As usual, here's Laura's summation of last week's Classics group:

This month we had a slightly smaller than usual turnout (9 or 10 people

- I forgot to count during the meeting, but that's the tally I get when

I try to remember who was there). On the other hand, some might think

that's a pretty big turnout for a discussion of a trilogy of classic

greek plays (Aeschylus' "The Orestia") and a trilogy of a modern

somewhat-retelling of the classic greek plays (O'Neill's "Mourning

Becomes Electra")! As I recall, we began by discussing how we had

approached our assignment of reading the two trilogies. Almost everyone

chose to read the Aeschylus first and then the O'Neill, but one member

took the interesting approach of reading them in a "dovetailed" fashion

- the first part of the Aeschylus, then the first part of the O'Neill,

then the second part of the Aeschylus and the second part of the

O'Neill, etc. He felt that it heightened the ability to compare and

contrast (don't you feel like you're back in school when you see that

phrase?) the two works.



We actually started out discussing the O'Neill first - not so much by

any overt decision but by the fact that we found ourselves discussing

and interpreting the O'Neill "informed" by our reading of the Aeschylus.

Opinions varied widely - some really enjoyed Mourning Becomes Electra,

others really disliked it, and the rest liked it mildly. Even those who

liked it saw it as flawed, at least in terms of O'Neill's ambitious

attempt to refashion The Orestia for modern times. There was a somewhat

more, but not complete, uniformity of positive opinion of The Orestia.

We discussed the definition of a "tragedy" and how it applied to The

Orestia and whether Mourning Becomes Electra was really a melodrama. We

compared the characters in the two books to their counterparts, both in

terms of personality and outcomes, and wondered why O'Neill chose to

omit a Cassandra counterpart and end on a much more pessimistic note

than Aeschylus did.

Count me as the member who read the plays "dovetailed" (a nice way of putting it), although it was as much to alleviate the expected boredom of reading the Oresteia straight through as anything else. Beth and I saw the Aeschylus plays at the ART about 10 years ago, all I remember is Jeremy Geidt sitting on the castle wall as the nightwatchman in the very first scene, and his first line was "Here I sit, freezing my balls off." You knew from then on that you were in for the ART version of Greek tragedy, not necessarily the real thing. Don't remember anything else about the whole trilogy, and then I read the plays again for this and I still don't remember anything. The story is familiar to me, from Strauss' Elektra primarily, the plays are long on talk and short on action, some of the key scenes happen offstage, and there's minimal stage direction, so there's not much to sink your teeth into other than the text itself. They're really plays to study rather than just read through.



O'Neill on the other hand evokes strong reactions because his characters are so over the top. Laura made a good point that the first play, "Homecoming", doesn't seem to work right because the two principle female characters both start off at such a high level, hating each other from the first page, that there's nowhere for them to go as the play goes on. Everyone comes across as a bunch of whiners. By the second and third plays things the viewer/reader has gotten kind of used to the overall tone, and there are a few effective scenes, particularly I thought the scene were Orin has had his confrontation with Lavinia and storms off and she knows he's going to kill himself and tries to carry on a conversation while waiting for the inevitable gunshot from the next room. I remember seeing these plays done on PBS when I was in high school, but didn't remember much about them. What's interesting in reading the two trilogies together is it shows their dissimilarities more than their commonalities, like O'Neill set out to retell the Oresteia in a modern setting but found that it just wouldn't work, so the Clytemnestra character kills herself rather than also being killed by her son as in the original. There wasn't enough here to sustain a long discussion (plus Jim and Evan weren't in attendance), but they were worth reading and make me interested in reading more of both authors. Not for a little while, though.