If there is a common thread uniting the most complete evenings I have spent in a theatre, it is this: To the last, almost all have been authored by Charles Mee. At a time when the sheer number of media options seems to stymie writers, convincing them to strip their cupboards bare or attempt a repellent pu pu platter presentation, Mee continues to compose comprehensive theatrical banquets that nourish intellectually and viscerally. A new addition to his ample list of delights is Iphigenia 2.0 -- the first work in Signature Theatre's season dedicated to Mee -- and a searing, resoundingly relevant portrait of the moment when an empire grown thoroughly corrupt cracks, and no one yet realizes it.
Straying little from Euripides' plot while incorporating texts by soldiers, psychologists, and war poets, Mee's remaking of Iphigenia at Aulis finds the Greek general Agamemnon (a circumspect yet heartbreakingly impotent Tom Nelis) called upon to sacrifice his daughter on the eve of war. (It seems Helen, the comely wife of his brother Menelaus, has run off to Troy -- but that's another story.)
Mee's innovations are subtle, shifting motives, not events. In Euripides, the sacrifice is to win a fair wind from the gods; here, it is primarily to appease the Greeks' own dubious army (a tight, excellent chorus of J.D. Goldblatt, Will Fowler, Jimonn Cole, and Jesse Hooker). Chillingly, Mee reconstructs filicide as an act of executive responsibility -- a ghoulish idea made almost reasonable in its populist solidarity.
And the soldiers who calmly demand such sacrifice? They themselves are little more than boys, one moment training in a macho combination of athletics and 'N Sync, the next pining dreamily for Oreos, marijuana, and "the names and addresses of women incarcerated at federal correctional facilities."
Standing apart from the soldiers is Achilles -- played as a delightfully jittery man-child by Seth Numrich -- and used unknowingly as bait for Iphigenia (a magnificent young actor named Louisa Krause). Her arrival is an example of Mee's peculiar genius, here vibrantly augmented by his frequent collaborator, director Tina Landau. Into a world of pending doom, Iphigenia bursts forth, bubbly bridesmaids in tow (Emily Kinney and Chasten Harmon), like it's spring break in Cancun and time for the girls to go wild. Sweeping the entire camp -- including her enervated father -- into a raucous Greek folk dance, sheer joy thrives in the face of despair.
Mee's tonal shifts cut both ways. After the dance of the soldiers, Agamemnon's wife (Kate Mulgrew, who seems to be playing Clytemnestra as Kate Hepburn, but what else is new?) almost brings the theatre to the ground, quaking at her husband, "What you have begun will not be finished/Until you are pounded back into the dirt."
The ability to accomplish such tonal shifts -- to sustain a voracious appetite for life in even the most pitiful moments, yet never to forget too long about the world's perils -- is at the heart of Mee's work. And it leads to phenomenal payoffs, as in Mee's version of Iphigenia's great speech in which, given the chance to live, she chooses death. Mee transforms her decision from a (potentially) misguided act of patriotism into a sickening grab for immortality that is only the magnification of the desire to subject oneself to Survivor, Big Brother, or whatever reality programming preserves one's fame far beyond the allotted 15 minutes.
Presented by and at Signature Theatre Company,
555 W. 42nd St., NYC.
Aug. 26-Oct. 7. Tue., 7 p.m.; Wed.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sat. and Sun., 3 p.m.
(212) 244-7529 or www.signaturetheatre.org.
Casting by Telsey + Company.