Ariane Mnouchkine, the guiding spirit of Paris’s Théâtre du Soleil, brought the four plays she calls Les Atrides—Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis and Aeschylus’s trilogy, the Oresteia—to the Park Slope Armory, a vast brick barn of 1895 near the southwest corner of Prospect Park in Brooklyn. Inside the dark armory, she sought to re-create the numinous atmosphere so powerfully achieved at her home base at the Cartoucherie, a Napoleonic arms factory in the Parc de Vincennes. Players made up in a netted but open space. The stage itself was a great, bare, three-sided arena of unpainted white wood; atop it to stage left was a long, blue-netted cage in which Jean-Jacques Lemêtre made his sustaining live music of angry percussion and softer lyre and flute. The audience sat on a rising bank of tin chairs (something like a high-school basketball game). Seating was unreserved. Between plays, one could leave the armory to patronize a restaurant in the gentrifying neighborhood or buy food inside to eat on dimly lit picnic benches. Access to the outdoors was at all times easy. These mild rigors much outraged and discombobulated the local critical elite, and many notices were largely occupied with whining and pouting about indignities suffered. If Mnouchkine accomplished nothing else worthwhile, she at least gave these pampered scribes a dose of artistic populism in action.

But on the whole the transplant of Geist from Paris to Park Slope worked. The Iphigenia I have already reviewed from Paris;¹ its