Forest Theatre Company is launching its first year-round season at Madison Street Theater in Oak Park with the play “Elektra.”
“Elektra” will run from Nov. 13 through Nov. 30 and is Ezra Pound’s modern adaptation of the classic Greek tragedy by Sophocles. Set in the late 1940s, Forest Theatre Company’s production follows Elektra, who sets out to avenge her father’s murder while awaiting the return of her brother, Orestes.
“It’s a play about retribution, revenge and the justification for violence,” said Richard Corley, producing artistic director of Forest Theatre Company. He added that, like in the play, today’s political climate nationally and abroad encourages retribution as the solution to cycles of destruction and violence. “People commit terrible acts with what they believe is great justification.”
Elizabeth Hope Nahulak, an Oak Park resident who plays Elektra, wanted to be a part of the production to adapt a Greek classic to a modern audience.
“She has so much grief and anger and confusion going on inside her,” Nahulak said of her character, adding that truthfully performing such a wide range of emotions was one of the hardest parts of the play. “I’m always looking for projects to grow and deepen my own vulnerability. I think that’s important for audiences, especially today, to be reminded why we’re human.”
Pound’s translation of “Elektra” is rarely produced, according to Corley, one of the reasons he’s wanted to put on the play for a long time.
Though he spent much of his life in Europe, Pound, an American poet, translated the play while he was in a stateside mental hospital after being arrested for treason in his support for Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini.
“It seems very personal that a man who had been on the wrong side of history and was an artist was, in some sense, trying to justify himself, but at the same time, finding it impossible, delving into a kind of a kind of moral quandary that proved impossible to solve,” Corley said.
In his translation of “Elektra,” Pound uses a lot of mid-century American slang, along with a fair amount of ancient Greek.
Elizabeth Hope Nahulak, an Oak Park resident who’s portraying Elektra, said that, in rehearsal, production participants often talked about how important rhetoric was in ancient Greece, but that Pound’s adaptation is much more poetic.
“Modern audiences really love the emotional stuff, but to the ancient Greeks, what was really important was the argument and the rhetoric. What are you saying? Why are you acting the way that you are?” Nahulak said. So, she needs to balance leaning into the rhythm and stanzas of Pound’s translated lines while paying attention to what the specific argument her character is making.
And because Pound wrote his adaptation of “Elektra” in 1949, Corley and the play’s designers decided to set their version in the years following World War II.
Cindy Moon is the costume designer for “Elektra” and helped create an on-stage post-war setting. To create looks representative of the time period, Moon researched historical photos and fashion magazines.
In the original “Elektra,” the titular character is treated as a slave and kept in a cage, Moon said. With the play set in 1949, Moon dressed Elektra as an asylum patient — not unlike Pound when he wrote his version.
The chorus of women who take care of Elektra are dressed like nurses inspired by hospital nurses and Trümmerfrauen — women who helped clean and rebuild bombed cities after WWII, Corley said. Elektra’s well-off family wears period-accurate dresses and suits.
One of costume designer Cindy Moon’s image boards for “Elektra,” this one used to inspire the titular character’s outfits | Provided 
Cindy Moon’s image board for chorus costumes in “Elektra” | Provided 
Cindy Moon’s inspiration for military uniforms, what she said was one of the most challenging parts of the costumes | Provided
“We’re post-war, so the rationing of fabric and supplies has kind of ended, but people are still coming out of being in these war-stricken areas. There’s a huge disparity between the rich and the average person, the people affected by the war versus not because of their wealth or socioeconomic status,” Moon said.
Moon added that the most difficult part of Elektra’s costume design was creating accurate military uniforms for the 1940s. But the part she looked forward to most was having an assistant who’s a seamstress and helped her make costumes from scratch — a rarity for smaller groups like Forest Theatre Company, according to Moon.
Despite not having as much funding as bigger productions, Corley described the play as both epic and intimate — Epic because of the ideas and language, and intimate because it will be in a 40-seat theater and in-the-round, where the audience sits on all sides of the stage.
“Whatever conflict is going on onstage, it makes the audience a part of it,” Nahulak said. “Whenever the audience feels involved like that, it immediately raises the stakes for everybody, which I think makes a way more powerful performance.”
Cast of characters
While Nahulak plays the titular Elektra, Avery-Slade Fountain plays her brother Orestes. Both are associate artists at Forest Theatre Company — which means the company prioritizes these artists and asks that they prioritize the company, Corley said — and have previously done three Forest Theatre Company performances together.
Starting the associate artist team within the last year, Nahulak and Fountain “get to work more frequently together on these projects and have more artistic input,” Nahulak said. “It helps me feel comfortable and safe in the environment in which I’m working, so that furthers the process of vulnerability and empathy.”
Though Nahulak and Fountain are consistent actors with Forest Theatre Company, along with three other associate artists, other actors and the show’s design team are mostly new to the group. Corley said many are from Oak Park, Berwyn, River Forest and Chicago.
These are the areas Corley is trying to target to get funding for, and audiences to, his shows.
“Our ultimate goal is to be a year-round professional theater for the near western suburbs. We’re building something here, hopefully that can be a destination theater for Oak Park, River Forest, Forest Park, Berwyn, Maywood, all these surrounding communities.”
Moon said she largely wanted to be a part of “Elektra” because of how close it was to her Oak Park home when, as a freelance costume designer, she often has to travel to Chicago for work.
“I just want to do something here in this community with folks generally from this area,” Moon said. “You can drive 20 minutes and get to Drury Lane, or you could drive into the city, but there’s this weird gap in these near west suburbs, so it’s nice that there’s someone who’s really committed to bringing that level of professional theater to this area.”
Corley hopes the play’s audience, wherever they’re from, comes away from seeing the show feeling more connected to humanity through a story that resonates across time.
“People have always grappled with questions of ‘How do I deal with traumatic pain and suffering in my life? What do I do with it? When I have suffered injustice, what choices do I make in my life because of that?’” Corley said. He wants viewers to consider those questions long after they leave the play. “Plays are not good if they get tied up in a bow. They are good if you feel at the end of it that there’s been a little bit of a nuclear fission that then begins to resonate in you.”
“The ending is very unresolved. I really like pieces that challenge the audience,” Moon agreed. “There is a real emotional battle that will happen in the audience of ‘Do we support this? Do we not support this? Who do we like? Who do we not like?’”
Nahulak said she wants the audience’s takeaway to be that there’s always hope.
Elektra “is a character who, a lot of times, has completely given up on hope, or doesn’t see how it would be possible to have hope. I think you can really see through her story what can happen if you abandon that,” Nahulak said. “There’s so much to be completely grief stricken about, so much to be angry about, and rightfully so. But I think that if we let that completely consume us, it never ends well.”
“Elektra” is showing at Madison Street Theater, 1010 Madison St. in Oak Park, from Nov. 13 through Nov. 30. Buy tickets and learn more at https://www.forest-theatre.org/.
