Heroes, Gods & Women

Electro (by Sophocles) has one of those scenes of naked emotional intensity that have been missing on the stage since Olivier gave his howl of self-recognition as Oedipus. It comes when Electra, played by Aspassia Papathanassiou, sees the urn that supposedly contains the ashes of her brother Orestes. She drops where she stands with a wild animal cry; she clutches at the urn, cradles and rocks it in entwining arms, spasmodically tries to breathe it back to life with words of love, smothers it with the salty, sightless kisses of tears, the strangulated sobs of a soul bereft. She is an open wound bleeding passion, and the spectator sees what is almost too shameless to see, grief at the pitch of human endurance. In an admirable company--Athens' Greek Tragedy Theater, now at Manhattan's City Center after stands in Los Angeles and Chicago--Actress Papathanassiou most tellingly unlocks the memory of all human sorrow.

Like all the Greek tragedies, Electra is divided into heroes, gods and women. Here, the gods are remote, the hero Orestes largely absent, and it is the women who seem demoniacally possessed. Before the play begins, Clytemnestra and her ambitious paramour Aegisthus murder King Agamemnon, Electra's father, upon his return from the Trojan War. After that, treated like an outcast in the palace, Electra counts on her brother Orestes to return and avenge their father. At Orestes' seeming death, a clever display of Sophoclean theatricality, her hopes are dashed only to spiral into joy when her brother reveals he is alive in the famed recognition scene. Up to this point, Electra has been a kind of female Hamlet except that her griefs lie all without. After this point, she and Orestes dispatch Clytemnestra and Aegisthus with all the aplomb of Chicago gangsters.

The chorus, a kind of corps de ballet of 14, chants in Greek and uses body English to underscore, but not undercut, the action. In their pleated rust-brown gowns with cowled headdress, the women often resemble the caryatids on the portico of the Acropolis' Erechtheum. The modern Greek rendering of the play has a venomous and vibrant intimacy that the English translation, transmitted at the City Center on transistor earphones, fails to reflect. In a cast that achieves a triumph of ensemble playing, Clytemnestra is coolly reptilian, and Aegisthus is a strutting upstart of self-aggrandizement who yet meets his implacable doom with dignity.

The horror of Electra is not mythic but domestic. In the rasping quarrels of Electra with her mother and sister, modern playgoers will find hints of those vicious family fights that occupy whole scenes of Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller. The difference is that Sophocles' dialogue reveals destiny as well as dissension; the troubles of the House of Atreus belong to the universal family of man. Before the muted grey stylized panels, columns and stairs of the palace facade, the drama of man's willful pride goes on unmuted. But the play's hypnotic center is Aspassia Papathanassiou as she seethes with mother hate and sways before high winds of woe. As primordially pagan as a bolt of lightning hurled from the hand of Zeus, her Electra consumes the stage with quenchless fire. To see it is to see a classic become a conflagration.

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