Orestes. a Tragic Slam-dunk

or “Euripedes, Eumenides!”
by Gina Guglielmo

Orestes, a Tragic Romp, a World Premier now playing at the Folger Theatre until March 7, is un-predictably the surprise smash of the year. Directed by the Super Theatre Mensch, Aaron Posner, using the transadaptation of Anne Washburn, the performance delights and inspires from start to finish.
Greek drama is daunting to teach or present to realistic, savvy and cynical audiences of today. A few….er, odd traditions present stumbling blocks. Start with the Chorus, a group of citizens and a leader who hang around the stage lamenting, berating, narrating background and always imploring the gods to clean up the hero’s mess. These prayers effectively bring down one or another of the Olympians in a device called “Deus ex Machina” lamely rendered as “The God on a Pulley” since in earlier times the divinity was lowered thus onto the stage and with a wave of his/her wand, solved the thorniest problems.
Woody Allen finessed the chorus problem in “Mighty Aphrodite” by inserting scenes in which mummy-like figures berated the main character Lenny for his total ineptness:”Lenny, don’t be a schmuck!” This example of gods/man interaction occurs later in the film:

Greek Chorus: Oh my God! It's more serious than we thought! Greek Chorus Leader: It's very serious! Her marriage to Lenny is in crisis! Greek Chorus: With the passage of time, even the strongest bonds become fragile! Greek Chorus Leader: Great, fellas, it sounds like a fortune cookie! Greek Chorus: Oh, Zeus! Most potent of gods! We implore thee! We need your help! Zeus! Great Zeus! Hear us! Hear us! We call out to thee! Zeus: Um, this is Zeus. I'm not home right now, but you can leave a message and I'll get back to you. Please start speaking at the tone. [beep] Greek Chorus: Call us when you get in. We need help!

The “Deus ex Machina”, Zeus, here does a booming voice-over as crashing as
the Almighty’s in Monty Python’s “Holy Grail.”

Posner’s solution to these archaic practices is to use a group of young women as the chorus of Argives who chant, sing, and dance with the vivacity or anguish the situation demands. Their clarion voices intoning the odes make James Suggs’ original music an integral part of the dialogue. Likewise, the god Apollo comes to the rescue in a clear, soprano voice from the wings to the great relief of Electra, Orestes and Pylades who were at the point of executing themselves as Argos had decreed.

Another practice of the original Greek drama was the use of only three actors to play all the roles, which required very precise scene ordering so the actor could change his appearance. In Orestes Holly Twyford doubles as Electra and Tyndareus, her own grandfather; Jay Sullivan plays a frenzied Orestes and the messenger who brings his death sentence; and Chris Genebach morphs into four different characters: Helen of Troy, Menelaus, Pylades and a Trojan Slave. All of these transformations were believable except for Genebach’s cameo as Helen: this woman never launched any ships, but his was a game effort .
Euripides’ play was the most popular work of the classical world, but it fell out of favor until modern times. Washburn admits that most people found it “peculiar, ignoble, largely immoral and the ending inexplicable.” She also asserts that it is funny, ironic and harrowing, a daring experimentation with the genre truly combining tragedy and romp. The comedy is strangely contemporary, but lest I give too much away, I can only cite one example. When Euripedes tells us a certain politician speaks not so much because he has something to say, but rather “to be known to have spoken” certain figures in the political world immediately come to mind.

Posner speaks of building bridges between our world and the ancient Greek cosmos.. How did that world look? sound? feel? What kind of music makes sense? Clothes? Energy? The director grappled with all these questions and came up with near-perfect answers. The play moves along uninterrupted by any intermission, reckless at times but always tremendously unified and controlled. Without explicitly stating the connection the story makes with our times, we feel a bond with these characters’ lives, their religion, and their culture. In the playwright’s words, Orestes is “relentlessly modern”

Lunchtime with Aaron Posner

In eleven years of association with the Folger Theatre, Aaron Posner has become a docent favorite, thanks to productions such as Twelfth Night, Measure for Measure, and last year’s Macbeth, and thanks also to his engaging, frank and articulate discussions with us. He did not disappoint on January 19, when he took an hour off from rehearsals of Orestes: A Tragic Romp, an adaptation of Euripedes’ play by contemporary playwright Anne Washburn, which will run January 27 to March 7.

“It’s really exciting to direct a play by Euripedes with the author in the room,” he began, to general laughter, noting that Washburn has been an active participant in the rehearsal process. Orestes was a play she studied in college, and she always wanted to see it performed. As with most Greek drama, the existing translations are either academic and literal or highly poetic. Contemporary working playwrights, when adapting Greek drama, usually use the original story as a springboard to their own concerns. In this case, though, Washburn’s adaptation is quite close to the original. “Anne has brushed the dust off the play and updated the language,” said Aaron, “but the humor, the moral ambiguity, and the energy of the play are Euripedes’ own.”
A big challenge of Greek tragedy, for Aaron, is how to tell the story without “overwrought weeping and wailing.” He liked Washburn’s adaptation immediately, because her dry caustic tone puts the action at something of an ironic remove, without being too clever. “We talk a lot in rehearsal about the line between clever and good,” said Aaron. “Good to me means provoking a conversation about the play’s ideas and conflicts. ‘Who am I? How did I get here from there?’ are fascinating questions, whether you’re in therapy or watching Greek drama, and I want the ideas out front.”

Aaron is setting the action in an imagined, created world that represents no particular time period, though the audience may detect Greek overtones in the costumes and set. (The floor of the stage is covered in stones, an idea Aaron had one day while sitting on the gravel of the Folger’s Elizabethan Garden.) The music, written for the show by frequent collaborator James Sugg, is influenced by everything from pop to gospel to classical, but does not refer directly to any genre. It will be sung by a five-member, female “chorus.” The production will also feature ironic, cross-dressing doubling in the cast—for example, Holly Twyford plays both Electra and Electra’s grandfather. In a nod to the Greek practice of using masks, most of the minor doubled characters wear glasses.

“This is as hard as anything I’ve ever done,” Aaron confessed. “How to integrate the over-the-top tragedy, the music and movement and rhythm in ways that aren’t just ridiculous to a modern audience is a constant challenge. It feels like we’re on a perilous, narrow mountain path we can fall off at any time.”

Et in Arcadia ego (ah, the memory liners on!) by Gina Guglielmo

Tom Stoppard used the irony in the above Latin epigram as a major motif of his play, Arcadia. The phrase, which is not attributable to any ancient author, means "Even in Arcadia, I exist" the "I" being "death" who dwells even in the most idyllic lives. The same phrase was used by Nietzsche; Evelyn Waugh used the motto for the heading of Book I of Brideshead Revisited; it was misquoted by William Faulkner, and was appropriated by Goethe in a memoir. W.H. Auden appropriated the saying for poem title; Walter Pater alludes to it in his essay on the philosopher, Winklemann; it even appeared recently as a line in a song by the band, Killing Joke. Painters too found the idea arresting. Poussin created two canvases depicting the idea, but Guercino’s picture is worth a whole library of words. (See accompanying image)

Tom Stoppard is undoubtedly the most ingenious of all modern playwrights, so when he chose to explore the idea of death hovering above the most vivacious and ephemeral of lifestyles, one could expect a hell of a ride. The play starts out in the early 19th C., the Romantic Period in England, at Sidley Park where a precocious child, Thomasina Coverly, Lady Thomasina actually, is approaching the discovery of a mathematical breakthrough while being tutored by an Oxfordian named Septimus Hodge. Septimus was at school with that bad George Gordon, Lord Byron, whom he brings to Sidley for a visit. Also sashaying around the drawing room are Lady Croom, the mistress of Sidley; a writer of most bathetic rhymes named Ezra Chater; Captain Brice, Lady Croom’s sea-captain brother; and a demented architect Richard Nokes who is systematically converting all Sidley Park’s classical and orderly gardens, designed by Capability Brown, into a Romantic wilderness. For his troubles he is excoriated by that harpy, Lady Groom, and rechristened Culpability Nokes. A fascinating character is the licentious Mrs. Chatter who has affairs with all the above men, but with Stoppardian deft humor, never appears in the play!

These goings on would seem enough for a night’s entertainment. But remember who is writing this Arcadia. The setting of Sidley Hall remains the same, but the audience is catapulted into the present where a novelist/garden book writer Hannah Jarvis is researching the pre-Nokian gardens. The descendants of the Coverlys are in residence: Chloe, Valentine and the mostly mute Gus. His counterpart in the other world is Tomasina’s brother, Augustus. Hannah’s peaceful diggings are interrupted when a scholarly critic, one Bernard Nightingale, comes to the stately house to do a bit of unearthing on his own. He believes that Byron killed Chater in a duel, and tries to unearth the evidence to stage a coup in the literary world. Valentine is a computer savant working on his own math breakthrough (using grouse and the old hunting logs of Sidley), and is connected to the past because he has found Tomasina’s workbooks. These modern folk are constantly one-upping each other with discoveries in one book or another, and eventually solve the mysteries shrouding Byron and the mysterious Hermit who lived a solitary life on the estate for twenty years and left rooms and rooms full of paper.

The intellectual and scientific dialogue bandied about by these characters both in the past and present is daunting and could be off-putting were it not for the skillful handling of plot, personalities and technical jargon in the recent production of Arcadia, directed by Aaron Posner at The Folger Theater. When one realizes that Stoppard takes us from the old world of Newtonian Predictability to the new realization of an increasingly chaotic universe, it’s amazing that the play truly comes off as a deeply human, humorous and poignant experience. Posner’s approach was everything: the cast was perfect in its fidelity to the text; these were living, breathing, flawed, loveable human beings who despite their brilliance beyond most normal people’s taught us this message: "It’s the wanting to know that makes us matter." In the program notes, Posner counsels us to ever be open to "wonder" as he leads us through this magical mystery tour.

Holly Twyford was marvelously wry as Hannah. The expressive face and body language were wonders to behold. Erin Weaver was a beguiling Tomasina and managed to portray both genius and girlish vulnerability. Her romantic waltz with Septimus at the conclusion, while contemporary characters strode in and out of the scene, introduced a note of sadness knowing as we did his and her fate. Suzanne O’Donnell as Lady Croom, was a protean force of nature, a comic whirlwind of a seductress whose life was idyllic and painless since her most serious thoughts were about the Ha-Ha in the park.

Equally strong and devastatingly attractive in their roles were the gentlemen of the ensemble. The comedic turns and bombast of Eric Hissom’s Nightingale were perfectly matched to Stoppard’s twisting and turning ideas. Cody Nickell made such an appealing Septimus that one fell in love with him along with Tomasina, not just for his beauty, but for his clever mind, his ability to laugh out loud at himself and his society, and his underlying vulnerability to the phantom that lurks in this earthly Paradise. Peter Stray deserved a medal for memorizing and clarifying all that mathematical jargon. It is not hyperbole to state that the entire cast of Arcadia lived their parts to the hilt. Finally I would be remiss not to conclude with my own Helen Hayes nomination for best costumes this season: there is just one adjective for Kate-Turner Walker’s designs: delicious!