Iphigenia in Tauris
Not to mention a certain distance between the modern reader and Greek antiquity. But in Chicago at least, that two-millennium gulf seems to make audiences’ hearts grow fonder, judging from the recent success of European Repertory Company’s Electra and Agamemnon, not to mention Roadworks’ Orestes. The matri-patri-fratricidal House of Atreus threatens to become as popular in the 1990s as the ill-fated House of Carrington in the 1980s.
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Actor Lisa Hodsoll understands well the stakes of Goethe’s play. Her Iphigenia goes through a titanic struggle, giving the production its unshakable moral center. At the same time, Hodsoll understands that a 200-year-old poetic drama has nothing to do with psychological realism; her struggle is emblematic, as she merely suggests the kind of superhuman agony that any actor would be foolish to try to fully realize. Ever attentive to Goethe’s fluid meter, punctuating her speech with ambiguous, highly stylized gestures, she conveys the power of Goethe’s text without having to convince us that anything she does is “real” (which of course it isn’t). Like most intelligent actors handling lyric drama, she lets the words do most of the acting for her.
