Blood relations.

THE PRIMORDIAL FAMILY DRAMA UNFOLDS IN A BOLDLY RECONCEIVED 'ORESTEIA' AT AMERICAN REP

A desperate woman, spurned in love and yearning to take her own life, drowns her two young sons so that they will not have to grow up without a mother. She blames her crime on a demon with dark skin.

A warrior hero - also with dark skin - flees his citadel on the verge of madness, mounts his wild white steed, and is chased across the landscape by a chorus of sirens until he submits to their will. He will stand trial for the murder of his wife.

The wife of a general awaits her husband's return from an unending war so that she may punish him for taking the life of their first-born daughter 10 years before. She celebrates his homecoming and then fatally stabs him in his bath.

An orphaned child returns to his native land as a young man and avenges his father's murder by killing his mother and her lover. He, too, is hounded to the point of madness. And he, too, stands trial before a jury of citizens.

If we ever needed to be reminded of our consanguinity with the ancient Greeks, the tabloid headlines of 1994 brought it home to us with the subtlety of Zeus. Exactly 2,452 years before jury selection began in "the trial of the century," an audience in Athens watched a mythic enactment of the first-ever trial by jury: the prosecution of Orestes, son of Agamemnon, for the murder of his mother, Clytemnestra. And if O.J. Simpson is not Orestes - or if Susan Smith of South Carolina is more Medea than Clytemnestra - the parallels are resonant enough to argue for the universality of Attic tragedy. We are the Greeks; the Greeks are us.

Of course, Robert Brustein could not have been thinking of O.J. Simpson when he decided last spring to open the American Repertory Theatre's 16th season with The Oresteia, the cornerstore of Western drama and the only extant trilogy from ancient Greece. The artistic director of the Cambridge, Mass. company had a better reason to produce Aeschylus' masterpiece: a startling new version by playwright Robert Auletta. "I have always been looking for ways to do the Greeks in a way that corrects the notion of a group of people dancing around a maypole in diaphonous gowns," Brustein told me during preview week in late November. "Here we had something that was living, vibrating, pulsing animal heat."

Brustein knew and admired that heat from Auletta's adaptations for Peter Sellars of Sophocles' Ajax and Aeschylus' The Persians. "It became possible to look at The Oresteia as a contemporary play without losing the grandeur and majesty of Aeschylus. The adaptation was so colloquial and so modern that it clearly demanded a trans-cultural, trans-historical production."

Enter Francois Rochaix.

Rochaix is an internationally heralded Swiss director, known in the U.S. for his work in opera but not in theatre. (The Seattle Opera will mount his staging of Wagner's Ring cycle for the fourth and final time this summer.) In 1991, as part of a festival celebrating the 700th anniversary of democracy in Switzerland, Rochaix directed The Oresteia (in two languages) with a cast of Swiss, Norwegian and Russian actors. Interest in bringing that production to Los Angeles led Rochaix and his sponsors to commission an American adaptation from Auletta. The L.A. production never materialized - "Something to do with the Gulf War and Nestle," the playwright recalls - so Auletta sent the first two plays to Brustein, who subsequently invited Rochaix to come to Cambridge to get acquainted. That visit was delayed for a year when Rochaix had an emergency surgery for a quadruple bypass. Finally, last spring, Rochaix came to stage a workshop of Agamemnon and The Libation Bearers with students in American Rep's Institute for Advanced Theatre Training. As the project proceeded, it became more than a classroom exercise. Bonds formed, plans gelled,schedules were re-arranged. "The man's humanity was so powerful that I had no hesitation in going ahead," Brustein says of Rochaix. "It was a leap of faith." All of a sudden, The Oresteia was set to open the Rep's 1994-95 season.

"I think we should talk about blood a minute."

"Yes, okay, go ahead."

"What is Orestes wearing when Apollo pours the bucket of blood over his head?"

"Bare chest, bare feet, shaved head, loose linen pants."

"Are they washable?"

"Yes, I should think so."

"The blood has to be something that won't sting, and it has to be edible in case Tommy gets any in his eyes or mouth."

"Yes, that is good, the blood is to cleanse him." In the working world of theatre, few things are as sobering and down-to-earth as a production meeting. The nuts-and-bolts concerns of backstage artisans and technicians offer a healthy reminder that all the art and magic are held together by a web of velcro, electrical cord, spike tape and spirit gum. On this occasion, my first visit to American Rep to observe The Oresteia in process, these detailed questions remind me of something more basic to my investigation: The Oresteia is a tragedy of blood.

The curse of Thyestes threatens the House of Atreus with extinction. Crime begets crime and murder murder. Necessity demands that justice (of the eye-for-an-eye variety) be done and that blood (stage blood) will flow in this production. The wardrobe person, the stagehand with a mop, the actor playing Orestes, ART veteran Thomas Derrah, and the audience are going to have to deal with it. That, in effect, is what the trilogy is all about: stopping the flow of blood, cauterizing a wound that has been festering for generations, resolving a barbaric legacy of violence with a civilized system of justice based on democratic rule and a court of law. At least, that is the textbook view.

Eight weeks later, at the first performance of the completed Oresteia, I am surprised that there is not more stage blood on the tracks by the time Orestes arrives in Athens and submits to a trial by 12 citizens (selected, by the way, from the audience). Apollo does anoint Orestes in The Eumenides with a few ounces poured from a bucket. And both Clytemnestra and Orestes are stained in blood when they appear at the end of their respective tragedies, revealing their bloody victims for all to see. But this is positively restrained compared to, say, the recent Russian Oresteia of Peter Stein, in which the realistic corpses are fitted with pumps which spurt blood into the air.

Such gore is not Francois Rochaix's style. His sense of Greek tragedy is more, well, classical - that is to say, more iconographic, abstract and controlled. Blood, the threat and thread of blood, is omnipresent in his production, but most often in symbolic forms - in the sumptuous red gown designed by Catherine Zuber for Clytemnestra's reunion with Agamemnon; in the billowing red silk-carpet she unfurls for him to walk on; in the lighting of Mimi Jordan Sherin, which makes the palace of Argos glow red at moments as if it were a dam holding hack a river of blood. These abstractions of blood lift the play out of the realm of a crime story or simple revenge tragedy. They invoke an otherworldly, almost Platonic elsewhere where the true action occurs.

Even the acting, the ultimate expression of presence, is colored by a sense of the remote. For all her passion and immediacy, Randy Danson's vigorous Clytemnestra is less an individual mother with a grudge (remember the sacrifice of Iphigenia at Aulis) than she is a living, breathing monolith of female wrath, a history in action. Thomas Derrah's reluctant Orestes is a hollow vessel which must be steered by the gods and stirred by the African rhythms of the chorus of libation bearers before he can fulfill himself and become his destiny.

(In rehearsals, I cannot help noticing the brief moments of confusion when Rochaix uses the words "motif" and "motive," which in his Swiss-French accent come out as homonyms. In the end, the two words seem like synonyms as well. The motifs are the motives. Such dominant symbols as a blood-encrusted knife and a blood-soaked net seem to drive the action as much as they are driven by it.)

On a balmy Friday evening in Indian summer, the entire Rep company gathers in the basement rehearsal room at Zero Church Street for a design presentation. This is the room where Rochaix staged the workshop in the spring, so there is already a palpable continuity to the project - a history - even in the first week of rehearsals. Outside, the streets of Harvard Square are jammed with weekend tourists and college kids on the prowl, gawking at the buskers, avoiding the panhandlers and leafleteers. Inside, scenic designer Robert Dahlstrom is setting up his model of the set on a long, narrow conference table in the middle of the room.

Dahlstrom's design features the plain white stucco facade of a palace which has the feel of a fortress, a Mediterranean Alamo. To any theatre history student who ever cracked his Brockett, this structure suggests the skene of an ancient Greek theatre. It has a roof for the watchman who starts the trilogy and for the gods (Athena, Apollo and Hermes) who end it. It has a large palace door which will open to reveal the horrific violence within, committed offstage (obskene) because the Greeks considered it obscene to act it out. This skene is just one of a dozen or more elements which echo what we know about the Greek stage. The eccylcema, paradoi, orkestra, cothurnoi, even the deus ex machina - they all have their equivalents in Rochaix's production, but they are not pedantic intrusions or archaeological fetishes. They are traces of the past, genetic markers which point back to an earlier stage of evolution. Rochaix seems to regard the Athenian Theatre of Dionysus as just as much his text as the play itself, and he stages that text by incorporating it, vestigially and organically, into his mise-en-scene.

If Rochaix stopped there, his work would be merely intelligent (no small virtue these days), but for him, history is both processual and sensual, and he renders it as such in his productions. Flanking the undecorated white palace on either end is a tower of red pipe scaffolding, the metal kind used in construction and landmark restoration projects. It immediately historicizes the central image and at the same time casts doubt on the permanence of history. What the viewer cannot know (and need not know) is how the scaffolding came to be a part of the set. When Rochaix first began to prepare The Oresteia, he traveled to Greece to visit the actual ancient sites of the tragedy and to retrace the steps of the Greek geographer Pausanius, who wandered the Aegean peninsula in the 2nd century CE. Everywhere he went, the ruins he saw were shrouded by scaffolding, part of an obvious effort to preserve a heritage which is also a national tourist industry. That experience, another history, another text, has left its ironic trace in the design.

Similarly, the rehearsal process itself will leave its material mark on the final performance in the form of the rehearsal table in the center of the room. The cast of The Oresteia spends the early days of rehearsal around this table, which is covered with a green cloth, with reference books scattered about, and a conspicuous bust of a bearded Greek (thought to be Aeschylus) on it. Before getting up "on their feet," they sit "at the table" and thrash through the text line by line, brush up on their Greek mythology, browse the photo album of Rochaix's trip to Greece, and get familiar with the cadences and anachronisms of Auletta's adaptation. When I return to see the performance at the Loeb Drama Center on Brattle Street, that same table is still there, bust and all, in the orchestra pit, used now by the chorus of Agamemnon as a gathering place and, with particular irony, by Athena at the end of The Eumenides.

Only in retrospect will I recognize how richly Rochaix layers history upon history in his production. This is not the trendy, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink postmodernism that views the directors job as an artistic scavenger hunt. Rochaix practices a more neoclassical postmodernism. His Oresteia is a palimpsest which elicits le plaisir du texte, and of text upon text, in ways that are subtle at moments, clear and strong at others, but always sure-handed and keen.

"The Greeks are sacking Troy," bellows Kerry O'Malley (Electra) from across the street, quoting Clytemnestra's triumphant announcement as smoke billows from the roof of the Loeb Drama Center. It is theday after Thanksgiving, hours before the first preview of Agamemnon, and there is a fire on the roof of the theatre. A real one. As a necessary precaution, in the middle of the final tech/dress rehearsal, cast and crew have been escorted out into the November cold, so quickly that the Trojan slave girls and Clytemnestra are still barefoot. Someone sneaks back in the building and grabs a bin of socks from the wardrobe department. As the second, third, and fourth fire engines arrive, a small crowd gathers to stare at the actors in their exotic makeup.

If anything could push an excitable director over the edge, an incident like this would be it. But Rochaix is unflappable. For some reason - a quiet self-confidence? Surviving a heart attack? A Swiss temperament? - nothing seems to raffle him. I have been sitting in on rehearsals once or twice a week for seven weeks now, and not once have I heard him raise his voice or even express a moment's irritation or impatience. Rochaix's equanimity is only one of several traits that have endeared him to his cast and the entire ART community. "He is a completely guileless man with a very positive attitude," says Brustein, who commends Rochaix's theatre work as "an extension of his intellect as well as an extension of his artistry."

"He knows his stagecraft, his artistic sense is impeccable, and he is a genius at managing all the personalities and egos," says Randy Danson. "Somehow he makes you feel that you are never in disagreement with him, that you're having the same thoughts at the same moment, that you're magically creating together with seamless, effortless joy. It creates a world for you to work in where you feel utterly safe, where you could try anything, suggest anything, ask anything."

Back inside - the fire extinguished with only minor damage - Rochaix resumes work on restaging the entrance of Agamemnon, who is supposed to drive on in an armor-plated chariot-jeep, the triumphant general surrounded by captive Trojan women in purple veils. A missing part means the car won't propel itself, so Rochaix decides to put the slaves to work and have them push the vehicle on stage. Hours before the first-night curtain, it takes precious time to get this right, but Rochaix remains as even-tempered as ever. The final image is striking - Agamemnon standing tall and erect in the armored car, looking a bit like Norman Schwarzkopf or Charles DeGaulle in his desert uniform; Cassandra, in magenta, seated behind him, the staff of Apollo in her hand; and then five lithe female figures shrouded in purple, the wound of Troy, stretching and straining to push their conqueror towards his destiny. It is not what Rochaix would have chosen, but if he is disappointed, he buries it in a joke. "Now all we have to do is make a little video which shows the car breaking down in the middle of the countryside and Agamemnon saying, 'Okay, girls, get out and push.'"

In order to accommodate the scheduling demands of a subscription season, The Oresteia is presented by American Rep as two separate offerings: Agamemnon by itself and The Libations Bearers and The Eumenides together. But Rochaix has clearly directed the three plays as a single magnum opus, and enterprising audiences who combine a Sunday matinee and evening show experience the grand design more readily. Agamemnon is served up as tragedy straight, no chaser, an inexorable event unfolding like a desert flower in bloom. The Libation Bearers is a ritual around a tomb (which brings to mind one theory about the origin of tragedy itself). The chorus sent by Clytemnestra to make offerings at Agamemnon's grave induce Orestes' revenge with chanting and pulsating movements, like a giant, collective heart pumping blood into his will.

The Eumenides, as the conclusion of the trilogy, is notorious for its happy ending, for rounding tragedy's catastrophic bend to become a divine comedy. Rochaix goes Aeschylus one better by turning it into a satyr play (the comic afterpiece which followed a trilogy and lampooned its heroic characters and tragic themes). In his hands, the trial of Orestes becomes a travesty of justice and of the Olympian gods who preside over it. Natacha Roi's coy and serene Athena looks a bit like Marcia Clark dressed up as Athena for Halloween. At one point, Charles Levin's stentorian Apollo - a sun god who wears sunglasses - threatens the Furies with his golden bow and arrow, but when he puts down his weapon, the bowstring remains taut, the arrow cocked and at the ready, nothing more than a gag prop. Ben Evett's Hermes prances about in white hot pants with silver wings on his feet, a little light in the loafers, and even before he tallies the votes of the jury, we suspect that the verdict is rigged. These are cartoon gods with real, awesome powers.

"I don't deny that it is better to solve the problems of crime with a trial than just to kill, kill, kill," says Rochaix, "but I am fascinated by how the trial in The Eumenides has a different echo today than it did for the Greeks, without changing a word. I am totally sensitive to the Mafia relationship between Athena and Apollo, who says not one intelligent thing in the whole trial. All he says to the jury is 'I am the son of Zeus, so pay attention, because Zeus is more important than your vote.' This is terrible. Today, we have grown a little, and perhaps we don't buy this. Perhaps we listen more to what the Furies say and understand that they also have something to defend."

What the Furies have to defend is largely a matter of gender. As the embodiment of a certain womanhood, first manifest in the shadow-chorus of Trojan slaves Agamemnon brings home as war trophies who then become the eponymous chorus of the second play, the Furies of this production become the tragic heroes/victims of the trilogy's battle of the sexes. Rochaix observes, "The male principle - the Apollonian principle, the head, the logic, the Athenian city, law and order - is deadly afraid of the female principle, coming from the womb, the belly, from energies down below, the source of disorder and subconsciousness, mother night - that is, the Dionysian side." In Aeschylus, of course, the Apollonian (indeed, Apollo himself) wins out with an argument as sexist as it is specious; 2,500 years later, the injustice has yet to be fully redressed. "Even if today women have many more rights than they did in the Greek civilization," laments Rochaix, "even if we don't have so-called slaves, basically I find it is the same. The basic structure is a male structure."

That male structure, epitomized by the Areopagus, the site of Orestes' trial and the first supreme court in the history of democracy, is presented by Rochaix with ironic literalness in the closing moments of the trilogy. Once Orestes has been acquitted and allowed to return to Argos, Athena must find a way to appease the still vengeful Furies who threaten to contaminate "the very roots and water" of the city that bears her name and then to "enter the bodies of your citizens, insidiously infecting, and filling them with a virus, for which there is no science." The goddess of wisdom summons the power of Persuasion and convinces them to change their inflection and accentuate the positive - to become the Eumenides, the kindly ones.

As part of the bargain, she offers them a permanent place of rest in Athens, a room of their own, as it were, deep beneath the earth, where they will be enthroned in honor and receive perpetual adoration from suppliants seeking blessings and good fortune. In Rochaix's production, this business amounts to selling condominium time-shares in an Alpine ski chalet or a Caribbean beach house. Athena circulates official-looking contracts for each of them to peruse, and then, in an effort to close the deal, she whips the green cover off the rehearsal table in the pit, pulls a lever, and flips a section of the tabletop to reveal - voila! - a gleaming white scale model of the Acropolis, complete with Parthenon, Propylean gate and towering statue of Athena herself.

Here again is history in action, part magic, part chicanery. And as Athena leans over and points out the historically exact place on the model where the pacified Furies will be/were enshrined, I cannot help but harken back to the design presentation eight weeks earlier when Robert Dahlstrom stood over his model of the set and pointed out to the assembled cast this place where the tables would eventually be turned. In Rochaix's Oresteia, the past nips at the heels of the present as feverishly as the Furies once hounded the perpetrators of blood crimes. In place of the curse of Thyestes, there is a law of eternal recurrence which, in at least one regard, is a blessing for the American Repertory Theatre.

Francois Rochaix will return to direct again.

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Title Annotation:	'The Oresteia'
Author:	Cummings, Scott T.
Publication:	American Theatre
Date:	Feb 1, 1995
Words:	3628
Previous Article:	Guns and Huey Newton.
Next Article:	Thomas Derrah: falling into place.
Topics:	Greek drama (Tragedy) Greek tragedy