Trinitas Christian School varsity drama club presents Aeschylus' “Agamemnon” from The Oresteia, translated by Robert Fagles, on 9 and 10 December 2011 at 7pm.  Tickets are available in the school office (850.484.3515), $5 for adults and $3 for children 12 and under.
 
In “Agamemnon” Aeschylus tells a story of revenge and death.  Agamemnon, the king of Argos, returns from victory in the Trojan War to a city in shambles and a people longing for his return, hoping he will restore justice and order.  Agamemnon's wife, Clytaemnestra, and her paramour, Aegisthus, not only have assumed power, but also have plotted together to murder Agamemnon upon his return for their respective vengeful purposes.
 
Clytaemnestra's indignation began when Agamemnon sacrificed their daughter Iphigeneia to the gods before his voyage to Troy.  Aegisthus' ire stretches farther into history.  His father, Thyestes, was the brother of Agamemnon's father, Atreus. When Atreus learned that Thyestes had seduced his wife, he prepared Thyestes' children and served them to him at a banquet.  (Aegisthus was safe, having not yet been born.)  Thyestes, realizing he had eaten a cannibal’s feast of his own children, cursed Atreus and his descendants.  In “Agamemnon,” Aegisthus has plotted Agamemnon’s murder with Clytaemnestra to avenge the wrong done to his father and to fulfill his father's curse on the House of Atreus.
 
“Agamemnon” is the first of the three plays of Aeschylus' Oresteia. The story continues in the second play, “The Libation Bearers.”  Here, after the news of Agamemnon's death reaches his banished son, Orestes, he returns to Argos to avenge his father's death by murdering his mother, Clytaemnestra, and Aegisthus.  In these first two plays, Aeschylus elucidates the horrors of the retributive justice that ruled Argos and ancient Greece.
 
The third play, “The Eumenides,” offers hope of relief from the despair of the first two plays.  Orestes seeks sanctuary in the temple of Apollo from the Furies, the ancient spirits of retribution, who torment him for murdering his mother. Orestes attempts to justify himself while the furies insist that spilled blood demands spilled blood. Apollo sends the parties to Athens where Athena initiates a trial by jury for Orestes.  The jury is hung, and so Athena casts the deciding vote to acquit Orestes. To satisfy the demands of the Furies, Athena offers them a station of honor and transfigures them from reeking, abominable spirits of death to the Eumenides, or “the Kindly Ones.”
 
Trinitas is pleased to present the first of the three plays.  Although the three plays taken together offer hope after despair, “Agamemnon” portrays only despair. When you attend, expect to see only part of the whole story. Expect to see Aeschylus' depiction of a dark world where death leads to death—a graceless world of sin with no hope of redemption.  Aeschylus' story, in all its darkness, is an honest one. Death does in fact lead to death. Our world is in fact hopeless.  This is why Jesus' good news is so good—because the bad news is so bad.  Christians can watch Aeschylus' first play in order to understand the insufferable reality of a graceless world. We sympathize with Aeschylus' characters and identify with their ineluctable desire for justice. Their desires make sense to us.  But we see that we simply cannot live that way.
What we hope for is a world that does not make sense.  We need a world where there is relief from the pain we cause ourselves and everyone else.  We need a world where death does not lead unto death.