A site-specific production and further adaptation of Charles Mee’s Orestes, based on the play by Euripides. Mee adapts Euripides’ plot concerning murder and morals and “stuffs it to splitting with contemporary material from an eclectic collection of sources including fashion magazines, the writings of Harvard law professors, and the statements of serial murderers. The product is a fragmented world of violence, depravity, and obsession: a world of rampant passions and excesses sardonically mirrors own own. With this is mind, Euripides is a well-chosen source. William Arrowsmith asserts that ‘Euripides uproots a myth from the cultural context of a remote and different time and intrudes it forcibly into a contemporary world, thereby altering its motives, its characters, and its meaning.’ Euripides’ play lends itself to Mee’s objective. The text by Charles Mee has been further adapted by this company. Some material has been cut from Mee’s play, and some added in an attempt to focus this production on its immediate social environment” - the confessions and statements by the young men convicted of mass-murders in U.S. high schools, such as Columbine.  [Excerpted from program notes by Dave Mason, Dramaturg].  The production took place in the Stock Pavilion - a huge colonnaded oval building with a saw-dust floor regularly used for horse/animal shows and dressage.


First production
March - April 1998
UW Stock Pavillion
Madison, Wisconsin, USA

Director Phillip B. Zarrilli
Scenery Joseph Varga
Costumes Sarah McLain
Light Daniel R. James
Choreografy Dora Lanier
Cast Susan Nanning, Wini Froelick, Leah Roy, Katie Holsinger, Erik Black, Ric Segovia, Neil Sklar, Bill Hagen, Troy Dwyer, Mari Brown, Jessica Gaspar, Jay Overton, Neil Donahue, Trent Mendez, Jay Overton, Jeff Morrison, Dora Lanier, Heidi Armbruster, Deanna Pacelli, Eleanor Hancock, Deborah Proctor.


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