Modern Production History
The American theatre director Robert Wilson staged a production of the play in 1986 at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts and in 1987 at the Staatstheater in Stuttgart. The production supplemented Euripides' play with material drawn from a range of sources, united by their exploration of the themes of death and rebirth. It began with Heiner Müller's Explosion of a Memory (Description of a Picture) (1985) as a prologue; the piece is a dream narrative partly composed using automatic writing. Müller described it as a description of "a landscape beyond death" that is "an overpainting of Euripides' Alcestis which quotes the Noh play Kumasaka, the Eleventh Canto of the Odyssey, and Hitchcock's The Birds." The production also utilised a Japanese kyogen play whose themes parodied those of Alcestis, laser projections, and a musical score by Laurie Anderson.
Read more about this topic: Alcestis (play)
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