By Cid Standifer
Ruthless and unsympathetic, Clytemnestra violently demands her daughter Electra to cease her grieving while chorus member Mary Tarullo watches in shock.
As the lights go up, Electra (Lara Janson ‘05) steps cautiously out of her mother’s palace and begins to pace slowly around the stage in Roberts Theatre. She pauses momentarily, hunched like an old woman, and begins pacing again more quickly.
She begins tearing at her fingers with her teeth, treading the same ground over and over. Finally she collapses and begins to thrash in sand the color of dried blood. Four veiled chorus women appear to bundle the raging Electra back into the castle.
Electra has been performing this ritual of mourning and outrage every day since her father’s murder over a decade ago. She fights to keep the memory of her father Agamemnon alive and constantly plots revenge against her mother Clytemnestra and Clytemnestra’s lover Aegisthus for the brutal murder.
In a way, she is the image of justice and loyalty who will never forget what happened to her beloved father. But her obsession also begs the question of whether vengeance and justice are one and the same, and whether exchanging one injustice for another is morally justifiable.
Electra was written by Sophocles almost two and a half thousand years, a part of a series of plays about the Trojan War. The complex roots of Electra’s moral dilemma began in an earlier story. The audience learns early on in the play that Clytemnestra had her own reason for murdering her husband Agamemnon. Her oldest daughter, Iphigeneia, was sacrificed by Agamemnon to appease the Gods so that his fleet could sail to Troy for battle.
In Electra, Clytemnestra seems cruel, heartless and abusive, and many of the cast members at first supported Electra’s lust for revenge until director Chris Connelly showed them a film of Clytemnestra’s grief-stricken reaction to Iphigeneia’s death.
Chorus member Renee Lynch ‘08 said that “After seeing the film Iphigineia, I, and I would probably say a majority of the cast, was very against Electra, because in that movie the mother character, Clytemnestra, is portrayed in such a pathetic light.”
Connelly chose the play because he felt that its moral questions were strikingly relevant to current events. “I’m always amazed when I read the Greek plays [by] how incredibly timely they still are in the issues that they deal with and the complexity of the moral choices of the characters,” he said.
Connelly said that the necessity of drawing a distinction between revenge and justice was important in the U.S. decisions to invade Afghanistan and Iraq, and that similar issues arise constantly in places such as Rwanda and Northern Ireland.
Janson sees the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as the epitome of this question. “Both sides have done so many horrible things and simultaneously suffered so many tragedies that the issue[s] of revenge and justice [are] entirely confused,” she said.
Rather than using a traditional Greek setting, Connelly drew on contemporary landmarks, landscapes and cultural artifacts from across the world to highlight these parallels.
The idea for the sand-like substance that covers the stage came to Connelly when he was sitting on a red sand dune in Namibia and contemplating the fact that “These characters [in Electra] are constantly slogging through dried blood.” He looked at the setting around him and realized that “this is the world of Electra.”
Clytemnestra’s palace is modeled on the Great Mosque in Mali, while the characters’ costumes seem Middle Eastern and Orestes’ weapon is modeled on a Kenyan sword.
Connelly said that audience members from abroad may recognize some parts of the set from their own region of the world and realize that “in a sense, this is a story from your own country as well because these types of things are still going on: the confusion of justice and revenge.”
Electra will be performed in Roberts Theatre this Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m.
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