It's All Greek to Mee

Electra sits center stage in a green spotlight with a pack of Marlboroughs on the table in front of her. She is surrounded by unmoving men with bloody bandages, in wheelchairs and on hospital beds. "You could say," she observes while looking up and taking a drag on her cigarette, "there is no form of anguish, however terrible, that human beings might not have to bear." It's a near-verbatim quote from Euripides's Orestes, the inspiration for Charles Mee's Orestes 2.0. The script then slips seamlessly back into Mee's original words. "Well," Electra sighs, "there's a way of putting things in order."

But order is not the aim of Mee's frenetic and high-energy play, now at the HERE Arts Center. While Mee makes liberal use of the ancient Greek source text, he also incorporates quotes from Guillaume Apollinaire poems and Soap Opera Digest articles into his own writing. He splices all these pieces together into a gritty and darkly humorous collage of a show that sweeps you into a scene, only to push you out in the next brisk transition.

The play draws on the famous Orestes myth, picking up the story at the height of the action. After discovering that his mother and her lover have killed his father, Agamemnon, the prince Orestes kills them both. Orestes 2.0 raises questions about the role his sister Electra played in goading him to action and about the punishments they each deserve.

Mee writes in verse, and his command of poetry is the driving force in his plays, which range from violent adaptations of Greek classics (Bacchae 2.0) to contemporary love stories like Big Love and True Love. Critics can accept his appropriations of Molière and Shakespeare because Mee's unique metaphors and fluid language are often on par with the established masters. (Another factor that deflects accusations of plagiarism: Mee makes all of his works available online at charlesmee.org and encourages young writers to borrow from the plays.)

But HERE's production of Orestes 2.0 loses most of Mee's verses in a chaotic competition for volume. The script is by no means calm, but at times director José Zayas seems to lose control of his own stage. The script's themes are loud, but the production bordered on deafening.

Mee calls for a vague setting with hospital beds, and Zayas sets the scene in what appears to be the mental health wing of a veterans' hospital. The problems this raises have nothing to do with the set. In fact, designer Ryan Elliot Kravetz makes effective use of the small stage with a few beds, wheelchairs, and microphones. A strategically angled mirror allows for cinematic bedside scenes, and the connotation-loaded red tape adds dimension to the sparse stage.

The psych ward setting falters because it limits the actors to playing crazy. Orestes and Electra, played by Bobby Moreno and Barrett Doss, respectively, display obvious talents as physical actors as they throw themselves against walls and ease into interpretive dances throughout the show. But their overly stylized speeches are difficult to understand from the start of the play, which is already highly charged following the recent matricide. From there, the emotions and decibel levels only rise, so that by the play's end, more than half of the actor's lines are delivered in incomprehensible shouts.

Although the staging quashes the lead characters' audibility, it does provide an excellent function for a modern-day Greek chorus of nurses and patients. Detached from the central action but elaborating on the environment of a postwar world, their speeches riff on subjects ranging from masturbation to imagination. Particularly engaging is Daniel Manley's lighthearted speech about multiple homicides. But even their words dissipate among the overlapping monologues and a background of recorded techno beats.

The choice to prioritize emotion over language in the play sacrifices more than just the script's poetry. Mee's relevant themes about state corruption and his subtle satire aimed at a hotheaded rising generation are lost in the literal fog that covers the stage. The green lights and smoke machine may transport you to another world, but they deny how similar this world is to our own.

At times the production seemed to carry the audience into a war zone. In one of the many climaxes in the second half, an overly excited actor nearly stepped off the stage, smashing a footlight with his boot and scattering glass off the stage. At another moment, an overhead speaker visibly shook with the radio voice-over it was projecting, threatening the closely seated audience. While Mee's script blurs the distinctions between ancient Greece and American society, Zayas's production sometimes blurs the chaos in the script with the confusion onstage. The results may ring in your ears more than they resonate in your thoughts.

Visits and Visitations

Popular psychology holds that there are five stages to grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Stewart Lombardi, the lead character in Martin Casella's new play, Scituate, at TBG Arts Center, is stuck in a stage somewhere between one and four, and he can think of only one solution: staying in bed. The premise of an immobile character mourning the death of his lover from AIDS sounds at least static, if not completely depressing. Throw in the backdrop of Scituate, a seaside summer-getaway town on Cape Cod, and it's sentimental enough for a Lifetime Original Movie. But even when cushioned between down pillows, Chad Hoeppner's Stewart remains a surprisingly active and charmingly funny guide through the world of loss. He doesn't reject life; he just prefers the one in his bedroom, where he can be alone with his visions of the recently deceased Robbie (Matthew Mabe). Hoeppner and Mabe bring their love story to life so vividly that it's no wonder Stewart won't budge.

In addition to these dreams, flashbacks, and visitations, Stewart's room bustles with visits from his real-life friends and family. If his bedded life denies classification as one of the stages of grief, his loved ones provide pure examples of some of those steps as they try to get him back to his normal life. Using anger as his primary tool, the fiery leader of the mission to move Stewart is his wealthy father, played by a dynamic Damian Buzzerio. Stewart's mom, meanwhile, sweetly accepts, while his therapist and two couples of friends bargain.

Casella provides the cast with great moments of comedic bickering, and Laurence Lau and Stefanie Zadravec take full advantage of these opportunities as Stewart's married friends. Buzzerio's dead-on Boston accent is the perfect complement to his threats to have his bodyguards pull his son out of bed, and his wife (Holly Barron) serves as a sweet foil to Buzzerio's tough love, naïvely accepting her son's wishes with smart comic timing.

Hoeppner's subtle shifts from romantic scenes from the past to present scenes of stubborn resistance hold the show together. And thanks to clever directing by David Hilder and seamless lighting transitions from Graham Kindred and Traci Klainer, the story maintains a lively and engaging pace.

But as Casella's script moves away from the safe harbor of its quirky characters and sharp one-liners, it drifts out toward the dangerous waters of cliché. He feeds the audience standard fights about a woman wanting a baby and marriage and a man who won't commit, while ensuring that every character gets his/her monologue explaining how death has affected him/her in the past. The formula comes full circle as Stewart and his mother share a heart-to-heart and a hug in the closing scene.

With Stewart's flashbacks and visions, the play raises some potentially interesting questions about the difference between reality and memory, but those questions fall prey to similarly tidy conclusions. Robbie first appears as a ghost or an angel, yet in later scenes he appears as Stewart's memory, leaving the audience wondering whether all of these scenes are in his imagination. But then Casella neatly answers questions about the line between the supernatural and memories with a séance, the modern-day writer's deus ex machina.

Although his comic writing and quickly moving script keep Scituate from digressing into a sentimental lament about death, Casella seems almost fearful of leaving his audience with any sense of unease. Look to Scituate for a comforting and amusing story about dealing with loss and sharing love with friends, families, and romantic partners. As for revelations, maybe the most helpful message the show will leave you with is that you're not the only one who doesn't want to get out of bed some mornings.