San Diego Reader

It's likely that when he wrote this bitter anti-tragedy, Euripides was heading into exile at Macedonia. That might explain why he fractures one of Greek theater's classic tales into a "god-cursed" maelstrom of brutality. Like Shakespeare's Troilus, Orestes demythologizes with an avenger's rage. Orestes murdered his mother and now must pay, or in a cynical take on the original, will he make the world pay instead? Although the acting ranges from quite good (Fred Harlow, a prissy Menelaus) to in-between (John Polak in and out of focus as Orestes) to nonexistent, Theatre Inc.'s production plows unafraid into Orestes's hallucinatory mix of satire, low comedy, and tragedy-toppling (the chorus, for example, is five platinum-blond young women who wear tap shoes and sing Leigh Scarritt's eerie songs). Director Douglas Lay also performs: he turns a Phrygian slave into an Asian stereotype; but hits the mark as a deus ex machina'd Apollo, a game-show host come to set things straight - another place where Euripides doesn't deconstruct a myth; he destroys it, doing his best to make his original audience hear fingernails on a blackboard.

February 20 through March 21