Theater: Electra

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Sophocles' Electra is no Hamlet. She doesn't agonize over whether to avenge the murder of her father Agamemnon by killing her mother Clytemnestra. She just does it (or rather, has her brother Orestes do it). Leveaux, who has brought his crisp staging of the tragedy from London to Broadway, says he was thinking of events in Bosnia: Can the cycle of vengeance ever end? Yet he resists the urge to add modern complexities to this fiercely singleminded play. Enough to watch the talented Zoe Wanamaker as a very human, almost waifish Electra, buried in a gigantic overcoat, like the mantle of fate that impels this timeless play forward.

--By Richard Zoglin