Interview: Will Hollis Snider, Writer/Director of Orestes
For the laugh-fest bible of a fake religion mainly invented for what the kids today refer to as the lulz, the Principia Discordia includes an important tip for would-be artists and thinkers who find themselves overwhelmed and over-burdened by the weight of those who've come before: "The classical Greeks were not influenced by the classical Greeks."
It's a useful reminder that creating powerful, memorable art and revering the canonical figures can be a pair of clashing objectives. It's also a lesson that Will Hollis Snider of Cambiare Productions, whose new interpretation of the story of Orestes, opens at the Off-Center this weekend, has taken to heart. Rather than simply stage a modernization of Euripedes' classic, Snider gutted the script, ripped out the boring parts, replaced the scenes in which the messenger runs on to tell the audience what's happened with new scenes that show exactly what that was, and placed it all in a post-apocalyptic setting. With that accomplished, and the show set to open, he sat down with Austinist to tell us about improving on the Greeks, the movement in Austin theater back toward the classics, and what Orestes has in common with the brave men and women of the Battlestar Galactica.
Tell us a little about this production of Orestes.
It's based off of Euripedes' Orestes. That's the main source that I took it from. I've been obsessed with Greek tragedy for a while now, and I've been wanting to tell Orestes' story, but I wasn't really fond of Euripedes' version.
There are some things in it, like the deus ex machina, and some really clunky monologues in the structure of the play, that just didn't feel like they were right to me. I sort of pulled in text that covered this story from many different angles, just to see how many different versions of Orestes' story are out there, and how to best fit it together.
How do you decide to improve on Euripedes?
Euripedes isn't perfect. You don't necessarily improve on it, but make it a little more relevant to an audience today. Instead of sticking with the unities like most Greek plays do, I find it more interesting to go back and forth in time and not just have it be set in one day. Make it a little more interesting to an audience. Explore the story beyond that one day. Instead of just saying, "Here's all this exposition!," we're going to show you what happened. Seeing action, as opposed to just talking about it—that's one fault of Greek plays. We have action that happens off-stage, and then someone comes on and says, "This is what just happened!" For the most part, we're trying to make it so we actually see those things as they happen onstage.
It's kind of cool to tear down the Greeks a little. They've been around for a while - they can take it.
[Laughs] Yeah. It's public domain, so I can do whatever I want with it. And the thing about the Greeks is that these stories had been told to them for thousands of years, as well. They modified the stories as they were told, so why can't I?
The poster for this production makes Orestes look like an action movie. Did you have that in mind when you were conceiving this version?
We joked about how, as I was working on the adaptation in the writing phase, it was a psychological thriller. When I was writing it, I was watching a lot of Battlestar Galactica. It was weird how it paralleled - the way that they treat faith and the gods in Battlestar Galactica is very similar to Greek tragedy. They have this overwhelming belief in their gods that every Greek character has. And losing that faith is what Orestes is going through. So I really wanted to ramp up the action, and give it that feel of, "We're not just going to talk about it, we're actually going to do it." Instead of Orestes saying, "Apollo made me do this," he's going to go to Apollo. He's going to ask him, you know, "Why did you make me do this? Why did you make me kill my mother?"
Robert Faires had a piece in the Chronicle a few weeks ago about the movement toward the classics in Austin, with Black Snow, No Exit, Henry V, and others all being staged this summer. Do you consider yourself a part of that movement?
I didn't initially see it as a movement, but I'm glad that it's happening. I think I'm along the fringes of that movement, in that I have no desire to take a classic text as it exists and put it on stage, but I'm really interested in adapting the classics. I think Faires' Henry V is a really good example of that - of finding that twist on it to make it a little bit more interesting than saying, "Hey, we're going to do Much Ado About Nothing as-is." It's a matter of finding the new ways we can tell these old stories, because the themes have stuck around, and that's why the plays have stuck around. And that's why people are always drawn back to them. I want to find a new way of telling that story, as opposed to just putting it out the way we think they wanted it done.
It sounds like you're attacking Euripedes' version from the perspective of the script, rather than from the staging. It's not, "We're going to do Hamlet, but everybody's naked!" Your changes are more fundamental.
I've always really liked the role of the dramaturge, of trying to fix something that's broken, and make sure that the structure of something works, and playing around with that to see if there's a better way to tell this story. I've had ideas as a director, saying, "I want to set Richard III in a waiting room," but I think it's always more interesting to attack the script, instead of just me approaching it as a director. I like approaching it in a writer fashion, saying, "Can I move this scene here, and does it work? Can I throw in an entirely new scene that makes it a little bit more relevant?"
