Klytemnestra

Comments (0) By Troy Schulze Thursday, Apr 14 2011

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Spring Street Studios

1824 Spring St.
Houston, TX 77007

Category: Community Venues

Region: Heights

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A woman who killed her tyrannical king-husband deserves more than one show, don’t you think? When Divergence Vocal Theater’s Misha Penton was asked to play the Greek heroine Clytemnestra in local playwright John Harvey’s adaptation of Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, she had an idea to create a sister production to the play as an opera, albeit with a tweaked spelling of the name. Today Divergence’s Klytemnestra has its world pre-miere, with Penton in the lead role, one week after Agamemnon’s premiere. “I ended up writing a bunch of text that’s based on Klytemnestra’s inner emotional landscape,” says Penton, “and that became the words for the opera.” Dominick DiOrio provided the musical score and John Harvey the spoken text. It certainly isn’t the first time the character, sometimes called the original femme fatale, has been portrayed in opera. After all, Klytemnestra com-mits perhaps the most high-profile murder in Greek mythology, killing her husband, the commander-in-chief of the Greek army, after he returns home after the Trojan War. In some accounts, she throws a net over him and stabs him to death while he’s taking a bath. We certainly hope Penton and her collaborators, whom she refers to as conspirators, decided to stage that scene in all its wet, bloody, operatic glory. 8 p.m. Friday and Satur-day. Spring Street Studios, 1824 Spring. For information, visit www.divergencevocaltheater.org. Pay-what-you-can (suggested donation is $20).
Fri., April 15; Sat., April 16, 2011