Agamemnon 02
Lookingglass Theatre Company
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Staged with the utmost simplicity and earnestness in the intimate surroundings of the Syndicate, Agamemnon 02 never quite finds the horror at the heart of this epic tale of rape, revenge, and desolation. The four young actors in Cullen’s ensemble are passionate but not technically proficient enough to move smoothly between their roles or to bring out the shadings in Mee’s language. Cullen doesn’t always find the play’s connective tissue, flattening the action’s arc just at the point it should be heightened. When Agamemnon returns to his wife, Clytemnestra, who’s bent on avenging his sacrificial murder of their daughter, the primal connections between domestic violence and the excesses of war should be obvious, but they remain somewhat muddy in this staging.
One of the liberties Cullen takes does pay off, though. Instead of identifying the choral characters as ancient historians and poets the way Mee does, he draws on the ensemble’s youth and energy to suggest that the young must address these atrocities. And it’s chilling to realize how much of Mee’s original script is applicable to the current world situation. When one of the returning Greek warriors talks about the decimation of the Trojan menagerie, one thinks immediately of the much reported fate of the one-eyed lion in the Kabul zoo. When Cassandra recounts how Troy was “brought down with all their towering beauties, their massive walls,” she asks the Greeks, “Could this never happen to you?” And when Agamemnon (Isaiah Brooms) boasts that his army made Troy pay “a woman’s price” in the war, it evokes visions of burqa-clad women in a shelled-out landscape foraging for food. (But some of Mee’s more graphic descriptions of torturing women, particularly when Agamemnon talks about naked women forced to crawl on their hands and knees toward their death by decapitation, are just plain creepy, veering into atrocity as titillation.)
Several couples, both gay and straight and of various ages, gather on a languid summer day on Martha’s Vineyard and proceed to fall in and out of love, recounting old passions and pains, creating new ones, and trading soliloquies about gender differences, whether or not there’s only one great love in each life, whether our families predestine our failure or success in romance, etc. There are lots of delightful moments and amusing stage pictures under Joy Gregory’s assured direction, and Brian Sidney Bembridge’s set and lighting design offer pure eye candy in saltwater taffy hues.
