The Tower Beyond Tragedy

Tower Beyond Tragedy, The (1950), a poetic drama by Robinson Jeffers. [ANTA Theatre, 32 perf.] Clytemnestra (Judith Anderson) has long hated her husband, Agamemnon (Frederic Tozere), and while he is away at war she falls in love with Aegisthus (Philip Ruston). On Agamemnon's return, Clytemnestra and Aegisthus murder him. She, in turn, is slain by her son, Orestes (Alfred Ryder), to avenge his father's death. The play, which was based on Aeschylus's Oresteia and Jeffers's own poem on the Electra legend, had first been staged a year earlier in California. Despite many glowing notices, it failed to find a public. The famed American poet [John] Robinson JEFFERS (1887–1962), who was born in Pittsburgh, was best known to playgoers for his modern translation of Medea, which Judith Anderson performed to great acclaim in 1947. In 1954 Washington's Arena Stage mounted his version of the Phaedra story, The Cretan Woman. Biography: The Stone Mason of Far House, Melba Bennett, 1966.