Hidden Treasures from Afghanistan's National Museum are now on exhibition at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, the last of several stops in a 15-month tour of the United States. I caught the exhibit in Washington DC last year, but you may have seen it this spring in Houston.
A haunting diorama of a barren Afghan plain shows how the unimaginable golden treasures were preserved in hidden subterranean vaults for thousands of years, even as the fabulous palaces of antiquity above them were torn down for re-use as construction material.
I had hoped that Will Hollis Snider's Orestes would offer us reworked antique treasures, but he provides instead an empty, echoing structure constructed from the pulled-down palaces of Greek myth.
The structure is not entirely barren. One clever touch is to convert the ravaging Erinyes or Furies from avenging spirits to fantasms of Orestes' mind, embodying the murdered -- his sister Iphigenia, sacrificed at Aulis by their father Agamemnon; Agamemnon himself, murdered by his wife, their mother Clytemnestra, upon his return from Troy; and Clytemnestra, whom Orestes has just killed, on instructions from the god Apollo.
Austin’s Cambiare Productions is proud to present a darker, more intimate vision of Euripides' classic Orestes.
Adapted and directed by Austin Critics’ Table nominee Will Hollis Snider (Sonata Escondida, Intermission, Elektra, The Nina Variations), Orestes will be performed at the Off Center (2211-A Hidalgo, Austin) Thursday through Saturday, July 30th through August 15th at 8 PM.
Tickets are priced at $15, $12 for students, and will be available at the door. Thursdays will be pay-what-you-can nights. Reservations can be made at reservations@cambiareproductions.com or at (512) 524-3761.
Snider’s adaptation takes Euripides classic, strips away the presentational storytelling of three millennia ago and reinforces the story with other classic texts including Iphigenia at Aulis, Elektra, The Libation Bearers, Iphigenia Among the Taurians, Agamemnon, and The Eumenides.
The production places the title character squarely at the center of his own story. It is set days after Orestes’ murder of his own mother, Klytaimnestra, in retribution for the assassination of his father. The dark fevered hallways of Orestes' mind are explored as he seeks absolution and release from the curse of the House of Atreus.
Sprinting backwards through the events leading up to Klytaimnestra's bloody death, the production unravels before Orestes' eyes the deceit and duplicity of the last generation of the House of Atreus as the black and white of zealous revenge recedes to the greys of politics and treacherous love. Confronted with the truth, haunted by Furies and hunted by his own people, Orestes makes one last desperate stand against God and man.
