Orestes: An Alternative Rock Musical
It’s a tale so lurid it makes Erik and Lyle Menendez look like the Hardy Boys: A brother and sister, heirs of the most powerful family in town, slaughter their mother because she killed her husband, their father. On trial for the crime, the matricides insist it was righteous, even divinely ordained; besides, they argue in a bid for sympathy, with a family history like theirs, how could they help it? Then, when the court sentences them to death, the siblings and their loyal accomplice murder the wife of the city’s top official and kidnap his daughter, setting the stage for a fiery hostage-crisis climax.
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Orestes is alienated from family, society, and apparently even the god who encouraged the vengeful crime (“a juvenile delinquent of a startlingly modern depravity,” the classical scholar Bernard M.W. Knox has written). Of course, he is heir to ancient Greece’s most dysfunctional dynasty, the house of Atreus. His ancestors include Zeus, king of the gods; Zeus’s son Tantalus, who killed his son Pelops and served the remains to the gods at a banquet; Pelops’ son Atreus, who emulated his grandfather by cooking his nephews in a stew; Atreus’ sons Menelaus (whose wife Helen precipitated the Trojan War with her adultery) and Agamemnon, king of Argos and father of Orestes and Electra, who sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia in an effort to ensure Greek victory in the Trojan War; and Agamemnon’s wife Clytemnestra–Helen of Troy’s sister–who waited ten years for her husband to return from Troy a hero so that she and her lover could butcher him in his bath.
The impulse behind his comment–the driving need to escape problems by invoking false goodwill, sham heroics, and “traditional values”–is the theme of Euripides’ (and Roadworks’) Orestes. It finds its fullest expression in the last scene, a deus ex machina of unparalleled absurdity. Orestes, who presumed that Menelaus would support his having avenged Agamemnon’s death, is, like, really pissed that his uncle–the quintessential risk-averse soldier-politician, who sent thousands to their deaths so he could reclaim his faithless Helen–declines out of concern for his public standing. So Orestes, Electra, and their loyal friend Pylades storm their way to freedom, assassinating Helen, setting fire to the city, and holding Menelaus’ daughter Hermione hostage. Then Apollo descends to restore order. Orestes will go free, the god declares–and will marry Hermione to boot, while Electra will wed Pylades. Helen will ascend to heaven as a goddess.
The characters, tellingly costumed by Mara Blumenfeld, are well acted if not always well sung. Christopher Gerson’s beautiful, blond, blood-spattered Orestes is convincingly moody and manic, though Gerson’s singing voice isn’t resonant enough to carry the words with the subtlety and clarity of his speaking voice. Debbie Bisno is a memorable Electra–taut and tense until a bit of welcome advice exonerates her. “What if I had Jupiter in my natal conjunction?” she asks her phone astrologer (the wonderfully ingenuous Mitchell Fain). Her face lights up at his profound response: “Wow.”
