It’s opening night tonight for <em>Iphigeneia at Aulis</em>, a 2400-year-old play by Euripides, newly translated by Robin Bond.

I play Agamemnon, leader of the Greek forces that will set sail to attack Troy just as soon as there’s some wind.  It seems the only way to make wind happen is for me to sacrifice my daughter Iphigeneia to the goddess Artemis.  Only I don’t really want to, on account of she is my daughter.  Will I go through with it?  You’d think I wouldn’t, but there are some very good reasons why I just might.  Let the hijinks ensue.

It’s at the University Theatre in the Christchurch Arts Centre, at 8pm, 19-22 November.  Come and see me emote.

I have been acting very hard indeed this evening.  Agamemnon has angst.  He has to kill his own daughter!  And he doesn’t want to!  But he has to pretend that he does!  And drive his wife insane!  Because if he doesn’t, his army will kill everybody!  Because they can’t have their war unless he kills his daughter!  That is <strong>Intense</strong>!

It is very hard to get all this across without feeling like you’re overdoing it a bit.

I’ve been crying today.

I was born during the last months of the Nixon administration, so for all my lifetime I’ve known the United States as a nation in decline, long past its best days, and mired in massive corruption and endemic racism. It wasn’t the United States of Lincoln, or Wilson, or Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It was a nation led at best by merely adequate managers such as Clinton, and all too often by corrupt and threatening incompetents like Reagan or George W. Bush. I’ve known nothing else.

Today, everything has changed. A United States I’ve never seen, but only read about in history books, has raised its head again. I can only imagine what it feels like to be a US citizen tonight. Whatever happens from here on in, I’ll know that the United States of America has a future as well as a past.