Reviews

Wisconsin State Journal
Nadine Goff
March 3, 1998

With its sweeping, panoramic vistas and stunning visual imagery, the UW Theatre’s production of Orestes will haunt you long after the tangy, fertile odors inside the Stock Pavilion have ceased to linger in your nostrils. Director Phillip Zarrilli [et al] have combined their talents and visions to create spectacular theater. Odors, images and sounds are all vital, exciting parts of this remarkable production.
           

The Badger Herald
Abby Ludowise,
March 30, 1998

Prepare to gorge yourselves on images of contemporary, amoral, pop-media gluttony because [this production is] an incredible post-modern feast…at the Stock Pavilion. The gutsy tragedy performed in this earthy-smelling stable is director Phillip Zarrilli’s adaptation of playwright Chuck Mee’s liberal interpretation of Euripides’ play Orestes…

True to post-modern ideals, Mee and Zarrilli interpret society as the cultural product of history, gender, and politics. Therefore, the basic themes of the play remain intact, but the presentation is metamorphosed into images we find stimulating today. Helen (played by Erik Black) becomes a drag queen. The Eumenides become three lusty female forensics experts/nurses with neurotic tendencies … Orestes’ (Troy Dwyer) agony takes place in a prison cell. The oracle becomes a far-out fortune teller who answers queries concerning Orestes’ fate over the phone (mari Brown). And Apollo himself becomes a Clinton-esque politician (Jay Overton) who solves everything with a sentence of cynical absurdity.

The acting itself is delivered with a kind of ironic innocence … Troy Dwyer gives an incredible performance as Orestes played John Malkovich style: demented, fidgety, and very passionate. Erik Black is a powerful presence on the stage as both Helen and her husband, Menelaus. Katie Holsing’ers Electra is extremely flaky … The dialogue pushes the limits of tragedy until the characters seem ready to cry over a broken fingernail and then it pulls you back to what is really tragic with stories of stark brutality.

The significant action of the play was not limited to the foreground … Whle the main action was occurring on a kind of hospital bed/prison cell the speechless chorus intermittently performed its physical interpretation of the events in the [saw dust] of the huge background of the Stock Pavilion floor…They dug up white mummy-looking bodies, sometimes to beat them, sometimes to rebury them. And ironic little and musica numbers popped up. For example, during Pylades’ (Neil Donahue) wild romp down memory lange with Orestes, Electra dreamily sings Cole Porter’s “Anything Goes” in a Hollywood diva ball gown.

… Huge flowing sheets doubled as mystical, somewhat Grecian curtains and screens for film projections of activities taking place from various areas of the huge acting space. These screesn and a television set in the prison foreground became the centers for the main action of Orestes’trial and escape … a cynical critique of our own culture which has somehow leaped out of the ideas originally set down by Euripides.
This show is incredible. You really need to go down to the Stock Pavilion next weekend and horrify yourself with the blood-stained hands of the post-modern Orestes. They have turned Greek ritualistic theater into a naked, negative, and yet touching critique of our own society. It would be a huge loss if you allow this opportunity of being haunted by the
Eumenides to pass you by.
                      

Isthmus
Linda Falkenstein
March, 1998

Spectacle in the theatre is something you don’t see too often around here. I don’t mean Broadway’s version of spectacle, which is usually glitz, but when a drama is so large or expansive in its staging that you can’t quite think of it as just a play any longer. That is true of this adaptation of Euripides’ Orestes. It’s staged in the Stock Pavilion … (avant-garden theater groups in New York would kill for a place this atmospheric, this … weird) … a huge, multilayered stage that actually uses the whole building and makes the set the star of the show.

The audience is seated at one of with a traditional stage area directly before them, set off with metal stock gates and furnished with vintage hospital beds. Behind that, receding to the opposite end of the building, are several distinct areas: a middle ground where the chorus shovels sawdust, several sheer curtains that function as giant video screens, a murkily lit burial area, and behind that a platform where several key scenes are staged and brought to the audience at the other end of the building by video cameras. At times, what is happening in the background upstages the action in the foreground … The overall effect, between the spotlighting, the candles, the sawdust, the metal gates, the use of video and the oval of the building, is a postmodern yet medieval version of the Greek stage.

Charles Mee’s ‘remaking’ of Euripides’ drama, originally about Orestes being tormented by the Furies after murdering his mother … incorporates a din of contemporary obsessions, from soap operas to sexual gratification to mass murder. The patients and nurses in the dingy hospital voice most of the modern counterpoint, as Orestes (Troy Dwyer) and his sister Electra (Katie Holsinger) hang on to the shreds of the original Greek text and attempt to figure out to what extent they are responsible for their actions and how (and why) they should accedpt their punishments …

Mee’s script is in part a critique of the slippiness of contemporary thinking about moral responsibility, especially where extreme violence is an extenuating factor, but to say it is only that simplifies the play too much…[T]he production works subliminally … It’s a challenging, visually stimulating, amazing show.
           

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