SELFISHNESS AND SACRIFICE
Alcestis is the old Greek story of a man who allows his wife to sacrifice her life for his. As interpreted by Euripides, T.S. Eliot and others, it has much to say on the relationship between the mortal and the infinite. It is a reverie on egotism, love, mortality, personal redemption, and the intersection of good citizenship and good 
manners. Euripides contemporized the story for his own audience in the fifth century BC, writing easily recognizable human characters with motivations so complex that scholars have despaired of consensus in classifying the play. Nancy Keystone has now updated Euripides’ version, with self-referential commentary in its allusions to other sources, in a production that she has directed with inventive flamboyance. The writing is frequently fascinating, and Ms. Keystone’s stage pictures are dynamic. But the action is not fluid enough, consistently engaging enough, or coherent enough to fully support the production’s lack of dramatic emotion.
Former Argonaut Admetus (Jeremy Shranko) once sheltered the banished god Apollo (Lorne Green), and in gratitude Apollo gets the Fates drunk and cajoles them into letting Admetus live past his destined expiration date – provided he find a sacrifice willing to die in his place. He can’t, though, until his beloved wife Alcestis 
(Kalean Ung) volunteers. And he lets her. For some reason renamed by this production (from the original Thanatos), Death (Russell Edge) rebuffs Apollo’s intervention and takes Alcestis to hell. But Admetus faces an awkward point of etiquette with the arrival of his old shipmate Herakles (Nick Santoro): if Admetus tells his drinking buddy of his wife’s death, formality demands that Herakles either be turned away from the house or be forced to mourn with Admetus. Given his history with gods and roofs, Admetus has an understandable obsession with hospitality. So he invites his uncouth, volatile, drunken friend to stay, but doesn’t tell him that his house is in mourning, with results unexpected and sublime.
It’s an unhappy sign when the review starts writing itself during the play. When my attention is allowed for a minute at a time to rest upon the beautiful hardwood floor (scenic design by Ms. Keystone, assistant scenic design Nick Santiago), the questions posed by the text give way to distraction. The characters’ journeys are crowded out of my mind. And character is my chief issue with this production, which like many a telling of Alcestis can’t decide what it is long enough to be anything in particular.
Each member of this attractive cast has worked before with Ms. Keystone’s Critical Mass Performance Group, many on an earlier version of Alcestis commissioned by the Getty Villa and performed there last year. Most of these actors are probably very 
good. But they have been directed to a heightened presentational style, and most of the acting does not feel integrated stylistically or temperamentally with the show it’s in. Few of the characters are written or played with much specific personality. This formality uses archetype as a bit of a crutch, and clashes oddly with the frequently colloquial and intimate nature of the adaptation. But in multiple roles, ensemble members Ray Ford and Danielle Jones were on fire at the performance I attended, larger than life while grounded and credible. I was moved to wonder whether they missed some directorial note, or were among the few to understand it.
Ms. Keystone makes the decidedly academic decision, by some still considered audacious and risky, of adapting a classic text by having its characters comment on previous versions. To have Alcestis suggest that she doesn’t agree with the character that Euripides wrote for her is a legitimate feminist agreement with the criticism that Euripides’ sympathy is more with the selfish husband than the giving wife. But this political posture seems off the point of the text, as well as stylistically not very 
well integrated with the rest of the show. Some of the mostly exciting staging also smacks of half-measure; when Death snatches Apollo’s very tangible arrow and pretends to mainline it like a hypodermic syringe, the arrow doesn’t really penetrate Death’s sleeve. It’s a mimed gag that sticks out among more fully realized gestures (when he later snaps the arrow in half, it really breaks). This inconsistency of disinterested gesture extends to the superfluous, intermittent video projections (by Adam Flemming) of text and imagery. And several of the formal experiments, like having the ensemble stand outside the story and recite lists of provocative verbs intended to stimulate mood and contemplation, go on about twice as long as my mood or contemplation could happily bear.
Still, much of it is really gorgeous (Adam Frank’s lighting design is not done justice in the production photos by the usually excellent Ed Krieger) and pleasingly thought-provoking. So typical of Boston Court’s good taste, Ms. Keystone’s show is genuinely theatrical in the sense that nothing like it can be experienced without leaving one’s house to see it. Which one should do, especially since the fires of hell that fanned our first heat wave of the summer have now faded to a tolerable roast.
photos by Ed Krieger
Alcestis
Theatre @ Boston Court in Pasadena
co-presented with Critical Mass Performance Group
scheduled to end on July 28, 2013
for tickets, visit http://www.bostoncourt.com