Part VI: Stephen Brown-Fried Stephen Brown-Fried Home Town: Madison, NJ Current Town: Brooklyn, NY Tell me about Orestes: Orestes is a play about what happens at the end of a seemingly endless cycle of violence — when there have been so many retributions and revenges that people start to lose sight of where it all began. And it’s about how a society attempts to make monsters out of the people who it deems to be the causers of that violence — despite the fact that those people may actually be the victims. Euripides wrote it incredibly late in the 5th Century, BCE — so by the time he wrote it, Athens was falling into the Second Peloponnesian War — a war that would essentially end the Athenian Golden Age. You can feel Euripides’ anger and pessimism throughout the play. It’s a play written by someone who knew his country was falling apart, and was attempting to scream from the stage that something was horribly wrong with the entire society. Tell me