Translation & Music
Greek tragedy combined song, speech, and chant.  Scholars are able to hypothesize how a section of a play was performed (sung, spoken, or chanted) based on the poetic meter the playwright used for that section.  Eleventh Hour artistic director Alexander Harrington is striving to approximate Aeschylus' original poetic meters in his translation of Agamemnon, and composer Michael Sirotta will be setting the sung and chanted sections to music.  An example of how the original meters affect the delivery of the text is below.  The first choral song of most of the surviving tragedies begins with a chanted march.  That section is written in anapests (weak-weak-STRONG).  This rhythm is well-suited to marching.

It's been ten long drawn years

From when Priam’s great foe

Lord Menalaos

with my King Agamemnone;

The firm league of the sons

Of great Atreus’ house,

Sharing throne and joint scepter

From great Zeus of the gods,

Did embark from this land

Thousand ships to command;

Costumes
The best clue to what Athenian tragic costumes looked like is a vase painting of the cast of a satyr play (photo at right).  That the painting depicts the cast of a play is made clear by the fact that many of the figures are holding masks.  Satyr plays were parodies of mythological and tragic stories that derived their humor from the incongruous coupling of a mythological hero with a chorus of drunken, over-sexed satyrs.  The heroes and gods in the surviving satyr plays behave much as they would in a tragedy or epic poem.  Because of this, scholars deduce that the costumes for the heroes of satyr plays would be similar to those of tragic heroes.

Designer Rebecca Bernstein will be basing the costumes for Agamemnon on this vase painting.  These robes with their elaborate graphic designs are far more theatrical than the plain white chitons and draping we expect to see in Greek tragedy.

Make-up and the Three Actor Rule
In The Eleventh Hour’s production of The Burial at Thebes (Seamus Heaney’s adaptation of Antigone, pictured at right) director Harrington and designer Kimberly Van Ness had the actors wear make-up in order to achieve the sculptural severity of masks while allowing for facial expression. Agamemnon will also employ this variation on the tragic mask.

By the time Aeschylus wrote Agamemnon, Athenian tragedies were performed by an all-male chorus and a cast of three male actors who played all the principal roles, including women.  This was facilitated by the use of masks.  Make-up enables The Eleventh Hour to adhere to the three-actor rule.  We will stand the cross-gender casting on its head.   Agamemnon will be performed by both men and women, but, as in The Burial at Thebes some of the male roles will be played by women.  The cast will consist of a chorus of twelve men and women all playing men and two female and one male actor playing four male and two female roles.