Photos courtesy of Wendy Mutz
OCU students appear in “The House of Atreus” last spring.
Not Your Daddy’s
Greek Tragedy By D. Lance Marsh School of Theatre Associate Professor TheatreOCU Artistic Director
On March 31, TheatreOCU, the producing arm of the School of Theatre at Oklahoma City University, opened the world premiere of new adaptations of four Greek tragedies. The project was titled “The House of Atreus.” The story follows a curse that affects several generations of a family in Heroic Greece, where a father sacrificing his daughter leads to a series of revenge killings, following the oft-repeated law of “blood must have blood.” In the end, the gods Apollo and Athena come down from Olympus and help create the first recorded trial-by-jury to sort out all the confusion. As the pictures bear witness, these Greek productions were not the usual fare that one expects when imagining a 2,500-year-old epic drama. The four plays whirled us forward in time, with the help of Jason Foreman’s dynamic and imaginative set, and the eerie, driving, dread-producing sound and rock ‘n’ roll-inspired lighting by Jim Hutchison, both OCU faculty. “The House of Atreus” was born in my Acting VI, Acting Styles class almost three years ago. I was repeatedly struck by the immediacy of these ancient plays and the huge scope of the stories. Agamemnon’s murder by his
Editor’s note: Focus asked Professor Marsh to give us an inside look at his unique idea to produce a new version of “The Orestia.” Following is his reflection on the undertaking.
wife and her subsequent murder by her son, along with all the mayhem that surrounds the story and the four-generation-long curse seemed to have all of the elements that make up a modern action movie. I was intrigued by the possibility of telling these stories fresh to a modern audience. But mostly I was taken by the power that the student actors found in the stillness these plays demand and how they blossomed by being allowed to play superhero-sized characters. And in my mind a crazy plan was born—to produce a fourplay cycle that told a new version of what is commonly called “The Orestia.” T ran slat i ons
The three great writers of tragedy in this period are Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. Aeschylus wrote the three-play cycle called “The Orestia” (“Agamemnon,” “Electra” and “The Eumenadies”) that make up the core of our production text. But there are a number of other theatrical texts from the period that seemed relevant. For instance, each of the three great tragedians wrote a version of the Electra story. There are two very distinct tellings of the end of cycle (Aeschylus’ “The Eumenides” and Euripides’ “Electra”).
A myriad of translations and adaptations of all the plays subtly or radically rearrange and react to the stories from Greek mythology that inspired them. So I picked and chose and cut and changed and ended up with the texts that we eventually produced. This process included three rounds of workshop readings, where the theatre students had a chance to read the new drafts and help me make critical choices about both the style and the substance of the finished product. The opportunity to get to work in such a hands-on manner with a new play is an experience I am sure will prove valuable to our students beyond school. I focused on three major elements as I adapted these plays: a new way of conceptualizing the chorus, the evolution from an eye-for-an-eye justice to the first trial by jury, and a nuanced and highly theatrical way of looking at the principal characters, especially Clytemnestra. Let me focus on these latter two elements here and take a little more time to discuss the chorus in a later section. The murder of Iphigenia by her father, Agamemnon, was the inciting incident of this whole sequence of the tragedy, and it con t i nu e d on pa g e 3 1
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