ABSTRACT
This case study details the manner in which the author deployed the process of confrontation, excavation, and composition in his production of Ellen McLaughlin's Iphigenia and Other Daughters – a bold, contemporary, feminist re-imagining of the fall of the House of Atreus that reconsiders the role of women in history. Interested "in redefining the concept of history from a female perspective," McLaughlin's play is a trilogy: a complete revisioning of Euripides' Iphigenia in Aulis and Iphigenia in Tauris and Sophocles' Electra. The author always comes to the first rehearsal with a strong, thoroughly-crafted sense of metaphor and vision for the production. In author's own practice and teaching, composing encourages expressive movement, rather than descriptive movement. As McLaughlin wrote her female characters into active history, the female actors dauntlessly wrote themselves into the very fabric of the performance text, moving and acting in expansive ways.
