Our daughter was tentative and unsure when we dropped her off at her first rehearsal and now it is one of her favorite activities. Melissa creates an inclusive, supportive environment where every child leaves feeling more confident.”

ORESTEIA OF Aeschylus by Jeffrey Scott Bernstein Book The THE ORESTEIA OF Aeschylus by Jeffrey Scott Bernstein Book The

Mourning Becomes Electra – a modernized version of the story by Eugene O'Neill, who shifts the action to the American Civil War A wretched piteous dove, in quest of food, dashed amid the winnowing-fans, its breast broken in twain." [16]

Meet the cast

Beneath the war for justice, there’s another war going on throughout Oresteia: the gender conflict between males and females of power. After waking up, the Furies hunt Orestes again and when they find him, Orestes pleads to the goddess Athena for help. She responds by setting up a trial for him in Athens on the Areopagus. This trial is made up of a group of twelve Athenian citizens and is supervised by Athena. Here Orestes is used as a trial dummy by Athena to set-up the first courtroom trial. He is also the object of the Furies, Apollo, and Athena. [1] After the trial comes to an end, the votes are tied. Athena casts the deciding vote and determines that Orestes will not be killed. [12] This does not sit well with the Furies but Athena eventually persuades them to accept the decision; instead of violently retaliating against wrongdoers, become a constructive force of vigilance in Athens. She then changes their names from the Furies to "the Eumenides" which means "the Gracious Ones". [13] Athena then ultimately rules that all trials must henceforth be settled in court rather than being carried out personally. [13] Proteus [ edit ]

The Yoke Of Necessity: The Oresteia Of Aeschlyus Translated

In the final play, The Eumenides (‘Kindly Ones’, a traditional euphemism for the Furies), the goddesses are visible to the audience: they serve as the hissing, violent chorus, in contrast to the human choruses of the first two plays and most other Athenian tragedies. Whereas the earlier plays were set in the distant city of Argos, The Eumenides is set where the play was performed: in Athens, on the hill of the Areopagus, a stone’s throw from the Theatre of Dionysos. The dominant characters are not humans but gods. Orestes has come to Athens for sanctuary, to beg Athena for absolution from matricide. Athena, like Clytemnestra in Agamemnon, is the hyper-intelligent, scheming ruler of her city. But unlike Clytemnestra, she is not mortal, angry, grieving or murderous: she has no personal interest in the case, but turns out to have a particular fondness for the democratic institutions of Athens in the fifth century. She organises a trial by jury.Cassandra’s fate is met with an accordingly visceral relish in Clytemnestra’s later reaction to her murderous spree, and Bernstein delivers her interchange with the Chorus with a sanguine swagger which is somehow neatly consonant with the blindness of Tragic necessity: The Oresteia perfects this vision of warning and reward. Athenian exhilaration still ran strong in 458 when Aeschylus, at the age of sixty-seven, produced his trilogy. It breathes the buoyant spirit of his city. Its dominant symbolism is that of light after darkness. Beginning in the darkness-before-dawn of a Mycenaean citadel benighted by curses and crimes, it ends with a triumphant torchlit procession in an Athens radiant with civic faith and justice. The entire drama is one long procession, and each step brings us closer to the light. Originally the Oresteia consisted of four plays - Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, The Eumenides and Proteus. The last was a satyr-play, completing the full ‘tetralogy’ dramatists composed. It would have presented gods and heroes in a comic situation that relieved the tensions of the tragedies while illuminating them with fresh perspectives. The Proteus has not survived, but the three tragedies form a unity in themselves, the only complete Greek trilogy we have, and its scope is as expansive as an epic. Aeschylus referred to his work as ‘slices from the banquet of Homer’, but his powers of assimilation were impressive. His trilogy sweeps from the Iliad to the Odyssey, from war to peace. Yet it was the darker events of the Odyssey - the murder of Agamemnon by his wife and the vengeance of his son, Orestes - that inspired Aeschylus to produce a great tale of the tribe. He deepened Homer with even older, darker legends and lifted him to a later, more enlightened stage of culture. Blush at’ makes the queen sound weirdly prudish. Ruden’s rendering, also in iambic pentameter, is far more direct, and appropriately aggressive: Culture Project (June 15, 2011). "Interview With Yael Farber Creator/Director of MoLoRa". YouTube . Retrieved May 31, 2023.

The Odyssey translated by Emily Wilson review – a new

Thank you for making the theatre program such a success! This is not an easy feat in the age of COVID, but you managed it perfectly. My daughter has absolutely loved your program.” Furies – also known as the Erinyes or "infernal goddesses", the Furies serve as Zeus' enforcers in Argos and punish those who swear false oaths. a b c d Porter, David (2005). "Aeschylus' "Eumenides": Some Contrapuntal Lines". The American Journal of Philology. 126 (3): 301–331. doi: 10.1353/ajp.2005.0044. JSTOR 3804934. S2CID 170134271. MacLeod, C. W. (1982). "Politics and the Oresteia ". The Journal of Hellenic Studies, vol. 102. doi: 10.2307/631132. JSTOR 631132. pp.124–144. When Electra repudiates her crime, Orestes says that she is bringing guilt on herself. Guilt results from the failure to accept responsibility for one's actions as a product of one's freedom. To repudiate one's actions is to agree that it was wrong to take those actions in the first place. In doing this, Electra repudiates her ability to freely choose her own values (to Sartre, an act of bad faith). Instead, she accepts the values that Zeus imposes on her. In repudiating the murders of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, Electra allows Zeus to determine her past for her. She surrenders her freedom by letting her past take on a meaning that she did not give to it by herself, and as a result she becomes bound to a meaning that did not come from her. Electra can choose, like Orestes, to see the murders as right and therefore to reject feelings of guilt. Instead, she allows Zeus to tell her that the murders were wrong and to implicate her in a crime.a b O'Neill, K. (1998). "Aeschylus, Homer, and the Serpent at the Breast". Phoenix. Classical Association of Canada. 52 (3/4): 216–229. doi: 10.2307/1088668. JSTOR 1088668. The Dramatic Workshop's skillful production takes this dramatic history of the play into full account by employing several theatrically effective devices, including a newsreel curtain-raiser depicting the Nazi heyday. [14] Compared to the Oresteia [ edit ]

Oh What A Night THE CAST - Oh What A Night

To the anthropologist Johann Jakob Bachofen ( Das Mutterrecht, 1861), the Oresteia shows Ancient Greece's transition from "hetaerism" ( polyamory) to monogamy; and from "mother-right" ( matriarchal lineage) to "father-right" ( patriarchal lineage). According to Bachofen, religious laws changed in this period: the Apollo and Athena of The Eumenides present the patriarchal view. The Furies contrast what they call "gods of new descent" with the view that matricide is more serious than the killing of men. With Athena acquitting Orestes, and the Furies working for the new gods, The Eumenides shows the newfound dominance of father-right over mother-right. [21] Kells, J. H. (1966). "More Notes on Euripides' Electra". The Classical Quarterly. Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Classical Association. 16 (1): 51–54. doi: 10.1017/S0009838800003359. JSTOR 637530. S2CID 170813768. An inexhaustible masterpiece is transformed into a glib anti-war morality play". Daily Telegraph. 1999-12-03. ISSN 0307-1235. Archived from the original on 2016-02-26 . Retrieved 2018-08-13. For more on the complexity of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, see Bednarowski, P. K. (2015). Surprise and Suspense in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon. American Journal of Philology, 136(2), 179–205. https://doi.org/10.1353/ajp.2015.0030 In Jeffrey Scott Bernstein’s masterful new take on Aeschylus’ Oresteia trilogy, he plays it relatively safe, which is not to undermine either the renewed emotive force of the Tragedy, or its essential gravitas. Bernstein’s prosodic skills carry an easy and appropriate sense of solemn momentum as though investment in encouraging foreboding were the drama’s central dynamic. And it works: Cassandra’s terrible prognostication in the Agamemnon bears down on the reader like a train from a tunnel, enabling an efflorescence of metaphor; the Furies ‘troubling the rooms with that primal wrong’ bring swift resolve in the embodiment of vengeful, alliterative hubris:

The Flies also shows the effect of Nietzsche on Sartre. Orestes represents the idea of the overman, as described in works such as Thus Spoke Zarathustra; the ability to free one's mind from dogma and the impressions of others, and instead think on a higher level. Like Zarathustra, Orestes feels he must "go down" to the people and open their eyes (though unlike Zarathustra, Orestes does it out of compassion). When debating Zeus, Orestes also talks about being "beyond" the moral yoke others allow to be placed on them - an idea explicitly discussed in Beyond Good and Evil, and implicitly described in other works by Nietzsche. Orestes is not bound by the false dichotomy of "good" and "evil," and instead accepts what has been done, choosing to focus on the present and the future. Herbert Weir Smyth, Aeschylus, Loeb Classical Library, 2 vols. Greek text with facing translations, 1922 – prose Agamemnon Libation Bearers Eumenides