Mourning Becomes Electra

Last night, we saw the revival of Mourning Becomes Electra, starring Lili Taylor, Jena Malone and Joseph Cross, put up by The New Group under the direction of Scott Elliot. It's four and a half hours of sustained tragedy, which is not an easy feat for an actor or an audience, but the performance was overall engaging, if a bit awkwardly staged--and well, honestly, sometimes I wondered what the hell Elliot was thinking. It's worth seeing--the sheer athleticism is a feat unto itself, and the play is so rarely done.

Jena Malone was capable and even a bit surprising--it's really her show when you get down to it, and to carry the third act so compellingly after already 3 hours of stage time is extremely difficult for an actor who's only 24--and primarily a film actor. Malone's performance was a bit direct--in that it seems that every choice she's made, or been given by the director--is a simple one, which is not to say easy. The performance isn't spectacularly deep, but it's real, energetic, and new. I think she knows what she's capable of, and often it looks like she's really enjoying herself.

I want Lili Taylor to take up more space. I want her to be slower, more powerful, louder. As John says to me after the show, "I kept thinking what would Meryl Streep do with this performance?" It's a bit unfair to compare her to Meryl, but Ms. Taylor didn't seem to be drinking it up the same way that Ms. Malone did. I know that Ms. Taylor is a deeply talented actor, able to take us to dark, lonely places, desperate places, all the while feeling strangely under her care. Her work in "Six Feet Under," "Casa de los Babys," and "I Shot Andy Warhol" is all of these things. But she's not eating up the scenery enough in this production. She's not throwing her hair around, flapping her skirt here and there, moving in a surprising way. I adore you, Lili; I bought this ticket because of you, but I want you to let it all loose. This is Clytem-fucking-nestra you're playing!

Scott Elliot makes strange choices. The Women was pretty horrid, the Threepenny Opera felt so mortifyingly amateur--come on, corporate logos on t-shirts?--I did this my junior year of high school to make a grossly overstated point about feeling disenfranchised. I guess I can understand why an artistic director would choose to put up this play at a time like this. We are a country divided (in the play by the Civil War, and in our lives by this whole Red vs Blue idiocy) and recently brought back together, by Lincoln and....Obama? Is that the idea? Am I stretching here? Or maybe you just want to mount this dizzyingly good play that people are not often keen on producing.

The white curtain drawing out to separate the stage was one incredibly beautiful moment--perfecto! But the doors--the double doors leading from the porch, where most of the scenes take place, into the house, why are they so cheaply constructed. Is this a question of money? I wonder where you let things go because of various constraints, and where you made creative choices that are turn out to be so awkward. The door is important, it's the last thing we see of the play, the last sound, even. Maybe your hands were full with other things?

Why have the floor covered in cheap blue carpet? Or was it expensive blue carpet? Either way, it feels too modern, too suburban. Wouldn't wood have been better? Why have Ms. Taylor light up a cigarette in the beginning of Act 1 and then stamp it out after taking only half a puff? Why play so many scenes on the floor, writhing around to make Christine look like a girl with no power? Why play so many scenes in the side aisles? All of these are clear choices to me--it's not like the direction is aimless--but the direction is definitely baffling and, as the play would say, queer.