However there’s a sort of abstraction to the performances by the members of La MaMa’s Nice Jones Repertory Firm, in distinction to the immediacy of the Balkan actors’ work. George Drance’s Agamemnon exudes a hail-fellow-well-met power, with none of the smoothed-over barbarity you may count on. Even with Cassandra, his human warfare prize, he lacks menace.
Admittedly, the charismatic, absolutely realized performances by Cvetkovic and Mihailovic put the scales of the manufacturing out of whack. Kushtrim Hoxha, an Albanian actor, can also be surprisingly compelling as Pylades, Orestes’s choreographer buddy from Berlin — a consultant of the non-Balkan Western world and its condescension towards the area.
Whereas Clytemnestra (Onni Johnson) and Orestes (Eugene the Poogene) each find yourself with blood on their palms right here, Mihailovic is the one who brings a way of simmering violence and bodily hazard into the room. When he makes a livid, stomping exit up the risers on one finish of the stage, the specter of savagery reverberates in his each footfall. When Pylades asks him about his experiences within the warfare, his solutions are unnerving, however the sluggish smile on his face is much more so.
It’s left to Aegisthus, the poet, to rail in opposition to the warfare and what it has wrought. “Oh my individuals,” he writes. “Beware the warlords, my individuals.”
Not that he’s harmless, after all. Earlier than Clytemnestra does away with Agamemnon, her lover has his personal thirst for blood.
“I prefer to think about his physique minimize into items, his eyes staring out like a lifeless fish,” Aegisthus says, with an even-tempered hatred that makes him completely terrifying. “However all that issues is that he’ll be over with. He’ll be performed, and we’ll reside fortunately ever after.”
That’s the everlasting fantasy, isn’t it — that only one extra act of violence will even the rating, and retribution will stop. Spoiler/not spoiler: Aegisthus finally ends up murdered, too.
“They’ve despatched me to hell by mistake,” his ghost says. “I’ve filed a criticism.”
Balkan Bordello
By means of April 10 at La MaMa’s Ellen Stewart Theater, Manhattan; lamama.org. Operating time: 1 hour 40 minutes.
