A long evening of secrets and lies

Returning home from the Civil War, a Union general announces: “I’ve had my fill of death. What I want now is to forget it.” Yet death is what awaits in his haunted ancestral home. By morning, he’ll have been murdered in his marital bed.

Extravagantly melodramatic, Eugene O’Neill’s “Mourning Becomes Electra” echoes ancient Greek tales about the bloody House of Atreus. Re-imagined as the fate of a prominent family on the Eastern Seaboard, it is a New England chowder of secrecy, adultery, manipulation and revenge, heavily dosed with Oedipal impulses and other psychological phenomena.

These intrigues are so protracted that, even with trims, a presentation by the classically minded A Noise Within company runs 3 hours and 40 minutes. Artistry and commitment carry the production a long way, yet ultimately, O’Neill’s grand ambitions crack under the strain and the audience faces an endurance test to the end.

Set designer Michael C. Smith sketches just enough detail onto the stage to suggest vast expanses of marble and long rows of family portraits. This gives the Mannon home the aspect of a mausoleum, haunted by a past that dooms its occupants to repeat ancestral sins.

The central character is daughter Lavinia Mannon (Libby West), the equivalent of the original’s Electra. Stone-faced and stiff, Lavinia nevertheless resembles her haughty, vivacious mother, Christine (Deborah Strang), in more ways than she would care to acknowledge.

Both women love the dashing sea captain Adam Brant (Geoff Elliott), but he belongs to Christine, who murders her husband, the returned general (William Dennis Hunt), to be with him. Lavinia, a daddy’s girl of outsized proportion, then needles her emotionally fragile brother, Orin (Doug Tompos), also newly returned from the war, into bloody retribution.

Family friends, another sister and brother (Amy Chaffee and Toby Meuli), are thrust occasionally into the overwrought proceedings to remind us how normal people behave. The cast, trimmed to eight for this production, is completed by Apollo Dukakis as the family’s loyal if perpetually soused retainer.

As directed by Geoff Elliott and Julia Rodriguez Elliott, the story is delivered in the breathless, shuddering manner of soap opera. It’s the style the material would seem to suggest, yet it makes these already over-the-top characters seem outright campy.

Still, some images really capture the imagination: Christine distractedly rubbing her abdomen, as though trying to wipe her husband’s handprints off her body, for instance, or Orin instinctively snapping to his feet and saluting when Lavinia gives an order.

Jaymi Lee Smith’s lights appropriately throw the action into perpetual shadow, and Julie D. Keen’s costumes help to reveal Lavinia and Orin, eventually, as duplicates of their parents.

When symbolism is this heavy-handed, however, it quickly grows wearying. O’Neill’s 1931 play is chockablock with it, making this long day’s journey into night feel even longer.

*

‘Mourning Becomes Electra’

Where: A Noise Within, 234 S. Brand Blvd., Glendale

When: 2 p.m. Sunday, April 30 and May 1, 15, 22; 7 p.m. April 29 and May 5, 21, 28; noon May 28; 6 p.m. May 29

Ends: May 29

Price: $30 and $34

Contact: (818) 240-0910

Running time: 3 hours, 40 minutes