Classical Spellbinder

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

TITLE: LES ATRIDES

AUTHORS: EURIPIDES AND AESCHYLUS

WHERE: PARK SLOPE ARMORY, BROOKLYN

THE BOTTOM LINE: Ariane Mnouchkine of France, one of the foremost stage auteurs, illumines Athenian tragedy.

In Anglo-American theater, the most important creative artist is normally the playwright or an actor. On Continental stages, from Munich to Moscow, it is almost always the director, who becomes as much of an auteur as in film. Even classic texts serve as mere points of departure.

Of the Western world's foremost auteurs, none is more distinctive and idiosyncratic -- or less culturally bonded to the West -- than Ariane Mnouchkine of France. Her troupe's arrival in the U.S. this week may be, paradoxically, the most prestigious theatrical event of the year and the least influential. It is sure to inspire admirers but probably cannot inspire imitators. Mnouchkine's work is spellbinding, in part for its eerie beauty, unrestrained energy and power, but also because its Asian-influenced anti- realism is so remote from anything American -- or, for that matter, French.

Mnouchkine calls herself populist but is scholarly enough to borrow from a dozen classical cultures, ranging from British to Balinese. She heatedly denies being avant-garde but despises realism as "the end of theater" and shrugs off as "limiting and uninteresting" questions about the inner life or psychology of her characters. She delights in interrupting a tense narrative with choral dance and music staged in a highly personal melange of styles, mostly from Asia, which she considers "the true home of acting." Having argued a few years ago that no Westerner could understand Shakespeare because no one (except, of course, Mnouchkine and her disciples) could attain the requisite intellectual distance, she now insists that the only way to comprehend Greek drama, the wellspring of Western culture, is to see it through the prism of her favorite form and principal influence, the kathakali dance drama of southern India.

She makes her case in Les Atrides, a nine-hour cycle of four productions embracing Iphigenia in Aulis by Euripides and the Oresteia trilogy of ! Aeschylus. Two years in the making -- including eight months of rehearsal -- the shows just completed a largely sold-out three-week run in Montreal and are virtually sold out for the troupe's New York City debut, ending Oct. 11. Mnouchkine, who works in an abandoned munitions factory in Paris and refuses to perform in a conventional theater, took Montreal spectators to a hockey arena. In New York, sponsors had to remove 375 military vehicles from a Brooklyn armory.

To mount the plays, Mnouchkine, 53, "studied the Greek language for the first time in my life." But she rejected the use of classical masks, because they "conceal rather than reveal character," and chose instead Asian-style face painting. Although she adopted the Greek idea of a singing and dancing chorus, she pragmatically trimmed it from a classical 50 people to about 15 and substituted Indian sound and movement.

The overall result is weird, thrilling and distinctly modern. In this interpretation of a myth of multigenerational male grief and retaliation, the central figure is a woman. Clytemnestra's just grievances seem as evident to the audience as they are invisible to the gods and men around her. Bereft of a child killed to propitiate war gods, then abandoned by the husband who slew their daughter, she turns murderous avenger. But she is killed by her own son, and her plea for retribution is deflected by the heavens. At every turn she is a victim of politics, deemed more important than matters of the heart. Brazilian actor Juliana Carneiro da Cunha takes the audience on a rich emotional journey. In a tour de force, she doubles as Clytemnestra's divine nemesis, Athena.

During the nine hours, long stretches are languorous. For those unfamiliar with kathakali, the dances can look a lot alike. Still, when the chorus is in full cry, stomping and whirling, an onlooker may have the sense of seeing Greek tragedies as they appeared at their origin in daylong religious festivals. The final play, The Eumenides, depicts nothing less than the birth of modern society: the supplanting of clan vengeance by the rule of law. Mnouchkine burdens the elegantly simple poetry with clunky symbolism, costuming the chorus, a sort of jury, as apes. Though the final words are uplifting, the last image is of these emblems of the atavistic, scuttling across the stage. It is a daring, haunting -- and characteristically excessive -- gesture.