Grinnell College Department of Theatre-Electra

Sophocles’ Electra contains one of the greatest female roles in all of tragedy. The play centers around Electra’s intense desire to avenge her father Agamemnon’s death at the hands of her mother, Clytemnestra, and her lover, Aegisthus. While she yearns for her exiled brother, Orestes, to return to kill their mother, Electra grieves almost to the point of self-destruction. The play is a brutal exposure of the psychological trauma that a passion for revenge creates, and a shocking examination of self-inflicted despair. The play is an obscure classic, a strange tale of a forgotten myth. Sophocles’ tragic dramatization of the paradox of justice and vengeance finds echoes in our modern violence torn world, and as we stare into Electra’s grief striven face, we see our own glaring back at us.