Breaking the Cycle Warps Laws of Morality

I'm not much of a theater-goer. I'm going to lay prostrate for a minute; the last performance I happened upon was a quaint little adaptation of Eric Carle's The Very Hungry Caterpillar. And while the performance was indeed delightful, I was the only person in the audience who hadn't watched Nick Jr. that morning. So you might say I approached Breaking the Cycle with more than an ounce of ignorance, or stupidity, whichever you prefer. That being said, I happen to be a large fan of psychedelic drugs and David Lynch (they're pretty much the same). Kevin Black's '09 adaptation of three tastefully necrotic Greek tragedies was a powerful trip. Lord am I glad I dropped in.

The final scenes of orgy and bloodshed were taken from Iphigenia at Aulis, Agamemnon, and Electra and performed in that order. If you don't know much about Greek tragedy (I don't, so this is more for me than it is for you), generally someone lusts after someone they shouldn't, then someone sleeps with someone they shouldn't, then someone kills someone they think they should kill when they actually probably shouldn't. This cycle of lust, sex, and death is an integral issue, and here it is contained within the house of Aerastes. Now, we all read The Odyssey or The Iliad so hopefully everyone has an inkling as to what this dude's deal is. To war or not to war? That is the question he has to deal with. Eventually he gives into his lusty desire to spill some blood and sacrifices his fauning daughter Iphigenia to Artemis. The good news is Greece kicks Troy's behind. The bad news is his wife Clytemnestra is really pissed that her little girl is dead. So she and her newly besotted lover Aegisthus rub out Agamemnon. And then Agamemnon's son Orestes returns to the house to whack those two. It is a rollicking rumble of death and destruction. But mankind weathers on.

The real triumph of the performance was Black's desire to embrace these scenes as abstractions. Having been cut from the body of their plays and stuck together cemented the validity of his direction. They were weird. The dress might have been bummed from the set of Blade Runner, as every character was fit with something that didn't quite have a place in time, but wasn't bizarre enough to be unrecognizable. The Greek chorus was clad in olive jumpsuits, giving a strong feeling of faceless conformity (emphasized of course by their creepy doll masks). This aesthetic was played over the jarring sounds of avant-garde music, which generally gives me nightmares, and worked well here. The very action of the play itself delved into pure abstraction. The initial sacrifice of Iphigenia, the pure offspring of the struggling Agamemnon, was portrayed by a dance that bordered between a tribal ritual and the pure desire for physical movement. In fact, every circular action of sex and violence was presented in this way. And each time the chaos the Greeks were struggling to keep themselves from collapsing into was touched upon. The performance itself sat on boiling pot of the black unknown.

Each character struggled with their destiny but were their executions just? By the final act the unceasing futility of process slowly began to rear itself, but could it be broken? Should it be broken in a world where evil is so impishly disguised as justice? Black responds. The program reads, "When justice isn't fulfilled, people begin to lose control. We hold the power. It is not fate, the gods, or others, who control the cycle." The very gluing of these acts together seeks to expose them in all their futility, to break us from the cycle.

Of course this message might not have been conveyed had it not been for the actors' performances. The Furies, played by Conor Leary '11, Kelly Koeth '10, and Jackie Tirocchi '10 were all inhumanly menacing, and convincing as abstract forces. Each member of the Greek chorus performed as convincingly and notably a part of a pack mentality. However, Sarah Bedard '09, Stephan Mirando '09, and Lauren Annicelli '09 were surprising, unsettlingly brutal, and honest.

Theater enthusiast or not Breaking the Cycle, speaks on a level beyond sing-song musicals or soapish dramas. It has something to say. I'm glad Black felt the need to say it.