Slane College » Interactive Media

The Oresteia

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Bradley University’s production of Aeschylus’ trilogy The Oresteia, represents a magnificent collaboration between the departments of Theatre Arts and Interactive Media.  Together they created a re-imagination of a timeless work. The goal was to make the play, which begins with the murder of Agamemnon by his wife as he returns heroically from the Trojan War, understandable and relevant to an audience of contemporary college students who have little background in Greek history or theatre.
As they planned how to bring their script to the stage, Theatre Arts chair George Brown and Jim Ferolo Interactive Media chair co-directed the huge collaboration. They wanted to use leading-edge digital filming, rendering, and projection techniques to blend together different media to enhance the storytelling. In their directors’ notes, Brown and Ferolo write that a goal of this collaboration is to create "something that is part movie, part theatre, and part Internet, but completely engaging."

In Bradley’s Oresteia, the convergence of interactive media and theatre arts and the attempt to make the drama relevant for a contemporary audience create many effects that contribute to an anti-illusive performance. Instead of creating an illusion and drawing the audience into the performance completely, anti-illusive techniques continually remind the audience that they are viewing a theatrical performance, not reality. In this way, Bradley’s production has some roots in Bertold Brecht’s concept of the "epic theatre." Brown and Ferolo state that they used many techniques to contribute to what Brecht called the alienation effect. "You keep the audience on the edge of their seat, not knowing what is going to happen next." For example, Brecht would use minimal props or interrupt the action with song or poetry. According to Brown and Ferolo, such techniques can encourage the audience to contemplate the action of the play within a social context and to approach the performance intellectually as well as emotionally. Justice is the central theme and question of The Oresteia—and this production challenges the audience to face that question head on, to determine what justice means not only for the characters in the play, but in their own lives.