ArtSavant - reviews - The House of Atreus

July 4, 2002

The House of Atreus

reviewed by
Matt Cosper

For more about Matt Cosper, please visit his main page.

This play was developed through The Warehouse Theatre Professional Journeyman Program. For more about The Warehouse Theatre, please visit warehousetheatre.com.

At the Warehouse Theatre in mid-June, an ancient myth was distilled into a new fiction for a modern audience. The House of Atreus, a new creation by The Mythmakers, is an interesting foray into the original soap opera. The three plays that comprised the evening (Iphigenia at Aulis, Agamemnon, and Electra) depict the brutal end of the long cursed house of Atreus. The family history involves adultery, cannibalism, child murder and war. Emotions run high and the gods can be cruel in these ancient sob-fests. In this telling of the tale, there is a focus on the human aspects of the epic myths. The struggles of real men faced with war, women whose position in society closely resembles that of a horse, and the effects that sudden power has on both.

The evening progressed from pretty horrible to pretty good. Some moments were wonderful: Teri Parker's cynical, gore-spattered take on the dead Iphigenia (who acts as otherworldly chorus in Agamemnon) was wicked, positioned atop the giant yellow ladder that plays a key scenic role in the production.

Parker, as well as Maggie Kettering as Clytemnestra, was a standout in a production that sometimes lacked in the acting department. Kettering had some great moments as the dread queen Clytemnestra. She was the most sympathetic Clytemnestra I've ever seen. I really did feel the sting of losing her daughter to her husband's war, felt it begin to fester into dreams of murder and eventual paranoid and sad delusion. The other three actors fared worse in my estimation...we'll leave it at that.

Directorially the show was a promising glimpse into what could really be an excellent production with a little more time in the workshop. The show abounds in startling, mature imagery, and a pretty interesting take on the story, but these things are in rough form. They haven't been distilled as completely as they shoud. A rigor and exactness is needed, as well as more time in rehearsal, to unify the thing. Its symbols became cliche and muddied in performance, and a few bad choices had not had time to be whittled away.

The age old problem arises: more time in the rehearsal hall to experiment and work is never seen. With a bare minimum of state subsidy available to theatre artists, time truly is money. The experiments are all well and good, but eventually a play has to be produced. Also, if theatre is not shared with an audience, does it really merit the name? We have to share our work with an audience eventually...and the balance act of Not-Ready vs. Got Stale in which lives Just Right is tricky. This was a good show that opened a week too early. The wonderful, if at times incomplete, work of Parker and Kettering was worth the drive, and director Hyler has ideas worth developing. (Hell, directors with ideas at all are worth hooting about.) I'm excited that theatre like this is being done, and that outweighs the aesthetic failures of the evening. While a not a completely satisfying theatre experience, this was exciting on many levels.

Matt Cosper, July 4, 2002