Though the entirety of the play is set just outside the palace of a royal family, Forest Theatre Company’s “Elektra” journeys through an entire range of emotion.
I went to see “Elektra” while it’s being performed at Madison Street Theater through this weekend. The Greek tragedy takes place in-the-round, with a stage surrounded by no more than 50 seats.
Elizabeth Hope Nahulak, who plays Elektra, said she was most excited about the intimacy of the small theater for this performance.
“The audience is right there. It’s live. You feel the energy from whoever is in the space at that time,” Nahulak previously told the Review. “Whenever the audience feels involved like that, I think it immediately raises the stakes for everybody, which I think makes a way more powerful performance . . . And I love being able to see the audience’s faces and tell whether or not I had them. In the moment, I’m like, ‘Am I convincing you?’”
I certainly felt more involved in the emotions of “Elektra” than I would have in a large theatre. My mom and I sat front-row, and there were times I felt like my feet might be in the way of Nahulak while she sprawled on the floor, weeping in grief.
Elektra is consumed by rage and grief after her mother kills Agamemnon, Elektra’s father and the king, because he sacrificed his other daughter to appease the gods at the start of the war. She also laments for her brother, yearning for his return home to avenge their father.
I was deeply impressed by Nahulak’s performance, and my mom was right when she said that she must be exhausted after every show.
Nahulak told the Review that the range of emotions she shows in “Elektra” was the most difficult part of the performance, and now I understand why.
“It’s very difficult to be truthful emotionally on stage because it is so vulnerable and this play deals with so many heavy themes,” Nahulak said. “There are times when I’m just weeping onstage, so that can take an emotional toll. I just really want to be as honest and as truthful to Elektra as I possibly can, so that way I can be kind of like a vessel. The audience can take what they will from it. They can hopefully see things reflected in themselves. It’s about them, it’s not about me.”
A needed relief from the visceral grief onstage, there are breaks of hope, reassurance and even brief laughter among the actors.
The chorus of two women who care for Elektra provide moments of honest, sometimes comedic, feedback to Elektra during her emotional turmoil. But they mostly chant in Greek. And Elektra’s living sister, a sympathizer with their mother, had a few lines that made me think of sassy conversations with my own sister when we disagree.
Such language can be credited to Ezra Pound, who translated the version of Sophocles’ “Elektra” that Forest Theatre Company performed. This iteration is rarely produced, perhaps because of Pound’s fascist sympathies which led to his arrest for treason. But the translation has a nice balance between Shakespearean-sounding sentences and modern, humorous jabs that bring classic themes into the present.
Richard Corley, producing artistic director of Forest Theatre Company, previously told the Review that he hopes audiences walk away from the play 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 added that he hopes viewers consider these questions long after they leave the play. I’m still thinking on them days later, and I don’t think I would ever kill someone, no matter how hard I was suffering. But morals aside, it was somehow moving to see a character’s grief cause them to do so.
