On Theater
BERMEL, ALBERT
ON STAGE By Albert Bermel Heroic Hypocrites At the Circle in the Square you quickly see and hear why scholars rate Iphigenia in Aulis an inferior work of Euripides. It is not so much that the...
...By volunteering to die she can become the legendary savior of Greece, the woman who made the Trojan War possible...
...Vitus' Dance...
...Yet she comes to realize she is trapped...
...Suppose that, instead of being a pack of sentimental yentas, the characters are selfish hypocrites...
...If he is the one to yield up his daughter, his treasure, to the bitch goddess, he will appear to be making the supreme offering...
...There is another reason altogether, which calls for a fresh reading of Iphigenia in Aulis: I would suggest that the play is not Euripides' death rattle but a master work ranking with his Medea, Andromache, Alcestis, and The Bacchae...
...His costumes for the Chorus are imaginatively right: Pale, sand-colored dresses with bands that are variations on a Greek key pattern, they match but are attractively unalike...
...In Iphigenia a Greek author implies that the Greeks of the golden era were scoundrels who placed no value on human life...
...The characters cannot keep their eyes off it...
...The lighting of the production was, like the production itself, a sort of visit to ancient Greece by a three-day tourist who will not take off his sunglasses...
...Are these the most telling reasons for reviving the play...
...Seven of the eight performances work vividly...
...why she took a lover during the Trojan War...
...as Iphigenia finally goes out with her pretty white throat held proudly up, ready to have it slit by Papa...
...Ca-coyannis reminds you of these consequences by some not-so-subtle emphases and by ending the performance with a spotlight on the face of Clytemnestra, her eyeballs on the prowl...
...Far from failing to contrive characters of heroic dimension, the author has devised an heroic debunking of Greece's most hallowed heroes...
...he is also entrusted with the best material in the play...
...Mitchell Ryan (Agamemnon...
...Iphigenia in Aulis is not, I think, the sloshy piece of writing it is generally taken for, but a tableau of monumental irony...
...What they are really hooked on is their private, fleshly troubles...
...Or take Clytemnestra...
...The audience as mirror-image, another device The Hawk shares with The Connection, permits asides and soliloquies to become literally reflective...
...They have evidently practiced and polished their solo bits, all set in the pad of a pusher of morphine, cocaine, heroin, and other compulsive delicacies...
...She doesn't want to die...
...He is more concerned first with going home to Pharsalia with his Myrmidons, and later with Agamemnon's failure to consult him...
...The Hawk (Actor's Playhouse) is a queer duck, hypnotic to watch in flight but a dumpy waddler when it infrequently lands...
...Like many scripts developed out of improvisation, it is taut in its separate parts and flaccid in its construction or "through line," which seems an afterthought...
...Nor do the faults he merely in the "unintegrated chorus" and characters of "unheroic stature"—feeble criticisms at best...
...her son Orestes will assassinate her, as is only fair, egged on by Electra...
...The production comes out of Theater Genesis, and features actors talented beyond almost any others I've seen Off-Off-Broadway...
...The play announces: "Drugs do not make psychopaths...
...Not at all...
...if he persuasively overcomes that feeling he is superhuman...
...Not only am I wrong...
...She does not want to be left alone in Argos...
...Michael Annals has put the notoriously impractical rear wall of the Circle in the Square to good use?it has a raised panel that usually looks like a frieze or a bird perch...
...I am wronged," she laments...
...The world may be going mad: "Dreams, orgasm, death are the now," and "the only guy to help you out is the junkman...
...But Cly-temnestra's speeches indicate she dreads her daughter's death less than she dreads the loss of her daughter...
...The translation by Minos Volanakis has some wild expressions which these actors sometimes succeed in taming...
...Jules Fisher's lighting seemed to me inadequate in volume, though he may have been following the director's requests...
...It is not so much that the text may be corrupt: It was probably the last play he wrote, and after his death other hands, his son's among them, dabbled with the language—amplifying, cleaning up, doctoring...
...Half-cocked ritual is the curse of experimental plays...
...By constructing a rough stairway down into the three-quarter acting area, Annals has enabled Cacoyannis to display the actors at different levels when necessary...
...Tom Klunis (Agamemnon's Servant), and especially Jane White (Clytemnestra) are excellent actors who give extravagantly of themselves, although they appear to grow uninterested in their roles as the evening wears damply on...
...He will have a couple of bad moments, true, and Cacoyannis conveys them as a "natural" display of parental grief...
...Say that again," says Clytie to Achilles...
...Once again in New York theater the designer makes the most thoughtful and impressive contribution...
...Here it briefly drags down an otherwise fast-flying evening...
...When it comes to stringing together these exercises in characterization, the authors, Murray Mednick and Tony Barsha (Barsha is also the director), repeat a ritual between the Hawk and his "double" that is meant to be "pure theater" but winds up as pure tedium...
...His four female victims are distinctive cameos, the most comic being Barbara Eda-Young's plump seductress with a fixation on the memory of Jean Harlow...
...Similarly, the chorus of women from Chalcis consists, not of noble though redundant commentators, but of sex-starved wives who have come, like Peeping Thomasi-nas, to gloat over the assembly of manly Greeks and, at the end, to gloat over the slaying of Iphigenia...
...And it is the starting point for the betterknown extensions of the Atrean myth: Clytemnestra will avenge her daughter by doing in Agamemnon later, with the help of her lover Aegisthus...
...His apparent reluctance to have Iphigenia slain can help him convince the rival Greek commanders that he is all the more a statesman for putting national duty before personal ties...
...and while he is offering to save the girl he is also saying there is no hope of saving her...
...Such a suspect motive makes more sense of Clytemnestra's earlier and subsequent behavior, providing clues to why she accepted Agamemnon after he had killed her first husband, Tantalus, and their baby...
...Like Cowboy in The Connection, he is merely the provider, God and government by default...
...A close study of the lines of Achilles, another principal, shows him to be not so much a man of good will who would, single-handed, defend Iphigenia against the entire Greek army...
...According to Cacoyannis' interpretation she is only a stricken mother...
...the Eumenides will get in Orestes' hair, and so on...
...What of Iphigenia herself...
...as Clytemnestra pleads, rants and grabs at Achilles' defective heels...
...It really is time for a revival of this "modern" play...
...Iphigenia is her only grownup child, her companion...
...If he shows no feeling for his child he is less than human...
...Don't blame the Hawk, in other words...
...A sentence such as "Virtue is the only pursuit" should sound like an accusation rather than a quotation from Poor Richard's Almanack...
...But not of the queasy variety enacted at the Circle in the Square...
...Yes, the play happens to be an antiwar drama, and it censures the Achaeans for going to battle in defense of so pitiful and mixed a cause as Helen's virtue and the honor of Menelaus...
...Some of Cacoyannis' present cast might suit it...
...This child is no stranger to me," Menelaus explains, "she is my niece...
...he is fulfilling a need he did not manufacture...
...That demure little maiden from Scarsdale and Wellesley, whom Cacoyannis bastes with great waves of dignity and pathos, is actually a tough, brave schemer...
...And, yes, it is a drama of exceptional power and compassion...
...why she murdered Agamemnon, and was loathed, even before the murder, by her second daughter, Electra...
...It provides another chance to let a chorus engage in crisscrossing, bobbing, skipping, knee bends, and all-fall-downs...
...Barsha tightens the relationship between the actors and audience by treating the fourth wall as a mirror...
...I would guess that Michael Cacoy-annis has directed the play with three things in mind: Iphigenia seems, like The Trojan Women, to be an antiwar statement and therefore eternally up to date...
...Tony Serchio incarnates the pusher or Hawk with regal arrogance...
...In two roles—a detective trying to figure out which of the victims was killed, and a drug dealer—Walter Hadler extemporizes with amazing vocal fluency...
...Not at first, that is...
...The incidental music by Marvin David Levy is accompanied by the splash and drip of authentic tears all over the house and the wringing out of drenched Kleenexes, as Agamemnon sacrifices his oldest and dearest daughter so the Greek fleet may win a wind from Artemis and sail off to murder Troy...
...In that case, his grief becomes a gesture...
...You simply feel disappointed that Euripides so painstakingly anticipated Victorian taste and came up with so orthodox a melodramatic weepie...
...She boldly—and astutely—chooses glory over ignominy...
...The play then acquires a radical new meaning...
...And every man is a potential psychopath...
...Rulers, their wives, and their progeny took cover from their consciences under pragmatic considerations...
...And fascinating...
...But what if Agamemnon is an w/matural parent, just as he is a treacherous husband...
...The message, worth taking to mind, contradicts the common assumption that drug-taking is an autonomous activity...
...The only debunking in Cacoyannis' version is an Achilles, played by Gastone Ros-silli, who suffers from a mild but continuous attack of St...
...Somebody speaks of "a timely stroke of luck," as if a stroke of luck could be untimely...
...We notice from Agamemnon's lines that he is afraid of losing his leadership of the massed Greek armies...
...His gallantry is a handsome pose...
...psychopaths make drugs...
Vol. 51 • May 1968 • No. 10
