Agamemnon When Court Theatre looked in on King Agamemnon of Argos last year, in a powerful adaptation of Euripides’s Iphigenia in Aulis, he was busy sacrificing daughter Iphigenia to the gods in exchange for favorable winds to take him and his armies to Troy. Now Court is visiting him again, this time through the lens of Aeschylus’s Agamemnon. A decade has passed, Troy has fallen, the king is returning in triumph, and as for his crimes—well, victory is its own justification, right? Queen Clytemnestra thinks not. Before Agamemnon can get a home-cooked meal, she’ll have made her point with a vengeance that’s come to define vengeance in Western culture.
The Long Christmas Ride Home The title conjures images of John-Boy Walton sitting atop a hay wagon, driving a jingle-belled Clydesdale through a gentle snow while the rest of the clan lie back on a bed of straw, smiling up at the stars. And sure enough, Paula Vogel’s 2003 play revolves around a holiday visit to grandma’s house. Yet this trip is anything but idyllic. Here, the wagon is a 1950s-vintage Rambler, and the family it carries is headed for a defining trauma, with philandering Dad at the wheel, embittered Mom beside him, and three deeply uneasy kids in the backseat. Chamber-theater-style storytelling and bunraku-inspired puppets contribute to the comic, tragic, honest beauty of this unorthodox yuletide tale, sensitively rendered in Josh Sobel’s staging for Strawdog Theatre. Don’t see it with the kids unless you’re prepared for a serious discussion on the ride home. –Tony Adler
Repairing a Nation The looming figure in this black family drama by playwright Nikkole Salter is as sympathetic as they come: a woman knocked down to avoid the high cost of repairing her. On Christmas Eve, poor, middle-aged Lois arrives at the home of her cynical, wealthy cousin, Chuck, with twin obsessions: joining the class-action lawsuit for descendants of Tulsa race riot survivors, and proving her father was cheated out of the family business by Chuck’s dad. Charismatic performances highlight Salter’s wit and control, as when Chuck and Lois’s son amuse each other with a canny series of preposterous activist slogans. But when Salter conspicuously drops the lawsuit plot to focus on Lois’s gripe with Chuck, what results feels short on epiphanies. –Jena Cutie
