Good Breeding

CONTENT ADVISORY: Good Breeding contains mature themes. This production includes explicit language, sexual content, and simulated sexual acts. There are also moments of violence, references to war, and potential partial nudity. The play explores themes of complex power dynamics and intergenerational trauma, and features an irreverent, darkly comedic treatment of classical mythology.

Good Breeding by Robert O’Hara is a retelling of the Oresteia by Aeschylus that centers the female characters of Electra, Clytaemnestra, Helen, and Cassandra—as opposed to the traditional male narrative of Orestes. It is a darkly comic and wildly contemporary adaptation of a classical tale of betrayal, love, revenge, bloodshed, and intergenerational trauma, told through a modern lens. The play seeks to answer the questions: What is free will? Is our fate predetermined? And, how do our choices define who we are? 

A human, Tantalus, wanting to gain the power of the Gods, does the unimaginable and serves them a soup unknowingly made from the body of his child. In retaliation, he and his entire family line are cursed for all time. Years later, war has come to Greece, and Helen, the sister of Queen Clytemnestra, has been taken hostage by the city of Troy. Clytemnestra’s husband, Agamemmnon (who is descended from Tantalus), is told by the Gods that if he wants to send troops across the sea to rescue Helen, he must sacrifice his daughter. Clytemnestra, enraged, retaliates with the fury of a mother in pain—coupled with the power of a goddess—and declares war on her husband and the ruling male Senate, slaughtering them all. Her remaining daughter, Electra, avenges the death of her father and sister, and in turn kills her mother. She is tried for this crime, but before she can receive judgement, she escapes to the Underworld to free her mother, father, and sister from the clutches of death. She then turns her sights on the true culprit of all of their troubles, vowing to make him pay for the heartache and struggles of all of humanity: Zeus, the king of the Gods.