Mourning Becomes Electra is a haunted play. The action takes place in and around a house of ghosts, haunted by the spirit of ancestral corruption; the looming shadow of the civil war haunts this world, and the lost dream of America, reinvented in a crucible of violence. Above all, the people are haunted. Lavinia, Orin, Christine, Adam Brant and Seth are driven by the ghosts of their own histories, their forgotten longings, their repressed ambition, their lust. The dream of an Eden on the sea, an island of peace, moves every one of them. You could even say that the scenes are haunted by the grand ambition of the father of American drama, as Eugene O’Neill wrestles with the shade of Greek tragedy, devours the 19th century’s melodrama, and dreams a new artistic future.

You get the picture. Passions and memories of which we are only too dimly aware, darkly, through a glass, charge every instant of this play. And let me tell you there are a lot of instants. Every play at TMT operates on many levels, that is what we do, but this has been my door into DRUNKEN WITH WHAT.

A large part of my excitement about this has been our work on how to act it. This amazing cast has created an intensely nuanced range of performance, from the quietly felt, the coolly considered, up to the most explosive technicolor presence we can imagine. You could say we are performing a palimpsest, whose scumbled faded layers emerge and recede in waves of feeling and memory, as the actors conjure up scraps of the story. Sometimes you do see a ghost. Sometimes the ghost slips away. Sometimes the ghost possesses your soul with its hungry tortured longing. Boo.