Whatever you may think of Daniel Fish’s bizarre staging of Sophocles’ Elektra, Brie Larson shows herself to be not just a movie star but the real deal on stage as well. In a buzzcut, Bikini Kill T-shirt and a microphone, Larson spends most of this production addressing us from downstage left, a mesmerizing standup tragedienne.
It’s a mannered but powerful performance of Anne Carson’s text, itself a mannered but powerful translation from the original Greek. The choice of “Elektra” rather than “Electra” is a conscious rejection of centuries of tradition. And I found the strangeness of this production a welcome reminder that the ancient Greeks are deeply foreign to our modern understanding.
The odd staging includes a blimp suspended above the stage, a curtain covering the back wall that rises and falls at random moments, a revolve with a stage light, a paint gun, other things I couldn’t quite identify. Much of this is incomprehensible. The paint gun gradually stains everyone’s costume with an inky black paint, suggestive of the dark desire for vengeance that drives the plot.
But the blimp? It does nothing, and by the end of the play we are none the wiser. It’s not that Chekhov is necessarily right that one should never introduce an accessory early in the play unless it becomes relevant to the action. But in this case, it feels as though Fish is simply trolling us. Judging from an interview with Stockard Channing (Clytemnestra, terrific), the cast had no more idea than the audience what it was doing there.
More effective is the extraordinary use of a fog machine when the disguised Orestes arrives, pretending to hand over to Elektra the ashes of her dead brother. Up to this point, Elektra’s grief has manifested largely as rage. But as she meets what seems to be incontrovertible proof of her brother’s death, fog fills the stage and spills out into the audience. I never quite lost sight of my friends next to me, but I could see nothing on stage. This was effective: a grief that simply obliterates everything (including the damn blimp).
And so this production goes, a farrago of good ideas and incomprehensible ones. When Elektra and the chorus of women pound their chests whenever she pronounces the name of her brother Orestes and spit every time she names her mother’s lover Aegisthus, the production skates dangerously close to a Monty Python skit. That it never quite crosses that line is a tribute to Larson’s commitment to the role and to the beauty of the choral singing.
Fascinating as I found the production, I was equally disappointed by its incoherence, particularly because Fish has shown his ability to put together a fully coherent and revelatory reimagining of another classic. His dark version of Oklahoma unveiled new depths of meaning in the traditional musical. And what was so astonishing about that production was how Fish’s radical vision felt completely new, yet utterly true to the text.
Was Fish’s Oklahoma simply a one-off? Two years ago, I saw Fish’s reimagined concert version of Frank Loesser’s A Most Happy Fella, a production that, in its weirdness, felt closer to this Electra than to his Oklahoma.
I do hope Fish gets his groove back. He has shown himself adept at deconstructing traditional works. If we’re lucky, he will show us once again how to put them back together.
After a too-cursory read, I wondered if the blimp is a MacGuffin. Alfred Hitchcock described a MacGuffin as a plot device which initially propels the story. In “The Lady Vanishes” (1938) it’s a secret European treaty provision coded in a melody that a matronly spy has memorized. In “The Man Who Knew Too Much” (1934) the MacGuffin is detail of a planned assassination plot whispered in the ear of an innocent tourist. Hitchcock further elaborated that it is something that the principal characters care about, but the audience does not.
On closer read, I see that the blimp, being inert and unremarked-upon in the play, is no MacGuffin.
My take: perhaps the blimp is an eyrie for the gods, a perch from which to observe the human follies below. Olympus?
Frank Loesser: Whenever my mother heard a rendition of “Standing on the Corner Watching All the Girls Go By” she’d relate some family lore about her father; that as a young man he and his buddies would stand on a windy street corner in Waterbury, hoping that the breeze would lift ladies’ skirts. A glimpse of ankle or a bit of leg, and they were most happy fellas.
You’re right, it can’t be a MacGuffin since it doesn’t generate anything in the plot. Some kind of stand-in for the gods is a plausible explanation. But still! It demands a little more context to make sense of it, I think. (Nice story about your father. It’s a great song.)