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Legend has it that the first performance of AeschylusOresteiatrilogy, in 458 B.C., terrified people.
Like the Athenian audience two and a half millennia before me, I felt fear.
Part of it was the space itself.
It takes you a moment to notice the ominous ticking that echoes through the space.
Alongside this pleasurably theatrical foreboding, however, I felt a deeper dread.
We fear what we dont understand, and the Greeks are hard to understand simply because theyre just soancient.
(How ancient is Aeschylus?
He is credited with the game-changing innovation of addinga second actorto the cast.)
It would have been performed by actors in masks.
Icke anticipates this fear, and his whole production is conceived to protect us from it.
Committing to this logic, IckesOresteiaremoves all references to the Greek gods of the original story.
His characters refer only to God, singular.
To some degree, thisOresteiais less an adaptation than an original play about the house of Atreus.
(Unlike Aeschylus version, it has natural dialogue, onstage action, and actors maskless faces.)
When his daughter dies in his arms, his grief and guilt are mesmerizing.
But all the foreignness of the original text all itsGreekness has been carefully sanded away.
Athens and Troy have become the city and the other city.
Concepts of honor and glory are overwritten at every turn by those of psychological trauma.
Klytemnestra is no longer a power-hungry adulteress but a generic grieving mother.
Cassandra (Hara Yannas) is no longer a prophet but a generic prisoner of war.
There are no gods, only God.
There is no chorus.
To my disappointment, there are no Furies to scare anybody.
So why stage theOresteiaat all?
What does this ancient Greek tragedy have to say to us if its not recognizably ancient or Greek?
Ickes is keenly aware of this question.
Do not sit too comfortably in your seats, Professor Emily Greenwood admonishes us.
This stunning play is work, work on the house we call democracy.
I dont know how much the audience thought about democracy during the performance I attended.
If anyone came to the show hoping to learn about ancient Greece, they surely left unsatisfied.
At the same time, the reimagining is too generic to have much to say about our current moment.
There was one moment, though, when I was so engrossed I stopped thinking and just reacted.
Significantly, its one of the few moments that preserves the original text.
Agamemnon returns triumphant from the war with a Trojan captive, Cassandra.
The other characters make a run at welcome her to the palace, but Cassandra wont come inside.
She wont even speak.
The characters implore her to communicate, even with just a gesture.
Does she not know their language?
Shes like a wild animal, someone says.
Finally, Cassandra opens her mouth and screams.
Even on the page, its thrilling; onstage, its electrifying.
It made me wish for more such chances to face my fear of what I dont understand.
Oresteiais at the Park Avenue Armory through August 13.
