Electra Becomes Mourning: Westminster College’s Disastrous Electra

I am reluctant to write a negative theater review. Not only am I eager to applaud the efforts of theater companies (they aren’t in it for the money!), but as I tell my students, being negative or dismissive is just too easy, a copout.

But sometimes a stinker cometh.

The stinker that came to the campus of Brigham Young University on September 21, 2015 was the production of Sophocles’ Electra by Westminster College’s Classical Greek Theater Festival. I want to believe this was a horrible aberration, as Westminster has put on fine performances in past years. In 2014, their production of Hecuba was more than admirable. That production honored the traditions of Greek tragedy and generated much thoughtful discussion among the audience--hard as it sometimes is to deal with the layers of suffering and the formalities that are the staples of Greek drama.

If Greek drama teaches anything, it is that suffering can matter. We can make sense of betrayal and death as we endure things together. If invited into an artful vehicle for reflection, we can (as ancient Aristotle truly observed) enjoy a catharsis, an emotional cleansing through pity and fear.

But the Westminster production of Electra introduced a new kind of suffering, one quite foreign to Greek drama. I’m not sure how to describe it, but it is a kind of profound cynicism that revels in incoherence, and yields only the satisfaction of a kind of smirk: you thought you were going to find meaning, and we are here to mock you for that.

Let me acknowledge the strong performance of the lead character, Electra, played by the very competent Melanie Nelson. Had she the proper vehicle, she could have shined. She had a commanding presence, but her serious suffering was constantly undercut by the barrage of bathos that surrounded this hapless actress. No, we were not watching Aristophanes, nor Moliere, nor the Comedy of Errors. But poor Melanie! It must have felt like Sartre’s No Exit for her as she kept attempting to play a serious suffering heroine while the rest of the play hedged her in with levity and ludicrousness. I truly felt sorry for Melanie; her character never had a chance.

Where did it start to go wrong? From the beginning. The opening music (reprised at the end) sounded like it was trying to be the soundtrack to My Big Fat Greek Wedding, but even if it was this carefree polka with its playful guitar created a mood as foreign to the ancient Greek world as a kazoo band. Unfortunately, this light mood was precisely the director's intention -- something less scrutable in the odd set. This, inexplicably, had broken Greek columns (sure!) with graffiti on them (huh?), and one severed statue head with blood on it (okay…). Dominating the stage was construction scaffolding, with no rhyme or reason to its presence, except that it partially hid the full, modern drum set and drummer behind it.

Yeah, a drum set. And the worst of it was that it got played, off and on, throughout the play. I couldn’t figure out why until one of the more painful scenes, the story told by the pedagogue or tutor about the supposed death of Orestes at a chariot race. Hugh Hanson played this tutor, and he played this part as pure camp. As he told the story of the dying hero, he made pa-dum-dum gestures upstage so that the drummer knew just how to mickeymouse the story into cotton candy superficiality. Ah! We are not watching Greek drama! I realized. We are watching a poetry slam done by eighth graders trying to channel Mike Myers in So I Married an Axe Murderer and doing a pathetic job of it. If Hanson had pulled out a whoopie cushion it would have felt more consistent with this production than anything ever done by Euripides, Aeschylus, or Sophocles.

Hanson is large, and he was dressed in a tiny vest and a kind of long-fringed apron that hung down from his comically huge belly. I seriously thought I was viewing Tevye from Fiddler on the Roof, except Tevye’s humor is undergirded with a wistful seriousness about his Jewish culture that was utterly lacking toward Greek culture in this farce-cum-tragedy. Hanson is a kind of John Goodman in stature and silliness, only I recall that Goodman actually honored the Greek tradition in the artful retelling of the Odyssey that was the film O Brother, Where Art Thou. It truly is possible to update Greek tragedy, as Eugene O’Neill did with Mourning Becomes Electra. That was not the case here.

Costumes really do matter, and Clytemnestra and Chrysothemis were dressed in traditional, identifiable Greek dresses. Their elegance played off of the one’s evil and the other’s this-worldly pragmatism. Fine. But Orestes, played by Max Huftalin, was decked out as -- I kid you not -- a sort of young Geppetto from Disney’s animated Pinocchio. It's true Orestes is sometimes played as a kind of innocent in this play, but this was pushed to a comically inappropriate extreme. Yes, Orestes, the avenging son who plots the death of both his mother and her lover, strolled about as a carefree peasant and came off as a buffoon detached entirely from the moral morass he both enters and deepens (in the text). This wide-eyed Aryan seemed to press two-dimensionality down to one, completely eviscerating the potential moments Orestes has for serious connection with his suffering sister. The key scene of recognition, when Orestes reveals to his sister that he is alive, is packed with potential drama and difficult emotions to work out. But it was played matter-of-fact, making fun of Electra seriously believing her brother had died. Joke’s on you, Electra!

It doesn’t matter how the costume designer, Erin West, justified her choices for representing a wide range of Greek periods in a parade of incongruous outfits. Orestes’ blousy pantaloons and silly cap would have put him at home on the H.M.S Pinafore or on the deck of a Johnny Depp pirate film. The “chorus” consisted of an old woman who looked like an angry nun, a younger hoochie mama in a miniskirt and heels, and a busty, floozy middle-aged woman who pulled tissues from her unbound bosoms and looked like she was straight off of a night playing the slots in Vegas, where she’d lost heavily. I don’t care if these women actually might represent real Greek women across the ages. They were a kettle of red herrings, whose goal seemed to be to distance themselves from any semblance of what the ancient Greek chorus was or did. In that goal they succeeded marvelously.

When Greek drama is played like a sitcom, you end up with neither Greek drama nor sitcom. In this case, that was disrespectful not only to a long, serious tradition of theater, but to the audiences (largely students) who are now completely misdirected as to the nature or experience of real tragedy, real drama, or anything resembling the true tradition of Greek theater. Shame on the Utah Humanities and Salt Lake City Arts Council, who need to vet what they are funding. This was public money being squandered, and it wasn’t right.

Some blame must go to the translators, whose colloquialisms (“Holy Moly!”) and casual contemporary speech connected with the audience to the degree that the language disconnected with the original Greek. A parallel would be taking the careful cadences and figurative eloquence of the King James Bible and reducing these into text-messaged emoticons. Yeah, classical Greek theater in LOL-speak is about right. Sometimes, when you abandon formality, you abandon the form that informs emotions, steadies the characters, and keeps tone aligned with theme. An overly colloquial translation helped along the idea that Sophocles intended for us to think that all his characters were jokers, and all his drama a big joke. Not funny.

A good share of the blame must go to the director, L.L. West, who couldn’t even use Woody Allen as a model for parodying Greek Theater. If you are going to go for comedy, at least have an underlying respect for the original -- as Allen did with his Mighty Aphrodite, whose chorus, however comically displaced into modern New York City, was degrees of magnitude more authentic in its chanting commentary on the action than were the trio of misfit Greek women that sustained the pretext of a chorus for this production. (Were these misplaced Maenads from Euripides’ Bacchae? You can’t have a chorus of mostly sexualized women and not invoke the feminine rites of the Dionysian tradition. But who cares? Anything goes!) How it is that West could countenance the series of profoundly bad artistic choices that added up to this fiasco is hard to fathom: the any-time-period-will-do “concept,” the miscasting, the bad translation, the befuddling set, the multiverse costumes--everything went wrong but the tragically isolated quality of the lead actress.

Just when we thought we were done enduring this travesty of tragedy, the action of the play ends -- and the can-can begins! No, I am not joking! It started haltingly, as the dead Clytemnestra stands up and gets her knees kicking alongside the ancient nun, the hoochie mama, the lounge lizard (Aegisthus), and Tevye the Tutor. Shoulder to shoulder they meandered like misfiring Rockettes at Mardis Gras. This wasn’t a play; it was a theme wedding gone wrong. The polka music started up again, and it suddenly occurred to me that they were attempting a remix of folk dance with ancient Greek drama, but only succeeded at looking like a really bad high school talent show finale.

I cried into my program. Not the good cry. No catharsis here. And I reprised my tears the next day as student responses came in, confirming my worst fears that they truly had no concept of the powerful themes and emotional dynamics of a bonafide Greek tragedy. When an academic production of a Greek tragedy convinces students that tragedy is actually farce, its sponsors have failed both the present and the past. This production was a great smirk, and a great blot on the escutcheon of an otherwise admirable festival from Westminster. I will be very wary of ever again leading future students into their labyrinth of laughs.

Dr. Gideon Burton

Brigham Young University