OFF BROADWAY

Man Is His Fate

In Greek tragedies, proud men and women roll their lives like dice against the gods and lose. Man proposes but fate disposes. Euripides, the most skeptical and psychologically minded of the classic tragedians, recognized that man is sometimes his own worst fate. Iphigenia in Aulis, presented last week at Manhattan's Circle in the Square in a translation by Minos Volanakis, shows men and women undoing themselves through ambition, power, lust, fear, guile and egocentric arrogance. At its heart, however, the play is a Grecian urn of tears, an incomparably moving lament for all who die young in war. Directed with musical cadence and poetic tension by Michael Cacoyannis, the drama drags human folly and grief screaming into the light.

The Greek fleet is becalmed at Aulis, restive and stalled in its military mission to bring the beauteous and adulterous Helen back from Troy. An oracle has told King Agamemnon that if he sacrifices the life of his daughter Iphigenia the wind will rise and Greek arms will ravage Troy. Agamemnon, played with a mixture of bluff aplomb and sad perplexity by Mitchell Ryan, is a politician's politician who rules more by public opinion than private conscience. He fears the mob and decides to do the oracle's bidding.

Moral Ambiguity. Agamemnon sends a letter to his wife Clytemnestra (Irene Papas) telling her to bring Iphigenia to Aulis under the ruse that the girl is to become the bride of Achilles. Abruptly seized by fatherly love, Agamemnon dispatches a second letter bidding Clytemnestra to stay at home. But this message is intercepted by Helen's husband Menelaus, who rails at Agamemnon for daring to dream of putting his daughter's life before Greek victory. This raises a question of moral ambiguity that runs through the play: Is this a war for a strumpet, or is it against a nest of barbarians who threaten the life of Greece? Euripides refuses to fob off the playgoer with an easy answer, for the question is fraught with pain and death.

Once the two women appear on the scene, they dominate the play perceptibly and strike plangent chords of passion and pity. Clytemnestra is the first to learn of her raddled husband's purpose. She spews at him the clotted venom of years of pent-up hate in a bad marriage; yet what chokes her spirit is anguish for her child.

As in her best film performances (Electra, Zorba the Greek), Irene Papas, playing Clytemnestra, is an actress of chained intensity. She bears herself with the regal poise of a statue by Praxiteles. Though her brows are as dark as doom, her profile is chiseled in luminous Pentelic marble. What she brings to Iphigenia is something that seldom exists on any stage: the adrenal flow of a mother's love and grief. When Clytemnestra learns that Iphigenia cannot be saved, she utters a howl of desolation that seems to be torn from her womb, as if a cycle of pain that had begun with the child's birth were ending. She is all mothers in the unbearable hour of loss.

Buried Heart. A near match to Papas in emotionally expressive force is the Iphigenia of Jenny Leigh, a young actress who knows where the heart lies buried. Caught like a bird in a cage of fear, she vanquishes terror in serene nobility. The chorus, which is sometimes a static, sanctimonious bore in Greek tragedy, is a fluid delight in Iphigenia. Circling in a daisy chain, opening like a petal, closing like a fist, it dances more than it speaks and speaks without oppressive foreboding. Forebodings and omens would be redundant in Iphigenia; disaster is openly sown and reaped like a poisoned crop. Opening night offered a rarity in New York theatergoing, the sight of many playgoers weeping--involuntary proof that Euripides kept faith with human truths, which, after 2,400 years, are as gapingly fresh as open wounds.

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