Synopsis
Regarding Electra
Published by Dramatists Play Service
7 Male 8 Female
As they move on, a young man stays behind to speak to the young girl who has been silently watching the group and, magically, almost imperceptibly, the centuries begin to fall away
She is Electra, and he is Orestes, the children of the slain Agamemnon. They are joined shortly by their mother, Clytemnestra, and her paramour, Aegisthus, and the great tale of crime and retribution begins to unfold
Electra thinks only of revenge against her mother, who killed Agamemnon her father and married her lover, and she has been waiting anxiously for Orestes to return and carry out the dreaded punishment
At first Orestes pleads that he wants nothing to do with his family and its troubles but, gradually, inexorably, the force of events draws him on to the fatal deed-the slaying of his mother and her conspirator
But then, in the shocked silence which follows, the past vanishes as suddenly as it had appeared, leaving us once again to contemplate the quiet, dusty ruins, and the haunting, terrible secrets which they hold
An absorbing and imaginative retelling of the Greek classic, in which antiquity and the present day are juxtaposed to unique dramatic effect. First produced Off-Broadway by the HB Playwrights Foundation