What is This Gallery?
After my one act play Libations was featured in the CU Boulder New Play Festival as a staged reading I developed a second act, something between an art gallery and a piece of immersive theatre, wherein some characters would remain on stage during the gallery and interact with the art pieces and audience members. A modified version of this gallery was featured in the fall 2023 CU Sandbox season.
What is it About?
It’s about one generation of The House of Atreus, potentially the most cursed family in all of Greek literature. It’s about grief and betrayal and sorrow. It’s a character study. It’s anti-Agamemnon propaganda. It’s about fate and control and if narratives can change. It’s metatheatre. It’s about constructing worlds. It’s about apologizing to your painting because you have red paint all over you after covering it with “blood” and you’re caught up in the concerning poetry of looking like you’re the one who killed Iphigenia. It’s about puppets.
What is it Based On?
These art pieces can stand without knowledge of Greek theatre, but titles and descriptions will reference characters and moments from certain Greek tragedies. I may refer to Aeschylus’ The Oresteia. If you want a very, very, very fast synopsis, I’ll sum up the plot line by the order of deaths. No wind to sail to fight a war>Agamemnon kills his daughter as a sacrifice to make up for the deer thing>Clytemnestra kills Agamemnon to avenge her daughter, also Cassandra the prophet>Orestes kills Clytemnestra.
If I reference The Oresteia, what I am really referencing is The story of Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, and their children. This story is covered in a lot of different Greek (and roman) literature. Aeschylus’ The Oresteia (a series of three plays including Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and The Eumenides), as well as Sophocles’ Elektra, Euripides’ Orestes, and Seneca the Younger’s Agamemnon concern themselves with the murder of Agamemnon and the events that came after that. Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis and Iphigenia in Tauris concern themselves with Iphigenia, the daughter who was sacrificed before the events of The Oresteia. The title of my play, and this gallery, comes from The Libation Bearers, though I actually worked mostly from Elektra. "Short Play Very Vaguely Based on Some Scenes from Elektra" is a very clumsy title though, so I went with Libations.