Concept is not Enough

While a Harvard undergraduate, Timothy Mayer '66 overhauled Aeschylus' Eumenides, the last part of the Greek playwright's Oresteia trilogy. The result is a sophisticated, irreverent interpretation called Red Eye. Last weekend at the Agassiz Theater, Orestes' flight from the furies and trial in the Athenian court underwent futher revision in director Patrick Tan's ambitions adaptation of Mayer's play.

Tan, whose Apollo (Jeff Branion) traverses the stage drinking a Pepsi and belching, has conceived his Red Eye for a new generation. While Tan's interpretation is intelligent and provocative, this production collapses under the weight of its concept.

Tan has designed an intergalactic Gothic set in which to develop his complex vision. Placed in a world of darkness and asymmetries, Aeschylus' familiar characters are de-familiarized, distored and dissected. Athena, once the cool, collected goddess of wisdom, is transformed into a weary, indifferent hostess. The Athenian court of justice degenerates into a cocktail party where under-the-table arm-twisting subverts the Athenian ideal of justice. The furies are not beyond consoling themselves with booze, narcotics and yogurt, not is Orestes above Oedipal fantasies for the mother whome he has murdered.

Throughout the play, Tan resists placing his characters in simple, archetypical roles, cultivating instead the psychological complexities and hidden motivations that inform the resolution of Aeschylus' own version. Who would have suspected that Apollo would have to use an erotic tango dance to persuade Athena to side with him on Orestes' behalf?

Ultimately, it seems, the demands of Tan's interpretation are too great for this production. The fragile intersection of the olympic and the ordinary are too often upset by a general lack of momentum, technical shortcomings and over-acting that reduce some of Mayer's most powerful lines to farce.

Still, Kelly Matthews should be commended for her dead-pan Athena, Branion for his studied assimilation of the roles of both Orestes and Apollo, and Robyn Fass for her humorous Clytemnestra. If nothing else one can be grateful to Tan, his crew and the cast for bringing Mayer's work to the public's eye.