.A Greek War for Our Time

Round Belly Theatre Company presents Greek tragedy in slightly filtered form.

Colin Johnson evidently had a contemporary war in mind when he
decided to stage Oresteia: Before the Furies for Oakland’s Round
Belly Theatre Company. First performed in fifth-century Athens,
Oresteia grapples with themes of vengeance, personal ambition,
and government corruption — albeit on a primal level. The subject
matter appealed to Johnson because it seemed to resonate with the
current war in Iraq and subsequent economic meltdown (to him those two
things are inextricably correlated). He got the idea of contemporizing
a Greek tragedy several months ago, and at first had designs on the
similarly themed play Lysistrata, but decided to go for
something a little less obvious. Johnson’s current production at
Oakland’s Noodle Factory attempts to foist modern themes on an ancient
text without changing the original storyline. For a small black-box
theater company, that’s a rather ambitious project. Somehow the cast
pulls it off with relatively few hitches.

This Oresteia is “slightly filtered” — as Johnson
writes in his director’s note — but only “slightly.” To keep the
play at a manageable two hours, Johnson expurgated some of the
dialogue, mostly in places where characters appeal to the gods for
guidance. (In fact, there are no gods in this production.) Still, he
left large swaths of dialogue unadulterated, meaning the actors address
each other in rather obtuse language. Add to that Johnson’s personal
interpretation of the play, which he interposes onto the source
material just to complicate things. Johnson thought that each member of
his five-person Greek chorus should have his own personality or
backstory (most of which were developed through the rehearsal process).
Ergo: a slutty Greek (Brittany Hogan), a little-match-girl Greek (Vicky
Weng), a drunk Greek (Perry Aliado), a tough Greek (Paige Lubawy), and
a “chorus leader” (Katie Meinholt), whose persona seems a little
opaque. All wear rags, meant to show the toll that a ten-year war has
taken on their economy. Johnson took a bit of poetic license in
creating this downtrodden underclass, which doesn’t really exist in the
original story — though it’s a fair bet that Argos suffered some
form of economic recession as a result of the Trojan War. Nonetheless,
it’s one of the stronger elements of this adaptation.

In the upper strata you have the royal family: King Agamemnon (John
Clevenger), who returns from a ten-year war only to be hatcheted by his
beautiful and vindictive wife, Clytemnestra (Mary Guiver); Aegisthus
(Josh Han), who seduces Clytemnestra and helps plot the king’s murder;
Agamemnon’s son Orestes (Lucas Buckman), who avenges his father’s death
by stabbing his mother; and Orestes’ sister Electra (Linda Landeros),
who helps devise the revenge plot. As is the case in melodramas, these
aristocrats are every bit as desperate and dysfunctional as their
underlings, except that their scraps and mishaps always have vast
social consequences. Johnson deliberately cast a middle-aged Agamemnon
against a young Clytemnestra in order to create more of a rift between
them. In this version it works, mostly because Guiver has the glacial
beauty of a trophy wife. Plus, she looks good with an axe in her
hand.

Clearly, Oresteia has a lot of slasher-film potential, and
the actors seem to take pleasure in chopping each other up and watching
the fake blood splatter. But the death scenes vary in quality. It might
have behooved Johnson to prune the second act, which largely consists
of Orestes and Electra plotting their revenge, but not actually
carrying it out until the last twenty minutes of the play. The
“plotting” is a lot less fun than the actual bloodbath, since it
involves several tortuous monologues that seem to be about nothing in
particular. To make matters worse, actors Buckman and Landeros fail to
turn toward the audience, so we have to watch their entire recon
mission in profile. That gets a little boring. Fortunately, Guiver
almost makes up for it with her grisly death at the end. She emerges as
the play’s most promising star.

Perhaps the most interesting story here is that of Round Belly
itself. Founded in 2008 by playwright Brian Quakenbush — who, at
29, is the company’s oldest member — it produces roughly nine
plays a year, ranging from Greek tragedy to Shakespeare to original
material. The company even produced a 24-hour theater fest (in which
plays are written and performed on the fly) in Quakenbush’s backyard.
Run as collective, Round Belly allows each member to assist in every
aspect of the production. This type of sweat-equity program sometimes
undermines the material, but also allows for some creative flourishes.
In Oresteia, the actors used a workshop process to create their
own character backstories. For the most part, they designed their own
costumes, too. The score, composed by Jeff Kimmich and played on a
laptop computer, uses found sounds to create a down-tempo, industrial
soundscape. Thus, Round Belly compensates in creativity for what it
lacks in resources. Johnson holds as gospel the idea that with a little
elbow grease, small theater companies can produce just about anything.
Even Greek tragedy.

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