The Pearl Repertory Theater takes its mission to present repertory seriously, often performing plays we otherwise might never see. This season they offer a version of Aeschylus' The Persians, the earliest extant tragedy in the canon and one requiring a considerable commitment by both actors and audience.
    In several senses, the work may not be a play at all; it rather resembles early opera where the music is sung by all, rather than apportioned to particular roles. So here, each principal and Chorus tell parts of the battle of the Persians against the Greeks at Salamis. Moreover, instead of the drama resulting from interacting characters, each speaks to Apollo, or to an imaginary polis, or to the audience.
    Queen Atosa (Joanne Camp), for instance, assumed two or three postures, regal to sad, always stylized rather than individualized or personalized. Emotion runs high, but it rises out of the material, not the person. The hyperbolic language, too, intends not to express personality, but to heighten description. As Queen  Atosa lost her sons to the war, so she takes privileged place in setting the pace and style of the tale as a formal lament. King Xerxes (Sean McNall) tells more, and a Chorus offers the remainder.
    To their credit, the translators, Janet Lembke and C. J. Herington, keep the physical immediacy, even brutality, of the original script's imagery--blood, suffering, corpses glutting the shores of the river Salamis. But the main thrust of the work is oratorical; the text calls specifically for "chant" and "song" rather than enactment. One dramatic moment occurs when a Herald rushes in to confirm that the Greeks have won the Battle of Salamis. Otherwise, the Chorus of Old Men, waiting in vain for the homecoming of the country's young warriors, grieve over their loss in a hymn of mourning.
    The actors tended either to characterize, or to read the characters as illustrations of the basic action. On the page, the actors speak long, dense passages in a kind of counterpoint; on stage, as already implied, actors speak into a void. It follows that what matters most to performance is the sound and quality of these voices, the music of the poem. These are quite pleasing, yet lack the emotional power and color that might make recitations thrilling.
    Still, the action is sometimes difficult to follow as Aeschylus' main interest seems to have been in speeches to illustrate a moment of historical conflict, taken as a given. Without the Oresteia plays, we might not know Aeschylus' greatness from this work. Why Aeschylus wrote from an anti-Greek point of view may speak to the security of the Greeks at the time, about 506 BC. He portrayed the Persians, who invaded Greece twice, as complex persons, whereas in popular views they were the Nazis of their time. The attitude has led many contemporary historians to suspect that the playwright was teaching a grand moral lesson. Still, no consensus exists about Aeschylus' choice of subject or moral purpose, if any. He was wounded in 490 BC at Marathon, where Athens defeated the Persians temporarily. To be morally right in retrospect is commonplace, after all; to be right in advance of history may be something quite else.