Ariane Mnouchkine, the guiding spirit of Paris’s Théâtre du Soleil, brought the four plays she calls Les Atrides—Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis and Aeschylus’s trilogy, the Oresteia—to the Park Slope Armory, a vast brick barn of 1895 near the southwest corner of Prospect Park in Brooklyn. Inside the dark armory, she sought to re-create the numinous atmosphere so powerfully achieved at her home base at the Cartoucherie, a Napoleonic arms factory in the Parc de Vincennes. Players made up in a netted but open space. The stage itself was a great, bare, three-sided arena of unpainted white wood; atop it to stage left was a long, blue-netted cage in which Jean-Jacques Lemêtre made his sustaining live music of angry percussion and softer lyre and flute. The audience sat on a rising bank of tin chairs (something like a high-school basketball game). Seating was unreserved. Between plays, one could leave...

 

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