Modern Performance and Adaptation of Greek Tragedy

Abstract

Leave it to a playwright who has been dead for 2,400 years to jolt Broadway out of its dramatic doldrums begins a recent New York Times review (December 4, 1998) of a British Electra by Sophocles starring Zoe Wanamaker and Claire Bloom. This fall the Times has repeatedly remarked on the deluge of Greek tragedy in the 1998-99 theater season: the National Theater of Greece's Medea, Joanne Akalaitis' The Iphigeneia Cycle (a double bill that combines Euripides' two Iphigeneia plays), a revival of Andrei Serban's famous Fragments of a Greek Trilogy, and a four-and-a-half-hour adaptation of the Oedipus Rex were announced at the start of the season. Off-off Broadway versions will inevitably follow. The Brooklyn Academy of Music even hosted a dance/theatre piece based on the Eleusinian Mysteries.' The Classic Stage Company, an off-Broadway theater group devoted to performance and adaptation of Western classics, currently receives more scripts that re-work Greek tragedy than any other category of drama.2

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