The moon haloed in mist shined out on cue last night. Orestes and his companions appeared at the top of the auditorium with some hints of where we were and what was to come.
Then Annie Purcell, bundled in black fabric writhed down the Getty portico, through the grim chainlink barrier that provided the set and began howling. And at once we were transported out of this pleasant evening on the seashore to a memorably bad day at the House of Atreus.
This Elektra was a familiar character. A bright, goodhearted young woman, whose outraged sense of justice has led her to scorn everything. She refuses to be consoled She refuses to behave. She’s one of the anarchists who smash store windows whenever the G7 meets.
Through an exchange with a sympathetic older woman (Olympia Dukakis as the Chorus Leader), Elektra expresses her contempt for the consolations of ordinary life, focused like a laser beam in her intense hatred of her mother.
Then Clytemnestra herself appears. She puts up a brave front. Pamela Reed played her with outrageous panache--an unrepentant celebrity with a tabloid scandal past. She may be a murderer, but she has her reasons.
The exchange between mother and daughter prompts the Chorus Leader to observe that maybe it is Anger that Elektra really loves, not Justice.
In the end, all of Elektra’s most horrible dreams of revenge are fulfilled. But minus any sense of finality. The nightmare is most definitely not over.
Carey Perloff directed the production to start at maximum emotion and never slacken for a minute.
One of the outstanding aspects was how musical it was. Bonfire Madigan Shive devised a variety of unconventional ways to translate the tension into bits of melody, sung fragments, taps on a drum, shakes of a rattle, and a whole orchestra’s worth of tender, harsh and eerie sounds from Theresa Wong’s cello.
Timberlake Wertenbaker obviously had Ezra Pound’s translation (which Perloff has directed) in front of her as she worked. Pound’s inset his stylized American slang dialogue with chunks of the original Greek text, to insist on its power as music and incantation.
In Wertenbaker’s version, words and fragments of Greek come out in moments of especially violent emotion—as if English—or language—wasn’t sufficient.
But Pound’s Elektra was an isolated poet-martyr-witness disturber of the peace, whereas this Elektra is wholly part of the family she mourns and detests.
P.S. The Getty announced that next year they’re presenting Trojan Women. Great, but what happened to the tradition of alternating tragedies with comedies? After last year's unsurpassable performance by Culture Clash in Peace, did we suddenly run out of comedians?
[Image: Di Cambio]