Breaking the cycle Brown’s The Greeks is action-packed BY BILL RODRIGUEZ

Those who refuse to learn from literature will have to relive history.

A finely honed adaptation of John Barton and Kenneth Cavander’s The Greeks, retitled The Greeks/The Murders, has cut through the subplots of nine plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides to thump the bloody heart of the matter onto the stage: war is all we need to know of hell, revenge is its perpetual motion machine, and the blame is within each of us.

Brown University Theater and Sock & Buskin are wrestling these sprawling events to the stage in the large Stuart Theater (through November 20), a black catwalk arching above the action like Mount Olympus. In three acts, the action speeds from a defeated Troy that is being sacked, to Mycenae where the victorious Agamemnon takes the temple virgin Cassandra home as plunder; and eventually, after his jealous wife Clytemnestra murders him, to further consequences that play out seven years later.

Despite the nearly three-hour length, director John Emigh and fellow adapter James Rutherford make the action speed by, since every scene is fraught with life-and-death consequences. Although Greek tragedies are written for static masked actors, to heighten the import of long monologues, the staging here is brisk. Members of the female chorus deliver individual lines with specific personality, when the chorus isn’t stressing consensus by speaking together. While just about all of the dialogue is taken from nine Greek tragedies, the translations by Kenneth Cavander have poetic cadence but no whiff of dusty classicism.

"Who is to blame? Who is to blame?" are the opening words here, which echo past the final curtain. We are at the emotional high point of the Trojan War, when the 10-year siege has just been won by clever Greek trickery. Freshly slain King Priam’s queen, Hecuba (Gloria Huwiler), is lamenting with her daughters and other women of the court, all of whom are being distributed as slaves to the victors.

There is plenty of blame to go around — and refusal to accept — in this sea of brewing hatred. Even Helen (Annabel Topham), who caused the war by running away with Paris, wards off responsibility by accusing Hecuba of having let Paris live despite prophetic warning. But blame has consequence. The vanquished must be punished or the valiant dead of the victors will be dishonored, the gods insulted if sacrifices are stinted. The King of Argos, Agamemnon (Christian Luening), went so far as to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia (Jessie Hopkins) to assure safe passage for his fleet at the war’s outset.

The last acts go into the aftermath. Back home in the palace of Agamemnon, his wife Clytemnestra (Katie Meister) bides her time when she sees that he has brought back the beautiful princess Cassandra (Theodora Greece) as a trophy. (A clever touch in the original 10-play cycle developed in 1979 by director John Barton for the Royal Shakespeare Company is that since Apollo condemned Cassandra’s prophecies to sound like babel, they are literally Greek to us. Trumping that, in this production the prophetess not only actually is Greek, but also is a princess, by traditional title: Her Royal Highness Theodora of Greece and Denmark. Good old Brown.)

By the end, the exiled Orestes (Chris Bremmer) has killed Clytemnestra, his mother, for butchering his father. His sister Electra (Aja Nisenson) has been clamoring for that, but both are filled with remorse after this reprisal — instantly, the one bump in this flowing abridgement. (Nisenson stands out among the other talents in the cast, giving the bedraggled Electra broad enough personality to convey both humor and anguish quite effectively.)

To paraphrase Hamlet, "What’s Hecuba to you or you to Hecuba that you should weep for her?" Well, think of it as weeping for all of us. Greek tragedies as a whole, and certainly this precisely focused summary of them, demonstrate and lament the universal human cycle of violence/ revenge/violence. In the Mideast after the latest bombing, whether on the ground or from the air, or after tragedy closer to home, such cycles may appear as inevitable as they have been perpetual.

More than one character here perceives and regrets that hatred is consuming them even as its momentum drives them fiercely on. Art, of whatever form, doesn’t have to be explicitly antiwar to break the cycle. All it has to do is what this intelligently conceived and accomplished production does: stop us in our tracks like a slap, giving us a moment to look around and come to our senses.