A new 'Orestes' for the modern age

Austin director Will Hollis Snider tweaks the classical Greek tragedy.

Director Will Hollis Snider - who recently was nominated for an Austin Critics' Table Award for his production of `The Nina Variations' - takes Euripides classic tragedy and tweaks it for our modern sensibilities. The result is a darker and more intimate version of the story of Orestes' murder of his own mother, Klytaimenstra, in revenge for the killing of his father.

- Jeanne Claire van Ryzin

American-Statesman: Of all the classical tragedies, why choose Orestes to tinker with?

Will Hollis Snider: Orestes' story has resonated with me personally since I first read it years ago. Here is a young man, Orestes, who grew up away from his family, and is commanded by the god Apollo to kill his mother in revenge for murdering his father. He commits the deed, and is immediately tormented by Furies for doing so. His eyes are then immediately opened to the consequences of that action. He begins to question his faith and wonder if it really was a god that commanded him to do this. For millennia, people have committed heinous acts in the name of God, and these people have truly believed they were doing the right thing. But what happens when they stop believing and see the consequences of the actions committed by their own hands?

Also, it has daggers and killing and stuff.

Explain how you've adapted the original play.

I first boiled the play down to its basic elements. What is the story I want to tell? What are the themes I want to explore? Once I had that figured out, I gathered up as much material as I could that touched on this story and these themes. ? I figured out the arc for each character and came up with a very detailed outline of what I wanted the adaptation to look like. ?

Then, I locked myself in a room with this outline for about month, and came out with a script that was almost completely different than the outline I went in with.

The play still begins six days after he murders his mother, just as Euripides' version does, but it now moves back and forth through time as Orestes tries to figure out what led him here. Instead of monologuing about his situation, Orestes is now much more active in his quest for the truth.

Gone is the deus ex machina that populates many Greek tragedies. At the end of Euripides' version, Apollo magically appears before Orestes and fixes everything. ?

It really didn't feel like the proper way to end the story. So, there has been some major tinkering, and I hope that I have enhanced Orestes' story by the changes that were made.

Besides shifting the focus to Orestes, what other aspects of the production have you built into the show to give the story new direction?

... The play is now much more fantastical. Orestes is constantly questioning his reality, and isn't sure himself what time or location he is in at any given moment. The technical elements are now informed by Orestes' psychological state, the costume design pulls from many different times and locations, and the language plays with classic as well as modern colloquialisms.

All characters but one appear in other Greek tragedies. To better relate the events of Orestes to today, I wanted to give the ordinary citizens a voice. Typically in Greek tragedy, only characters of noble birth are allowed stage time. If someone is not of noble birth and they get to say something, typically they are giving us a three-page monologue about what those noble characters did while they were off stage. So, I simply created the role: The Voice of the People. After decades of tyranny and bloodshed, the ordinary citizens had to have been fed up with the actions of their leaders. So they attempt to take justice into their own hands.

'Orestes' will be performed at 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays through Aug. 15 at the Off Center, 2211 Hidalgo St. $12-$15. www.cambiareproductions.com.