Alcestis

The Alcestis, being a Greek tragedy and more so than usual, is of very delicate curves. Like the hero perhaps, the Adams House Dramatic Group must fall, failing to take them.

"The collapse [of Fifth Century Athens] was only the outward and visible sign of the collapse of the individual character ... whose values are rotten with individualism," said Werner Jaeger in Paideia. This was caused by the failure of Homeric religion to overcome the centrifugal force of material success.

Euripides made, very gently so as to avoid the hemlock prescription, but sharply enough to cut, the microcosmic death of a man symbolize and be the death of the macrocosm, Athens.

The man--Admetus, fated for untimely death, received an out from Apollo, who out of love for Admetus' punch-bowl tricked the Fates into accepting a substitute. He voiced an ironic distress at the death of his wife, Alcestis, who volunteered to die for him after his senile parents declined the gambit. She was revived by the demi-god Heracles, also out of love for the punch-bowl. But Admetus saw his monstrousness and found little happiness at her return.

A fatal indelicacy of touch, whether from Director Don Marston or belonging to the untalent of the cast, blurs the Adams House production so that positive identification of what seems at times a perceptive interpretation is impossible.

The ultimate despair of Admetus, by Michael Sugarman, unaffected by his wife's return touches on awareness that the bisceptic actions of the gods offer no real solution to his trouble. But his tone does not vary throughout the play and in this he is typical of the rest of the cast.

The boldest touch is the interpretation of Alcestis. Usually seen as a paragon of unselfishness, as played by Abigail Lewis she seems to take inhuman pleasure in her martyrdom. The loss of a foil for the other monsters is difficult to overcome--in this production impossible.

The singing chorus is usually inarticulate, due partly to John Hollander's music; the dancing chorus, while legitimately formal, appears vapid against the strident actors; Cedric Whitman's translation hits the bump that jolts all colloquial renderings. The Greek dramatists are often not colloquial. They are, however, very, too, clever.