The Oresteia

The Adams House Drama Society's Oresteia is something special. Other productions this Spring have had skillful acting, direction and technical effects; this Sanders Theatre performance takes all these and combines them with intelligence.

Where directors David Mills and Edward Leavitt have taken liberties with the text, their additions are striking. As the watchman finishes his opening soliloquy and leaves the stage, Clytemnestra and Aegisthus burst through the curtain and look with surprise, with fear, finally with scorn on the beacon that tells them Agamemnon will be returning from Troy. While the king is being welcomed home by his queen, the herald who had earlier trumpeted his own joy at returning to Argos watches his wife turn away from him, a symbol of what will happen to Agamemnon.

These directors have actors of their own caliber to work with. Almost every voice meets the stiff test of Aeschylus' verse as translated by Richmond Lattimore. And not content with giving us the lush lines, they have given us memorable characters. No one who was in Sanders Theatre last night will ever forget Joan Tolentino's Clytemnestra. "A woman merely," she describes herself, yet she dominates the stage. She outfaces Agamemnon; she towers over Aegisthus (and the directors emphasize this by placing her a level above him on the stage as she snaps down the Argive elders.

Jay Smith's Agamemnon and Nicholas Pyle's Aegisthus provide fine support for Miss Tolentino, but the only character not overshadowed by her is Cassandra. Laura Esterman's tormented writhing and her cries of anguish are immensely moving; later she reappears as a quieter but equally impressive Electra.

Perhaps the play's greatest moment comes when Miss Tolentino, as Clytemnestra's ghost, stalks onto a stage where two large brown lumps lie. She howls, outraged that Orestes remains free, and the lumps dissolve into the avenging Furies, awakened and ready once again to seek the matricide's death. They are magnificently horrible, as frightening to the audience as they obviously are to Orestes.

The choruses throughout are well directed, well spoken and graceful. Care has been taken with details in the casting. Appollo and Athena (Joel Martin and Anne D'Harnoncourt) look like gods, towering over the mortals on the stage.

The effects are skillful and well thought out. Anne Hollander's costumes, striking and simple, the makeup, the lighting, and especially W.E. Schroeder's set--all are striking in concept as well as in execution. One could quibble about Seth Carlin's background music, which sometimes seems unnecessarily distracting, but it, too, is often impressive.

The slip-ups are small, but bothersome. Altogether too many lines are stumbled over: last night the lighting flickered and went out at one point, and actors tripped twice on the intricate set. But these are small errors, and the conception of this play is so good it suffers little from little mistakes. The only serious mistake last night was that Sanders Theatre was rather empty. It should not be tonight and tomorrow night.