Theater Review Revue

Elektra
Seattle Opera
Through Nov 1.

“Prophetess always of terror and nothing e’er came forth from me but
curses without end—and fierce despair and frenzy.” Scrawled in
tiny slanted cursive, those lines shouldn’t

be in my study score of Richard Strauss’s opera Elektra, but
a half-century ago on page 287, an anonymous copy editor embedded a
crude yet poetic English translation of Elektra describing
herself—and portending her fate.

Strauss (1864–1949) wreathes Elektra in dissonance, though not
with the fractured angles of the avant-garde. Instead, Strauss matches
her ruminations to giant, granite chords whose innards often writhe and
squirm.

Elektra’s first word in the opera is “Allein!” (“Alone!”).
Unlike the archetypal Greek hero, she has no followers to win, no
ascent, and no great deeds. Ensnared by her lust for revenge, she lives
in gloom and horror in a palace with her father’s murderer, her mother
Klytämnestra. Elektra’s heroic struggle is merely to resist by
surviving.

Seattle Opera hews to the basics in this one-act, 100-minute opera.
The set, a hulking castle alloyed with riveted steel plates and
geologic strata of metal sheets, stifles movement. Characters
predictably appear and exit left, right, and upstage (a secret door
would have been nice). The singers, however, are uniformly good—I
saw the “gold” cast on opening night and a dress rehearsal of the
“silver” cast—though the tour de force belonged to Rosalind
Plowright as the desperate and paranoid Klytämnestra.

Klytämnestra enters after a luridly Technicolor cortege of
soldiers, flunkies, and an incongruously costumed witch doctor who
combines the trappings of a Hopi kachina doll and Masai warrior.
Despite the sloppily directed procession—a sacrificial victim
exits with too little resistance—Plowright commands the stage.
Stooped and hobbling as if enduring the ancient equivalent of
chemotherapy, Plowright is spellbinding as she recounts her
guilt-ridden nightmares in a wild-eyed, neurotic rasp: “My body cries
out for death….”

Both Elektras, Janice Baird and Jayne Casselman, rage and fulminate
well; Carolyn Betty girlishly animates the innocence of Elektra’s
sister Chrysothemis; and Alfred Walker is a regal, bass-baritone Orest,
Elektra’s heroic brother. In the end, Elektra triumphs and dances
herself to death. Alas, the ill-conceived choreography—Casselman
does a wine-grape stomp and Baird employs a staggered
prance—fails to conjure any sense of crisis or doom. Elektra’s
dance should have been an exorcism, a chilling glimpse into the abyss
of Pyrrhic victory. CHRISTOPHER DELAURENTI

Bobbie and Jerome
Langston Hughes Performing Arts Center
Through Oct 26.

This new play about two African-American men—cousins and
ex-junkies who work as stonecutters for a cathedral in Harlem—has
about 70 minutes of good drama. Unfortunately, those minutes are buried
beneath two and a half hours of flab.

After a three-year disappearance, Jerome (a slightly hammy Marcel
Davis) limps into the stone yard where his younger cousin Bobbie (the
brooding G. To’mas Jones) is working on his first piece of marble. The
future of the yard rests in that stone—if Bobbie carves it
artfully enough, an unnamed benefactor will rain money on the yard,
saving it from bankruptcy. Playwright Daniel W. Owens dutifully trots
out all the standards of kitchen-sink family drama: old grudges,
childhood reminiscences, familial competition, the tug of conflicting
loyalties, life-and-death stakes (in this case, their addictions), plus
a cranky white overseer (Ron Davids) to mediate between them. It all
works. There’s just too much of it.

Designer Tommer Peterson has turned the stage into a convincing
stonecutters’ studio, filled with dust, rocks, sketches, gargoyles, and
tools, including a working pneumatic stonecutter. Owens, clearly, wants
his audience to learn as much about carving as he does about his
characters. The white overseer gives direct-address monologues between
scenes about marble and limestone and how “stone never lies, only
people do.” Bobbie and Jerome is edifying, but only
intermittently entertaining. BRENDAN KILEY

The Arabian Nights
Balagan Theatre
Through Nov 8.

Mary Zimmerman’s dreamy, drowsy adaptation of Arabian Nights excises the familiar—no Sinbad, no Aladdin, no Ali Baba, no
thieves. The framework is the same: wily, beautiful Scheherazade (the
appropriately arresting Allison Strickland) is wed to the wounded
cuckold King Sharyar (Ashley Bagwell—sometimes powerful,
sometimes overpowering) who every night “marries, loves, and kills a
virgin.” To save her own ass—and her younger sister’s, next in
line for holy matri-murder—Scheherazade distracts her
bloodthirsty husband with 1,001 Arabian cliff-hangers. Storytelling is
Scheherazade’s gift, her weapon, and the only thing keeping her
alive.

Scheherazade’s stories, and stories-within-stories-within-stories,
and so on, fold in on themselves and bleed into one another—some
silly, some meditative—with the specters of gender, infidelity,
and lust lurking around the sharp edges. A lonely, self-flagellating
caliph wanders a dark riverbank. A merchant is duped into a madhouse by
the promise of female beauty. Two citizens argue over the unknown
contents of a bag (“A feather bed with the birds still attached!”). One
unlucky dude can’t escape the legacy of an epic fart (“My fart is a day
on the calendar?”).

Gussied up in that old familiar Middle Eastern style—every
surface draped in scarves and padded with carpets (which seems, on a
side note to all Westerners, like an uncomfortably reductive way to
visualize an entire region)—Balagan Theatre’s low, dark,
subterranean space transforms handily into a caliph’s palace, a bazaar,
a desert: hot from breath and bodies and lights, stuffy with more than
a whiff of neighboring armpits.

The 12-person cast—anchored by Ashley Bagwell’s potency and
Terri Weagant’s deep, serene voice—indulges in a little
overacting, in both the earnest moments and the goofy comedy. (What’s
the Arabian equivalent of hammy? Is it… goaty?) But Balagan
productions have a consistent depth and life—they’re just so
likable—and after two and half hours with the cast in that
intimate, intricate bedtime story, it felt like we’d been through
something together. LINDY WEST