At last, Quintessence tackles American theater with ‘Mourning Becomes Electra’

Secrets, pride, incest, adultery, murder, and suicide – all help tell the tale in Eugene O’Neill’s classic play, Mourning Becomes Electra. O’Neill adapted Aeschylus’s The Oresteia and moved the setting to America in the years after the Civil War. The play focuses on the Mannons, an upstanding and wealthy New England family, their struggles, and the possible power of salvation. It’s coming to Quintessence Theatre Group’s Mt. Airy stage on April 2.

Director Alexander Burns said the play, which actually is a trilogy performed in sequence, includes themes of individual responsibility and fate, and how the two are in opposition or in sync. The show runs more than four hours with two 15-minute intermissions, but its episodic nature makes the time fly by. The length presents unique challenges for the company, though.

A marathon of a show

“It’s like running a marathon, finding muscle and control to sustain something on an operatic scale for that long,” Burns said. But he doesn’t think that will hinder audiences who want to see an American classic. “This is one of those once-in-a-lifetime experiences,” he said. “I also think there’s something in the zeitgeist right now – recent films have been longer. There is an interest for people who don’t want to see just the five-second YouTube video.”

In this production, audiences spend a year with the Mannons, “and experience their triumph and their tragedy,” he said. “You really get to experience the transformation and revelations and get to experience the results of these actions.”

O’Neill’s play has fascinated Burns since he was a young man enjoying theater: “I’ve always been drawn to epic stories with men versus gods and kings and queens versus humanity." That’s one of the reasons he cofounded the theater company in 2009 – to take classics and see how they relate to people now “without rewriting them, but exploring them in ways that make them as relevant as possible,” Burns said. Electra is very American, but also takes a classic look at what it means to be human.

American plays: "not vintage enough"?

The play opens on the theater’s fourth birthday. Burns, who also serves as the Quintessence artistic director, reminisced about starting the company, when some said that he only produced European works (classics like Antigone, Othello, The Seagull, and The Misanthrope, among others). “We are a classic theater company,” he said. “American work hasn’t marinated enough. It’s not vintage enough yet.”

But he does think this O’Neill work in particular is ripe and ready and has the depth of the classic and ancient pieces Quintessence has done. The playwright asks "what is human despair? Why do we all have these feelings of isolation and anger?” Burns said. “What can we do? And is this something we’re cursed with or that we brought upon ourselves?”

All of the works Quintessence produces, though, are timeless, Burns added, because “we are still the same people we were a thousand years ago. By coming together to experience them as a community, hopefully we can find catharsis and process the challenges we all face."

Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra is coming to Quintessence Theatre Group’s Sedgwick Theater, 7137 Germantown Avenue, Philadelphia, April 2 through 27 (opening night April 5). Tickets are $25 ($15 for students and those 21 and under). For tickets and more information, call 215-987-4450 or visit http://quintessencetheatre.org/.