An Oresteia

An Oresteia

It's the go-to myth: Soldier comes home from the Trojan War, gets hacked to death by wife; the kids go bananas. At the very dawn of theater, Agamemnon, Klytaimestra and matricidal siblings Orestes and Elektra were the fodder for the ancient Greeks' greatest tragedians. And now, the scholar-poet Anne Carson, at the prompting of theater director Brian Kulick, has woven a new tapestry out of the old threads, braiding together Aiskhylos' cool-headed Agamemnon, Sophokles' psychodrama Elektra and Euripides' neurotic Orestes. Why retranslate these tragedies and stick them in the same book? Perhaps because this makes for a juicier trilogy than Aiskhylos' extant one, which ends with a sober-minded trial (The Eumenides) instead of Euripides' punch-drunk kidnapping scheme. (If Aiskhylos is Ingmar Bergman, Euripides is the Coen brothers.)

As a theatrical exercise, it's daring and cool. As literary patchwork, it doesn't quite wash. Pieces don't fit: Carson shoehorns a silent character into Elektra to fill a plot hole, and Agamemnon consistently feels like the odd play out. Carson's informal style works like gangbusters in the Orestes. Reading her idiom-rich renditions, you can bet your sandals that somewhere a moldering Euripides is hugging himself with glee (for instance: One slave moans, "Where I come from people say bad shit/happening_/_when they mean death. Another quaint barbarian idiom is real bad_/_shit happening—_/_that covers blood on the floors."). But this same insouciance sounds tin-eared in the Agamemnon—would Aiskhylos' savvy Klytaimestra really say, "He'd be fuller of holes than a net," even at her folksiest? Still, Carson is a master in full enjoyment of her powers, and the individual pieces can be searing, funny and bizarre. Yes, you long to separate them into their proper camps again. But Agamemnon would be the first to tell you that there are worse things than divorce.—Helen Shaw

Classic Stage Company performs Carson's translations March 22 through April 19.

Buy "An Oresteia" on bn.com

More Book reviews >>