The Iphigenia Cycle
And the chorus? What can any director do to make a contemporary audience care about a crowd of people who speak largely in unison, for the most part providing the theatrical equivalent of cinematic background shots? In Euripides’ Iphigenia plays–Iphigenia at Aulis and Iphigenia in Taurus, here performed as Iphigenia parts one and two, although they were written in reverse chronological order several years apart–the problem of the chorus is a particularly thorny one, as they are present almost constantly. When not acting as a communal voice of conscience, they have the unruly habit of going off on lyrical tangents. They are the speed bumps, tollbooths, and roadblocks on Highway Euripides.
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Like many contemporary American auteur directors, Akalaitis’s solution to the chorus problem–as well as just about every other problem the text presents–is rampant modernization: finding contemporary icons to resonate alongside the 2,000-year-old words. The approach can work wonders, as it did in Peter Sellars’s racially polarized The Merchant of Venice and, less successfully, in Robert Lepage’s high-tech deconstruction of Hamlet. And after all, if a piece of theater doesn’t speak to our moment in history but to the public we imagined ourselves to be in 1955 (as commercial theater has a habit of doing), it may as well be in a museum.
Such robust insincerity pervades these three overblown hours. All the nonchorus actors, from the tragic heroes to the functionary herdsmen, are encouraged to get really, really upset about anything and everything–and there are few characters more ridiculous in Greek tragedy than a messenger who works himself into a lather reliving the news he’s come to deliver. Of course, these plays are fueled by titanic passions: with the curse of Atreus on your head and a major war about to break out in your backyard, you’d be agitated too. But one wishes the actors had spent less time asking themselves what they’re supposed to be feeling and more time wondering what they should be doing.
This blunder points up the fundamental problem with this production: its utter lack of internal logic. Akalaitis, like so many “hot” American directors committed to big stage pictures and high-energy performances (Rent’s Michael Greif springs to mind), tends to make choices that embellish the moment but rarely evolve into a coherent theatrical language. Whether you found Sellars’s Merchant of Venice compelling or infuriating, you had to respect the thoroughness and consistency of his choices. His boundaries were clear and rigid. That thoroughness creates a unified artistic sensibility, a lucid stage world, giving the actors a place to stake their faith and a base for their choices. Without it, the evening is up for grabs.
