Alcestis

I went to the HRDC production of Alcestis (Euripides) at the Loeb Ex this weekend. I thought it would be a play. It was, as queue notes, a ... thing. Performance art is the only category broad enough, really. I should have known from the director's notes in the program:

The script used in this performance is an original cut that draws primarily from Ted Hughes' adaptation of the Euripides and from the translation by Dudley Fitts and Robert Fitzgerald. Alcestis and the chorus also speak text drawn from Sylvia Plath's poems. The second act incorporates an experimental text by Heiner Muller, Explosion of a Memory/Description of a Picture, which was written as a prologue to Robert Wilson's 1986 production of Alcestis

This prologue that they used as an afterword hadn't been restaged until now, and perhaps that's with good reason. Oh, and "A number of scenes were devloped collaboratively in rehearsal and are the original creations of the actors", as if the rest weren't enough.

So in the end, trying to be all levels of text and very post modern, it's a pastiche of too many different things, and doesn't really work.

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