Timeless desire for revenge

By Don Shirley

April 28, 2005 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

Queen Murders King. Prince Murders Queen.

Headlines like those would drive even Brad Pitt off the front pages of the tabloids. The Greek legend of how Clytemnestra killed her royal husband, Agamemnon, then was slain in turn by their son Orestes, has been the source of sensational speculation for centuries, ever since the big three creators of ancient Greek tragedy -- Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides -- took turns dramatizing the gruesome tale.

Yet the focal character in many of the staged adaptations of the legend isn’t the queen, the king or the prince. Instead it’s Electra, Orestes’ sister, who worships their late father and goads her brother to whack their mom.

Just look at two Americanized adaptations onstage now: “Electricidad” at the Mark Taper Forum in downtown L.A. and “Mourning Becomes Electra” at A Noise Within in Glendale.

The Electra characters dominate: In Luis Alfaro’s “Electricidad,” set primarily in a barrio in East L.A., the title character never leaves the stage. In Eugene O’Neill’s trilogy, Lavinia Mannon is the only main character who survives over the nearly 4-hour production.

The back stories behind these two Electras are quite different.

Alfaro says the idea for “Electricidad” came to him in Tucson in 2002. As part of a residency with Borderlands Theatre, he worked briefly in an outreach program with a young teenager who had killed her mother. At the time, Alfaro also picked up Sophocles’ “Electra,” and “it mirrored so much of the world” of this girl’s story -- and of the cholo culture of Los Angeles.

Alfaro saw parallels in the language and in such cosmetic qualities as shoes, hairstyles, tattoos and women’s makeup -- which can be so severe, he says, that it reminded him of Greek masks. He substituted gang councils for Greek gods.

Because he decided to base his dramatization primarily on Sophocles’ “Electra,” Electra’s prominence was a given. Alfaro also was fascinated by the hissing of electric wires over the Tucson desert and wanted “Electricidad” (Spanish for electricity) as the title, signifying a woman “whose desire for revenge is as potent as electricity.”

But he found himself “frustrated with Electra’s inability to forgive or to create action” in the Sophocles version. “For the first 45 minutes, she’s just spewing,” he says.

So Alfaro spread some of the focus to other women. For example, Electra’s sister Iphigenia doesn’t appear in Sophocles’ play because, in an early part of the original story, she was sacrificed by her father. But Alfaro ignored this -- and also another, “really passive” sister, Chrysothemis -- and brought Iphigenia onstage as an ex-chola who entered a convent and now wants her mother and sister to forgive each other.

“When writing about gang culture, I needed to offer a sense of hope,” Alfaro says. “It came to me with Iphigenia.”

In addition, Alfaro portrays his Clytemnestra (here known as Clemencia) as a proto-feminist. Her anger stems from her husband’s abuse. And her adulterous boyfriend is missing, helping bolster her role as a self-sufficient leader.

“Is there something so wrong when women take over a patriarchal society?” Alfaro asks. “Gang culture is a male-dominated world. Women are there for pleasure -- although a lot of girls do drive-bys, because it’s thought that they won’t get as harsh a sentence if they’re caught. But I loved trying to focus the energy on how the women would rule the world.”

Alfaro also added the character of the slain king’s mother, called simply Abuela (grandmother), who brings a more worldly perspective. And he included a lot of jokes with local punch lines and dashes of Spanglish -- the king’s corpse sits “in the front yarda, on display, like some Rose Parade float.” Alfaro justifies such flippancy by citing the sardonic approach to death that’s evident in Mexican culture.

Although Alfaro made a lot of changes from the Greek models, “it was great to have a road map,” he says. “Myths are repeated because they have so much truth. The desire for revenge is still a serious issue. TV reality shows are built on this desire to get your due.”

O’Neill, too, disregarded the Greek blueprints in many ways. The motives of his Clytemnestra (Christine) are explicitly sexual. She takes her own life, instead of being killed by her son. This eventually helps prompt Orestes (Orin) to kill himself as well -- but only after he makes an overt pass at his sister and she recoils.

“Mourning” is steeped in Freudian imagery and eliminates any influence by supernatural forces such as gods.

While creating “Mourning” in 1928, O’Neill wrote in his diary that he had to “give modern Electra a tragic ending worthy of the character. In the Greek story she peters out into undramatic married banality. Such a character contained too much tragic fate in her soul to permit this.”

And so after her brother’s suicide, Lavinia cloisters herself inside the family mansion, apparently for the rest of her life. It’s a bleak fate. But at least she isn’t passing the family curse on to children or literally killing herself.

Julia Rodriguez Elliott, co-director of A Noise Within’s revival, notes that Lavinia’s choice might even break the family’s cycle of revenge and death: “O’Neill presents the possibility that by her giving in to the Mannon fate, she overcomes it.”

Interestingly enough, the character of Lavinia provides a window on O’Neill’s life too. “She is considered one of the most personally revealing characters O’Neill ever wrote,” Rodriguez Elliott says. “She, like O’Neill, loses father, mother, brother very quickly, and in the same order that O’Neill experienced his own personal losses.” (His father, mother and brother Jamie died in 1920, 1922 and 1923, respectively.) It might help explain his interest in focusing on her.

Electra isn’t a new subject for A Noise Within. The company staged an all-male version of Euripides’ “Electra” last year and had considered the daunting “Mourning” for many years.

Mary Louise Hart, assistant curator of antiquities at the Getty Museum and an expert on Greek drama in performance, suggests that Electra might be so popular with playwrights “because she can’t do the deed” -- commit murder, that is.

It would have been unthinkable for a young Greek princess to kill her mother, Hart says. Yet the tension between that fact and her feelings leaves her seething -- and intensifies her drama.

Hart has seen “Electricidad” four times and plans to give a talk about it at a conference in Delphi, Greece. She recently saw another rendition of Electra’s story by a Polish group, and she intends to see A Noise Within’s “Electra” soon.

“She’s a source of endless fascination,” Hart says. “She has the will, but she doesn’t have the way.”

An ancient tale to ponder in a modern light

‘Mourning Becomes Electra’

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

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

Ends: May 29

Price: $30 to $34

Info: (818) 240-0910, www.anoisewithin.org

Running time: 3 hours, 40 minutes

‘Electricidad’

Where: Mark Taper Forum, 135 N. Grand Ave., Los Angeles

When: 8 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays; 2:30 p.m. Saturdays, Sundays and May 11; 7:30 p.m. Sundays