Simon Stone's Medea, toneelgroepamsterdam (review)

Medea and Jason have changed their names to Anna and Lucas.  Simon Stone’s stimulating adaptation of Euripides’ familiar classic is titled Medea and it clearly follows the plot line so closely that nobody can be surprised by the outcome. Anna is a pharmaceuticals researcher. Lucas is attracted to the much younger daughter of his own boss — Clara's name is a fine translation of Euripides' Glauke, and Christopher here is the new name for her father, Creon.

Marieke Heebink plays the lead in
Simon Stone's Medea at Amsterdam's
Stadsschouwburg thru March 7.

A fortunate airline misfortune stranded me in Amsterdam for a choice opportunity to see this new adaptation of Euripides’ Medea. Open seating allowed me to arrive a few minutes before curtain and still get the best single seat in the house, precise center of row 5. The box office clerk asked whether I would be OK with a play in Dutch. Since I have read Euripides’ play few times, I felt confident that I would be able to follow it. And I am glad I took the chance. The Stadsschouwburg will feature the Toneelgroepamsterdam through the middle of March in this extraordinarily provocative production.

The boys have personalities. They are personalized with names, even. Stagecrafting in this production puts the boys on the empty stage for at least 10 minutes before the play starts. One plays on his laptop, as the other clad in a hoodie leans idly against a wall. This dramaturgical gesture shifts the focus of the tragedy more from Medea’s solitary plight to her murder of the children themselves. During the play, the boys’ pranks involve catching Mom and Dad in bed, offstage but with video camera rolling. Mom’s far more amused than Dad to be caught in flagrante with his estranged wife. And the prank becomes a critical plot element far beyond what Euripides conceived. The kids interact with their future stepmother both before and during the delivery of Medea’s auspicious gift. Anna/Medea has been slipping into an alcoholic emotional abyss since it was clear she would not regain her husband's heart. Here, too, Stone’s script probes new depths that Euripides overlooked.

Stone has plied rather deftly his adaptor’s tool in this new play. Rather than opening with the original’s ominous fears of the Nurse — “Would that the Argo had never penetrated the Symplegades…” The play opens with Anna and Lucas in dialogue softly and face-to-face, but separated by at least 20 feet. Later, the nurse's role will be filled by a social worker who comes in on assignment to supervise Anna’s increasingly frightening activities. Anna is a 40-something mother whose self-confidence is clearly shattered by her husband’s pursuit of a girl with long legs and a powerful father. Euripides' Jason had harbored similar motives, of course, but the circumstances are naturally modernized.

The only mythological allusion I caught was an overt reference to Ovid's Philomela and Itys, with citation overtly pointed out within the text of the Metamorphoses. Anachronism such as this cannot stall pedants who want to enjoy this 21st-century adaptation, for it can't matter that Euripides' 5th-century masterpiece is explained by way of a Roman narrative. Can it?

Some technological razzmattaz draws the audience into the most intimate proximity to the actors on stage. A large screen above the stage displays projected images from a wide variety of angles throughout. When the estranged couple explicates their rift in the opening scene, an offstage camera zooms in on Medea’s face then Jason’s, and the audience can simultaneously see their distance and fading lustre of Medea’s hair, the crows feet in her saddened eyes. A stunning shot late in the play gazes down directly down, 90-degrees from the rafters high above the stage in one of the most etherial views. Is the director showing us the vantage point of Medea’s divine grandfather, the only savior for this horrific mother?

Simon Stone’s play is not especially preachy. And in its most chilling moments Medea’s unthinkable crime becomes somehow plausible. The program notes chronicle briefly the horrific parricide of the Kansas physician Debora Green who in 1995 began poisoning her estranged husband, Michael Farrar, and then burned down the family home killing two of their three children. The sensationalism of Green’s murder is the subject of Ann Rule’s book Bitter Harvest: a woman’s fury, a mother’s sacrifice (2014). Mrs. Green is serving two consecutive 40-year death sentences incarcerated in federal penitentiary. While Ann Rule’s reviewers compare Green to Medea more readily than the author herself seems to, clearly Simon Stone has knitted a mythological layer over the top of Rule’s recent NYT Bestseller.

Stone produces the plot with a good deal of verve. The play’s second half is physically dominated by ash. The first phases bring a contstant falling column of black ash that falls into a heap in the middle of the stage, thematically visualizing the ruins of Medea’s ruined marriage. Then, when the rift is final and there is no going back, the column stops but the ash heap comes into play. It is tampled. It is scattered. The actors frollick through it and grieve in it and grovel in the most telling ways. A stark-white set that is otherwise utterly void of props becomes a gutwrenching backdrop to the blackened ash of a once smoldering love affair.

 — OGCMAMedeaANCIENT_EuripidesStone 

—— RTM

For the toneelgroepamsterdam website: http://www.tga.nl/en/productions/medea (click)

For Simon Stone:

http://www.theguardian.com/culture/australia-culture-blog/2013/aug/09/simon-stone-theatre-director

Cassandra and her name: a modern woman and her classical namesake

OGCMA0288NOTCassandra_Strang

My purpose in the Mythmatters Blog is to explore the reception history of classical myths. It is known to the Follower(s) of the Blog that my primary interest is the narrative gain accruing to artists in their usage of classical mythological allusions. What goes through an artist’s consideration to allude to a myth? This post is the first to engage a new usage type, the naming of a real person. Maybe sometime I’ll turn to Ulysses S. Grant or Penelope Cruz or some other child of a classical-mythological name dropper.

     I have a terrifically attentive TA this semester. She has been helping me also with research in the OGCMA project for about a year. Her mother named her Cassandra, and I quipped a few weeks ago what the narrative gain of that name might have been back on the day when Cassandra was named. Did her mother know what she was getting into when she selected the name of Priam’s daughter, the most tragic of the Trojan victims, yet the most noble of her generation?

Cassandra marks Apollo's
unwelcome approach in Aesch.
Agamemnon.

  Cassandra — The Other Cassandra — of course, was Trojan princess who prophesied nothing but truth and was never believed. This gift and this curse befell Cassandra when she refused the advances of Apollo, the prophetic god. The curse’s pain was realized in the fall of Troy. Disbelieved, or at least misunderstood, by her family and townsmen, Cassandra took refuge at the foot of the cult statue of Athena, but she was brutally removed by the lesser Ajax. It is one of the most abiding images of Greek violence run amok in the sack of Troy. Then, intensifying the tragic demise of the prophetess, Agamemnon claimed Cassandra as his personal prize and led her to her final demise back in Mycenae a bloody victim in Clytemnestra’s lex talionis. Classical literature could never quite achieve the pathos of Cassandra’s final prophetic drama outside the House of Atreus in Aeschylus’ Oresteia: “I went from door to door, I was wild with the god, I heard them call me ‘Beggar! Wretch! Starve for bread in hell!’ And I endured it all, and now he will extort me as his due. A seer for the Seer. … The cleaver streams with my life blood, the first blood drawn for the king’s last rites.” (Ag. 1291 – 99 Fagles) Indeed, it has been hard to beat Aeschylus’ Cassandra (458 BC) for sheer tragic nobility.

     My Cassandra’s mother wrote a personal account to her in October 2014, answering the question about how she had come to be called after the Trojan prophetess. Baby Cassie was spending the first days of her mortality in the Neonatal ICU.

I knew in NICU nurses would be taking care of you, and I wanted them to call you by your name-- not just refer to you as generic "Baby Girl". … [Y]our dad and I talked about one of the names we had considered, which was Cassandra. … I liked the name Cassandra, I thought it was pretty, it went well with our one syllable last name, and I mostly liked the meaning-- a Greek prophetess. I wasn't that well versed on Greek Mythology, but I decided to tie "prophetess" into a gospel meaning. … All of your brothers also have names that tie into the gospel. I wanted you to have a name with great meaning, but not be so obvious as are a lot of religious girl names.

     I always have thought that the name fits you very well, and I have never had a moment's doubt about it being the right name for you. I have always thought you were a unique and special girl. You had interests that were unusual for your age. And of course, when you were 4, I bought a book about Greek and Roman mythology, and you just ate it up. You carried it around for weeks. 

     Hecuba and Priam named their daughter either Cassandra or Alexandra, whom Homer calls (Il. 13.365) the loveliest of their many daughters. She is the first (Il. 24.699ff.) to see Priam returning with the ransomed body of her brother Hector. Homer, however, makes no mention of her prophetic abilities. These come first in Proclus’ Cypria. Later authors (e.g. Verg. Aen. 2.246) have her sternly warn against the Trojan Horse’s entrance into the city. Euripides’ Troiades has Cassandra foresee Odysseus’ trials and death. Aeschylus cannonized the traditional curse of the girl’s Apollonian “gift”; although Antikleides would have Apollo’s gift bestowed upon her as a

sleeping child when she and her brother Helenus had their ears licked by the god’s sacred serpents. Years prior to the Trojan War, therefore, Cassandra was endowed with the prophetic

Cassandra vainly seeks sanctuary where she
ought to receive it during the Sack of Troy — from
Pompeii, House of Menander

foresight that identified her brother Paris — aka Alexander — as a threat to the city and anticipated generations of historical mishaps for both Trojans and Greeks. (Lycophron Alexandra, 2^nd Century BC)

     Classical Cassandra passed nobly into literary reception with Boccaccio’s treatement in De claris mulieribus and thence into Chaucer, Shakespeare, and beyond. Christa Wolf’s remarkable Cassandra follows an important development in German literature from Schiller’s ballad (1802) to her own 1983 novella that has the princess mindfully approach her imminent demise with a retrospective monologue that liberates her heroically from masculine militance. Cassandra’s “emphatic and persistent” gains in importance during the 20^th Century, according to Seidensticker, are due to our age’s “rediscovery of the dark side of antiquity, and especially the great wars and crises [that] endowed the unheeded prophet of impending calamity with new timeliness. ... It remains to be seen, however, whether in the long run this development will result in [Cassandra's] once again becoming more than a mere metonymic cipher for the foreteller of disaster.” (in Grafton’s The Classical Tradition, s.v. “Cassandra”)

     Because of my own personal insistence in recovering authorial intent, I am very pleased that Cassandra’s mother was willing to share this account of her daughter’s naming. Because Priam’s Cassandra achieves such great dignity in her prophetic finale she remains an especially noble namesake after whom so many Sandys and Cassies and Cassandras have been named.

— RTM with permission of CB

Orestes in San Diego: My Son, My Son What Have Ye Done

 

Matricides are creepy. Let me just throw that out there. My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done (dir. W. Herzog; screenplay H. Golder and W. Herzog, 2009) is as disturbing a treatment of the Orestes-impulse as cinema can generate. That David Lynch, purveyor of cinematic wierdos, executive-produces this film may have significance for some readers.

Grace Zabriskie, Michael Shannon, Chloe Sevigny deal with pending
matricide over a disgusting gelatin dessert. A still from the film.

But those who allow an event so tragic may incur society’s frustrated scorn, even when they allowed matricide through mere passivity. For, we are no doubt programmed to blame anybody who permitted the impulse that makes a son murder his mother in cold blood? But why didn’t anybody stop it from happening? This film worries about the development of that impulse and about the stultifying failure of the murderer's associates before the most inexplicable crime. 

Three principal characters surrounding matricide Brad Macallam (Michael Shannon) cannot fathom the “strangeness” that overwhelms the man’s darkening existence. Mrs. Macallam (Grace Zibriskie) seems unable to quite figure out that she is in dire trouble. She also hasn’t figured out that her mismanagement of jello deserts and her son’s personal life have gotten her to this unfortunate place. His girlfriend Ingrid (Chloe Sevigny) does as little to check his stifling weirdness as, perhaps, a real person in such real circumstances might really, neither cajoling nor altering his onset tendency to enact the role of Orestes. And the disturbing passivity of Lee Meyers (Udo Keir), a black-box theater director utterly incapacitated by such clearly worded foreshadowing offered by the matricide himself as “A bird was the largest animal I ever killed, until I killed my mother.” Meyers makes note of that alarming confession several weeks after hearing it, and an hour or so after Mrs. Macallam has been killed by her son. Nobody saw this coming?

The murderer is clearly and patently crazy. Most of what we learn about him through the cinematic narrative comes through flashbacks. Macallam invents pseudo-scriptural commentary on the vile ostrich, quoting the Book of Job on the subject. He gives away all his possessions to a millennial frisbee player in Balboa Park. And he sets up his basketball in a sapling for some future NBA star who might someday come along. But he is first and foremost the brooding actor rehearsing the role of Orestes in a play-within-a-film. We meet this play throughout the film’s central exposition. Flashbacks take us to rehearsals of the play where Macallam’s failure to dissociate acting from role-playing foreshadow, for us, the horrific deed of matricide. We also meet the play in a workshop where the director explains the family curse of the House of Atreus, informing the cast that the mythological Tantalid curse is actually an explanation of the human condition. It affects us all. And a third vignette from that same play shows us a moment when Macallam and his mother together are in the audience of another production and he cannot keep from reciting Orestes’ lines. So deeply has he internalized the need to murder his mother. In the moment, his mother shyly smiles at her future killer’s quirkiness, and the audience judges him with their eyes alone. Why does nobody deal with his psychosis, his patently dangerous wierdness? That must be the point of this odd tale. Mental illness can lead to dangerous consequences, and these might be preventable if somebody does only intervenes.

Macallam’s role as Orestes is acted out literally in a performance of Aeschylus’ Oresteia. Critics of the film have missed this fine point. Reviews accessible through imdb.com seem to generalize the play-within-the-film as some Greek tragedy of Orestes, “the one where he kills his mother.”  None identifies Oresteia. The low point for me has been the Netflix description that says “Brad McCullum [sic] begins to have visions that make him believe he’s living in a Sophocles [!] play in this psychological thriller inspired by true events.” But, there are several less obvious identifiers to assure the viewer that the internal performance is certainly Aeschylus’ Oresteia. In his workshop, director Lee Myers mentions “this trilogy”. The lines rehearsed then performed in the vignettes within the film allign with passages in Choephori then Eumenides. And paracinematic material on the DVD, a dual interview with the co-screenwriters, reveals that Aeschylus was clearly in mind both during the writing of the screenplay and, more essentially, within the real-life events upon which this narrative is based.

A vignetted flashback to one rehearsal presents a chorus chanting ominously about “the cruel bitch of female passion,” of “the sword cutting deep, straight through the lungs,” and of a “child brought to the house to avenge the curse.” This sort of language impels a classicist-viewer to look toward Aeschylus and the Choephori (Libation Bearers) especially. And at Choe. 909 – 916 a little scrutiny shows that sure enough, the chorus is rehearsing Aeschylus. The arrival of the Libation Bearers in the film seal the fates, as it were, of Mrs. Macallam and her brooding son. The scene plays on, even though Macallam is unable to maintain a straightforward rehearsal — the ostensible reason for replaying this flashback.

Knowing the Aeschylean source text helps analysis. For, as that same vignetted rehearsal continues, Macallam misplays Orestes and skips “a hundred lines”. The director objects, walks onto the rehearsal stage and observes the gaffe. Much is wrong. “It makes more sense this way. It does,” says Macallam. What he skips, ever so blithely, is the onset of the Erinyes as acted in those omitted lines from Choerphori. A critical viewer may note that Macallam’s psychotic energy is allowing him to skip gently from the moment of matricide to the heroism of vindicated patriarchy, oresteian quid pro quo venegeance (Clytemnestra for Agamemnon) without those nasty retaliations. Clearly, the director fails to understand what is going on in his actor’s head. He just knows the play’s set narrative is being changed. Then, to compound a non sequitur onto the psychotic chaos, the actor indulges himself in a random anecdote about once shooting and missing a half-court basketball shot that failed.  The director, perplexed, shrugs it all off, and in a moment they are back at the rehearsal of the same scene, the rehearsed chorus chanting about bitches and swordsmiths of destiny and all that.

The director recalls in a police interview having once heard Macallam say, a month or more before the matricide, “A bird was the largest animal I ever killed before I killed my mother.” The vignette enters the cinematic narrative as one of the film’s flashbacks to the Aeschylaean context. In another, the director is workshopping the dramatic text with his cast and crew. 

Lee: [In workshop lecture.] Let me warn you straight out. These ancient Greeks were not just a bunch of philosophers and aesthetes pussy-footing around. They were into the real thing. So as I was saying before, we are dealing here with a trilogy. You know that the king comes home from Troy only to be killed by his wife. Then the son returns home to avenge him, to take his mother’s life. But there’s a history to this curse. The killing goes on for generations. Orestes is just the last link in a bloody chain. It all starts with Tantalus, the one who spends his eternity in Hell chained to a rock by the gods, starving for grapes just beyond his reach. He is the source of our word “tantalize.” He is at the root of our own curse, lusting for something we want but cannot have. He challenged the gods, this Tantalus. He challenged the gods, to see if they were real. So, he invited them for dinner. And just as a test, he served up his son in a stew. The gods puked up his flesh so he could still father more cannibals and killers. Like his own son Atreus who cooked the sons of his brother and then invited him for a feast. I’m saying: to understand Orestes and the curse you must feel the whole weight of this god-forsaken Tantalus house, a dynasty of ruthless kings and diabolical queens who eat each others flesh and ***** [seduce] each others’ wives century after century, generation after generation and only Orestes can lift that curse, but he has to murder his mother to do it. [Eye contact with Brad.] So, he is damned if he does; he is damned if he doesn’t. And doubly damned if he wavers."

Brad: “That’s it! Razzle Dazzle. Razzle them. Dazzle them."

Lee: “I’m the director, Brad. You do what I tell you.” // Brad: “Lee, some people act a role. Others play a part. [Brad grabs the sword. Lee swallows hard.] [Cut back to film's main time.] “You know one thing I could never get out of my mind. He clutched his sword and he said to me: ‘A bird was the largest animal I ever killed until I killed my mother. ‘”

Real-life matricide, Mark Yavorsky’s 1979 slaying of his own mother during the production of the Oresteia  (reported in the San Diego and national press), captured the creative attention of Boston University classics professor Herbert Golder. A press clipping from 12 June 1979 reported “The Elements of a Greek Tragedy? Brilliant UCSD Student Held in Slaying of Mother. Apparently the production was called “Orestes, Orestes”. Yavorsky played the role of the murderous son. At some point, Yavorsky walked out of the world of the play and killed his mother. The bitter irony of this tragic confluence, myth and reality merging, was not lost on a forensic psychologist who pointed Golder at the source narrative that was Yavorsky’s tragedy. Golder later worked with innovative cinematic director Werner Herzog to create a cinematic work with artistic tendencies of its own. In the creation of the screenplay, both Golder and Herzog concern, they were “not interested in making a documentary,” but striving to create a narrative based on fact, and poetically reinvented and stylized, true to both “the poetic core and the original context”.  (This information is shared in “Behind the Madness” interviews with Werner Herzog and  Herbert Golder on the DVD.)

Golder avers in his paracinematic interview that the impulse for MSMSWHYD is akin to Jules Dassin’s A Dream of Passion, a narrative of an actress playing Medea (Ellen Burstyn) coming to know a woman (Melina Mercouri) who murdered her own children.  “I was a student of the classics at the time I saw [A Dream of Passion]. It was the most powerful representation. I always had it in the back of my head,” before and during the creation of

            The formula for fascinating cinematic mythological reception is perfectly poised for brilliance in MSMSWHYD. A mythological narrative, real-life events, a quirky film — all elements deliver that brilliance to an arguable degree. Does it meet muster for consideration as an overt usage of classical mythology and (of real importance) further study? Absolutely.



OGCMA0771NOTOrestes_HerzogGolder
—RTM

APPENDIX:

Transcriptions from the film. Presumably the uncredited translations of Aeschylus are provided by Prof. Golder.

 rehearsal text of Aesch. Choe. 585 – 651 greatly truncated

Chorus of Libation Bearers:

Earth breeds many things,
begetting pain, terror and
horrors of suffering and
the depths of the sea teem
with murderous monsters.
And flaming comets stab down
through the sky and blast
creatures that fly. And creatures
that crawl. And things more
horrid still like the cradles of storms,
cradle of stoms, cradle of storms.
But who can describe the audacity
of man or the daring and passion
of women that stop
at nothing and lead to mortal ruin?
The cruel bitch of female passion
can break apart the yoke that
joins a pair and force apart
the dark embrace of beasts
and man alike. (585 – 600)
This sword cuts deep.
Straight through the lungs.
And justice is flouted and
stomped in the ground.
And the sword smith of destiny
hammers the weapon.
A child is brought to this house
to avenge to lift the seeping stain of
ancient blood. Brought by her, we
shudder to name the dark, brooding fury. (639 – 651)

πολλὰ μὲν γᾶ τρέφει
δεινὰ καὶ δειμάτων ἄχη,
πόντιαί τ᾽ ἀγκάλαι κνωδάλων
ἀνταίων βρύουσι:
πλάθουσι βλαστοῦσι καὶ πεδαίχμιοι
λαμπάδες πεδάοροι,
πτανά τε καὶ πεδοβά-
μονα κἀνεμοέντ᾽ ἂν
αἰγίδων φράσαι κότον.

ἀλλ᾽ ὑπέρτολμον ἀν-
δρὸς φρόνημα τίς λέγοι
καὶ γυναικῶν φρεσὶν τλαμόνων καὶ
παντόλμους ἔρωτας
ἄταισι συννόμους βροτῶν;
ξυζύγους δ᾽ ὁμαυλίας
θηλυκρατὴς ἀπέρω-
τος ἔρως παρανικᾷ
κνωδάλων τε καὶ βροτῶν.

... [omit strophe B thru antistrophe C]

τὸ δ᾽ ἄγχι πλευμόνων ξίφος
διανταίαν ὀξυπευκὲς οὐτᾷ
διαὶ Δίκας. τὸ μὴ θέμις γὰρ οὖν
λὰξ πέδοι πατούμενον, τὸ πᾶν Διὸς
σέβας παρεκβάντος οὐ θεμιστῶς.

Δίκας δ᾽ ἐρείδεται πυθμήν:
προχαλκεύει δ᾽ Αἶσα φασγανουργός:
τέκνον δ᾽ ἐπεισφέρει δόμοισιν
αἱμάτων παλαιτέρων τίνειν μύσος
χρόνῳ κλυτὰ βυσσόφρων Ἐρινύς.[1]

A Canadian production performance of Eumenides 245 ff. and then 588 ff. — when he’s in the audience with his uncomfortable mother. Udo comes and asks him to be quiet.

Leader and Furies: Like the hound on the trail of a wounded deer, we will track him down by the drip of blood.

I snort. Lungs bursting from long man-slaughtering toil ranging over every corner of this earth.

In pursuit without wings I have flown over oceans,

and now that this man is here,

somewhere, cowering.

The scent of human blood grins wide for me.

Look. Look. Look. Look. Look. Look. Everywhere.

Cast your eyes in every direction. Don’t let this mother-killer get away unscathed. (245 – 57)

Macallam joins in from audience, reciting with in unison with the actor onstage the following dialogue. His mother is clearly disturbed.

Orestes/Macallam: I now stand here. Made glad. Made mad with the blood, exulting, wailing, I slew her. (Eum. 594, sort of; it’s actually a telescopic reduction of lines 588 to 600)

I deny no word, heroes. Hear me, woven web that slew my father. This robe. She dyed it in the blood that ran around her lover’s sword.

Furies: Yes, you must tell the manner of your deed.

Orestes/Macallam: Drawn sword in hand, I lopped her head.

Furies: Who, and by craft of who, did urge you on? (607)

Orestes/Macallam: Fate and Necessity made me do it!

Lee intervenes, placing his hand on Macallam’s shoulder. His mother tries to grin in the withering embarrassment.

Lee: Brad don’t participate. You’re disturbing the play. Just be quiet.

Leader [on stage]: … and long dead draw from their killer’s blood to answer blood. 

εἶεν: τόδ᾽ ἐστὶ τἀνδρὸς ἐκφανὲς τέκμαρ.
ἕπου δὲ μηνυτῆρος ἀφθέγκτου φραδαῖς.
τετραυματισμένον γὰρ ὡς κύων νεβρὸν
πρὸς αἷμα καὶ σταλαγμὸν ἐκματεύομεν.
πολλοῖς δὲ μόχθοις ἀνδροκμῆσι φυσιᾷ
σπλάγχνον: χθονὸς γὰρ πᾶς πεποίμανται τόπος,
ὑπέρ τε πόντον ἀπτέροις ποτήμασιν
ἦλθον διώκουσ᾽, οὐδὲν ὑστέρα νεώς.
καὶ νῦν ὅδ᾽ ἐνθάδ᾽ ἐστί που καταπτακών.
ὀσμὴ βροτείων αἱμάτων με προσγελᾷ.

ὅρα ὅρα μάλ᾽ αὖ,
λεύσσετε πάντα, μὴ
λάθῃ φύγδα βὰς
ὁ ματροφόνος ἀτίτας.
ὁ δ᾽ αὖτέ γ᾽ οὖν ἀλκὰν ἔχων
περὶ βρέτει πλεχθεὶς θεᾶς ἀμβρότου
ὑπόδικος θέλει γενέσθαι χρεῶν.
τὸ δ᾽ οὐ πάρεστιν: αἷμα μητρῷον χαμαὶ
δυσαγκόμιστον, παπαῖ,
τὸ διερὸν πέδοι χύμενον οἴχεται.
ἀλλ᾽ ἀντιδοῦναι δεῖ σ᾽ ἀπὸ ζῶντος ῥοφεῖν
ἐρυθρὸν ἐκ μελέων πέλανον: ἀπὸ δὲ σοῦ
φεροίμαν βοσκὰν πώματος δυσπότου:
καὶ ζῶντά σ᾽ ἰσχνάνασ᾽ ἀπάξομαι κάτω,
ἀντίποιν᾽ ὡς τίνῃς ματροφόνου δύας.
ὄψει δὲ κεἴ τις ἄλλος ἤλιτεν βροτῶν
ἢ θεὸν ἢ ξένον
τιν᾽ ἀσεβῶν† ἢ τοκέας φίλους,
ἔχονθ᾽ ἕκαστον τῆς δίκης ἐπάξια.
μέγας γὰρ Ἅιδης ἐστὶν εὔθυνος βροτῶν
ἔνερθε χθονός,
δελτογράφῳ δὲ πάντ᾽ ἐπωπᾷ φρενί.[2]

cast:

Brad Macallam — Michael Shannon

Detective Havenhurst — Willem DaFoe

Ingrid Gudmundson — Chloe Sevigny

Lee Meyers [the director with the German accent] — Udo Kier

Mrs. Macallam — Grace Zabriskie

---

[1] The Greek text is the edition of H.W. Smyth, downloaded from Perseus: http://data.perseus.org/citations/urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0085.tlg006.perseus-grc1:646-652 [accessed 24 Oct 2014].

[2]  Again, here the text is taken from H.W. Smyth, ed., Eumenides as included on Perseus: http://data.perseus.org/citations/urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0085.tlg007.perseus-grc1:254-275