"Mourning Becomes Electra"

I just this moment finished reading Eugene O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra. In my history of drama and theatre course, as we were reading Aeschylus's The Oresteia, my professor mentioned this play as a reinterpretation of Aeschylus worth noting. In the play, O'Neill updates Aeschylus, setting the events in post-Civil War New England.

Now that I've read it, I'm not sure what to think. It's a brilliant exercise in updating an ancient play for modern times, but I'm fast realizing O'Neill's flaws as a dramatic writer. The conceit of the play, the resemblance amongst characters within the Mannon family, relies on heavy amounts of stage direction. This would be totally intolerable to literary departments accepting scripts nowadays and has the averse affect of spelling out too much for a reader.

The speechifying is overwrought; the dialogue is too often either too pedestrian or too erudite. That said, the character of Christine Mannon (the Clytaemnestra character) is fascinating.

All in all, an interesting, flawed read. Apparently it's being revived off-Broadway this season. It'll be interesting to see if they can wade through the muck of O'Neill's melodrama and make this a compelling production.

And another play from the same book (Three Plays) is being revived on Broadway this season with Carla Gugino, Pablo Schreiber, and Brian Dennehy: Desire Under the Elms (awful title, no?)