Notes About the Adaptation

The Oresteia by Aeschylus is the most important work of ancient Greek theater. 

Of the 300 plays we know, only 30 survive. 

The Oresteia is the only surviving trilogy. Some in the audience may have witnessed the artistic triumph of Tony Harrison’s brilliant translation performed at the National Theatre and then eventually at Epidaurus in Greece itself. All three plays were translated and performed fully. This adaptation does not do that…at all. 

I love these plays. Each one is uniquely beautiful. However, it is a wondrous and rare thing to find a company that can artistically and financially afford to perform all three plays in their entirety.  I also find so much of the context wrapped around these stories and these characters are lost on us today. 

It is my intent as a playwright and an adapter to give you everything that you need and lots to enjoy. To that end, what you are about to hear is my very humble, though hungry, attempt at combining texts from Iphigenia at Aulis, Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, The Eumenides, Elektra by Sophocles and Elektra by Euripides. Whew. 

Greek playwrights were masters of asking all the right questions while providing so few answers. The ideas collected in these plays have lived with us for thousands of years; the ideas of justice and revenge, family and independence, right and wrong, what a citizen owes the state and what that state owes the citizen, and the idea of doing what we have to do. I hope tonight you walk away with all the right questions.  

This audience has made me the artist I am today. My acting and my writing come from the words I have shared with you. Please find me tonight and share yours with me. Thank you. 

- David Daniel