Clytemnestra front and center Essay Example For Students

Clytemnestra front and center Essay It began casually enough. Guthrie Theater artistic director Garland Wright asked company member Isabell Monk a question he poses each year to his actors: What roles would you like to play in the coming season? Monk, who has spent eight of the past 12 seasons at the Guthrie, had an immediate answer: Clytemnestra in Sophocles Electra, a work she had appeared in Off Broadway a few years before as a member of the chorus. Her choice surprised me, says Wright. I wanted to do a piece for her, and Clytemnestra certainly doesnt carry that play. But after studying a number of other Greek tragedies involving the character of Clytemnestra, Wrights interest was piqued. Together they made the woman and her story as complicated as I felt they needed to be. You began to understand the sense of justice out of which these terrible events arose. From his simple exchange with Monk an ambitious design began to take shape: a fabricated trilogy by the three Greek tragic playwrights whose work survivesa kind of alternate reading of the Oresteia with Clytemnestra instead of Orestes at its convergence point. In Wrights words, this triptych would bring together Euripidess Iphigeneia at Aulis, the play of the child-killer; Aeschyluss Agamemnon, the play of the husband-killer; and Sophocless Electra, the play of the mother-killer. (Following a similar hybrid approach, Ariane Mnouchkine also highlighted Clytemnestra in her celebrated version of the Oresteia by preceding the trilogy with Iphigenie a Aulis.) I threw this idea back at Isabell and her eyes lit up for a moment, Wright recalls, and then she panicked. We decided to go ahead. While the Clytemnestra trilogy was conceived as a showcase for a specific actress, it had another point of originas a project for and about the company. If the play doesnt serve any function in regard to the company, says Wright, Im rarely prone to undertake it. Every year, in fact, the ensemble gathers in a loft in the warehouse district of Minneapolis for a pre-season lab, which functions both as a voice and movement clinic and a summit at which issues confronting the company are put on the table. Last year the chief topic of discussion was the four-play cycle of Shakespeares history plays the Guthrie had presented the previous summer. It had been an enormous experience and we spent over a week analyzing it, Wright says. The male actors came away with an unqualified sense of fulfillment. But not the women. Shakespeares history plays chronicle a society where men struggle with men for power, and women find themselves on the periphery. One actress recalls that on marathon days they w ould literally wait around seven hours to go on stage for six minutes. The Clytemnestra plays provided two ways of dealing with the troublesome gender issue, Wright notes. First, they allowed the men to support the womena worthwhile opportunity for the males. These plays are all shouldered by women and thats a rarity in the classical repertory. If there were no other reason for doing this project, that would be reason enough. These plays provide extraordinary roles for women. Although they are the artifacts of a society that denied women respect and the most basic freedomswhere to be a woman was to be nothingthe authors of three Clytemnestra plays each created women of energy and purpose who face whatever circumstance puts before them, act decisively and, as Monk says, take responsibility for their actions. They are women whoregardless of their crimes and the moral judgments a modern audience may place upon themdemand respect. The other benefit was that as the men in the company outnumber the women, says Wright, there would have to be a mixed chorus, wi th women playing men and men playing women. Tangible ghosts EssayNo longer the wise matriarch People dont understand why I asked to play Clytemnestra in Electra, Isabell Monk confides. I didnt care that she wasnt the major force in the play. I wanted to explore this woman. Ive never really gotten a chance to play a woman who wasnt a mother or grandmother or somebodys auntthe kind of person who can give advice to those whose lives are caught in the conflict. With Clytemnestra she has finally found herself at the heart of the conflict; no longer the wise matriarch who holds the world in balance, but one who cuts a fiery path through it. The plays demand you become a firestorm, a hurricane, a force of nature. Clytemnestra, the only character to appear in each play, reveals herself in three distinct guises. Each time I change costumes, Monk remarks, I feel like Im getting ready to play a different character. In the first play, Euripidess Iphigeneia, she is the joyous mother who arrives at Aulis on a cart piled with wedding gifts, resplendent in flowing ochre robes, her hair luxuriantly braided and banded with gold. This Clytemnestra is a proud yet vulnerable woman, passionately in love with her husband and thrilled to be escorting her daughter Iphigeneia to a noble marriage. This Clytemnestra is neither the husband-killer of legend nor the earth mother in some terrible guise, says Wright. Shes a loving woman who could have been a good mother. And with Isabell you keenly feel the loss of these impulses in the plays that follow. Aeschyluss Agamemnon, which takes up the story 10 years later, presents an iron-willed Clytemnestra who is no ones victim. She is the tyrant queen: imperious, calculating and defiant, moving majestically through the play with its images of fire, blood, cold, darkness and slavery, a creature securely in her element. In Sophocless Electra, the third and final play in the Guthrie trilogy, Clytemnestra is a woman living in fear and struggling to hold onto her power, haunted not so much by the past as by the future. At the end of the play, her body is unceremoniously dumped at the front of the stage, where she lies wrapped in coarse cloth, a blood-stained chrysalis with all her transformations behind her. But not even in death is Clytemnestras passion entirely spent. As the lights dim for the final time her voice reverberates through the darkness of the theatre, calling upon all women to awake to the cries of a mother betrayed by her husband, hated by her daughter, killed by her son.Arise you furies, you womenand kill my shame. Her plea (heard only on the days when the trilogy is performed in its entirety) is taken from Aeschyluss The Eumenides, in which the ghost of Clytemnestra calls on the Furies to seek out and punish those who wronged her. But here the speech acquires a new meaning. Monk herself hears it as a call for empowerment, for women to stand up, take charge of their lives and cease being willing victims.