Act 3 of The Alcestiad, the opera composed by Louise Talma with a libretto by Thornton Wilder, was presented as a concert reading at the Martin Luther King Jr. Library Auditorium in Washington, DC, on 20 July 2025 by the performance company IN Series. The cast consisted of Elizabeth Mondragon in the title role of Alcestis, Brian Arreola as Apollo and Epimenes, Rob McGinness doubling in the roles of Death and King Agis, and Joe Haughton as the Watchman. Joy Schreier was music director and played Talma’s piano reduction of the score. The musical performance was preceded by an introductory narrative that included readings of letters written between Talma and Wilder as they created the opera. The readers were Madison Norwood, Marvin Wayne, and Timothy Nelson, artistic director of IN Series. The narrative text was based on an article on The Alcestiad by Sarah Dorsey in volume 2, number 1, of the Thornton Wilder Journal.This was an important event for scholars and enthusiasts of Wilder and Talma. The Alcestiad, which was the first opera composed by an American woman to be performed in a European opera house, premiered in Frankfurt, Germany, on 1 March 1962, sung to a German version of the libretto, and ran for nine performances. It elicited an extremely warm response from the audience at its premiere, but received tepid critical reviews thereafter. It has not been performed since then in its entirety in German or English. A few excerpts were performed in English at the Yale School of Music on 3 April 1976 (“The Alcestiad Opera”). The IN Series production is therefore the first time a longer, continuous portion of the opera has been performed since 1962. The opera’s score was published by Carl Fischer Music in 1978. The unpublished English libretto and Louise Talma’s piano reduction of the score are among the Talma Papers in the Beinecke Library at Yale University. The IN Series performance was based on the material at Yale.1Wilder’s libretto for the opera is based on his play The Alcestiad, which premiered at the Edinburgh Festival in 1955 with the additional subtitle A Life in the Sun. Wilder had a lifelong fascination with Greco-Roman literature and myth, and this play was his attempt to reproduce the effect of an Athenian tragic triad of related plays, such as one finds in Aeschylus’s Oresteia (Wilder, Alcestiad 1977 ix–x). Wilder’s three acts present three different periods in the mythical life of the Greek princess Alcestis, spaced at twelve-year intervals. To complete the set of three tragic-style movements, Wilder later added a comic satyr play on related mythic material titled The Drunken Sisters, which was first published in the Atlantic Monthly in November 1957.As with the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, popular as an operatic subject from the inception of the genre, Alcestis’s myth recounts an attempt to defy death; in this Alcestis was more fortunate than Eurydice. Alcestis was married to King Admetus of Pherai in the northern Greek land of Thessaly. Years before the marriage, the god Apollo had offended Zeus, his father and king of the gods, and was made to serve Admetus as a mortal shepherd for a year. Admetus had treated Apollo with courtesy rather than haughtiness, and thus earned Apollo’s friendship. The god helped Admetus win Alcestis from her father Pelias, who demanded that any future husband of Alcestis be able to yoke a lion and a boar and plow a field. Apollo also visited the Fates, got them drunk, and persuaded them that when Admetus’s time came to die, he could be saved from death if someone agreed to die for him. (This episode forms the subject of Wilder’s The Drunken Sisters.) Years later, when Admetus’s time to die came, no one, including Admetus’s aged parents, would make the sacrifice. Only his wife Alcestis would die for him. She did so, but Admetus’s friend Hercules went to the underworld, retrieved Alcestis from Death, and reunited the couple. Other versions of the story say that the gods or Persephone herself returned Alcestis to Admetus out of admiration for her courage. It appears to be a story of spousal love and sacrifice and a reward for virtuous behavior and reverence to the gods. Wilder’s sources were Euripides’s play Alcestis, first produced in 438 BCE, brief accounts in Apollodorus’s Library (I.ix.14–15) and Hyginus’s Fabulae (50 and 51), and very importantly for his approach to the story, Thomas’ Bulfinch’s The Age of Fable, a popular compendium of myth first published in 1855 and first encountered by Wilder in his childhood (Wilder, Alcestiad 1977 ix; Fogel).2I said the story of Alcestis “appears to be a story of spousal love and sacrifice” because Euripides, whose tragicomic play Alcestis is the earliest and most complete telling we have of the tale from antiquity, was more interested in the emotional havoc that Apollo’s favor to Admetus would have visited on a real family. Admetus, having willingly accepted his wife’s sacrifice, is so devasted by her death that it is not clear what the point was of his staying alive. Hercules arrives unexpectedly and Admetus, ever the courteous host, forbids the household to tell the strongman that Alcestis has died. Hercules gets drunk and begins to put the moves on a slave boy, who in irritation tells Hercules what has happened. Hercules, suitably angry that Admetus has kept the truth from him, marches offstage to retrieve Alcestis from Death. In the final scene he restores a veiled Alcestis to Admetus but first insists Admetus accept this strange veiled woman into the house. Only then is Alcestis unveiled, and Admetus recognizes his good fortune. According to ancient testimonia, the play was performed in place of a satyr play, noting that “komikoteran echei ten katastrophen” (it has a rather comic outcome).Wilder’s play The Alcestiad expands the story chronologically and thematically. As the title suggests, he shifts the focus from Euripides’s tragicomic Admetus to Alcestis herself. “On one level,” said Wilder, “my play recounts the life of a woman—of many women—from bewildered bride to sorely tested wife to overburdened old age” (Collected Plays 689; see also Dorsey 104; Blank 90). Act 1 begins with a confrontation between Apollo and Death, a scene adapted from Euripides’s prologue to Alcestis and repeated in acts 2 and 3 as the two gods struggle for the life and soul of Alcestis. Act 1 interweaves the wooing of and marriage to Admetus of a reluctant Alcestis with the presence of Apollo as a herdsman in Pherai, and a visit from the senile prophet Teresias who forecasts unexpected consequences of the marriage. Act 2 is Wilder’s version of the action in Euripides’s play, but takes its tone from Bulfinch’s more romantic, Victorian account of the tale. Admetus is dying of a wound inflicted by one of his Herdsmen who may or may not be Apollo or Apollo’s agent. A message comes to Alcestis from Delphi that her husband will live if someone dies in his stead, and here Wilder diverges significantly from Euripides. The old servant Aglaia, the Herdsman who wounded Admetus, and the Watchman all hear of the message from Delphi and all are prepared to die for Admetus. But Alcestis realizes the sacrifice is to be hers. “This is work of love,” she tells the Herdsman, “not of expiation, but of love” (Collected Plays 394). A very drunken and comic Hercules arrives, finally learns of Alcestis’s death from Admetus himself, descends into the underworld, and brings back Alcestis. The resurrection is achieved in pantomime at the end of the act. The loving couple is reunited back on earth without comment.So far so good. Wilder drains the story of Euripides’s familial dysfunction that results from supposed divine favor and good intentions. If not exactly riveting drama (an otherwise positive review of a recent production in New York calls it “stiff” Mandell), Wilder’s first two acts are a play of ideas, spiced with comic figures (Teresias, Hercules, and perhaps Death, who has webbed feet and waddles), thus maintaining the “rather comic” nature of Euripides’s original play. It has focused on Alcestis’s progress from reluctant bride to self-sacrificing wife, while meditating on the complicated nature of divine knowledge and love from the perspectives of Apollo, Death, Alcestis, Admetus, and Hercules.The third act, which is the main point of interest in this review, pivots to tragedy. It is twelve years later. (In the opera libretto it is twenty.) In circumstances not explained in the play, King Agis of Thrace has killed Admetus and two of his three children by Alcestis. The remaining child, Epimenes, is in exile. A plague of unknown provenance is ravaging the land, and the people are demanding cures and answers from the tyrannical King Agis who fails to provide them. Alcestis herself is now a ragged slave woman who is blamed by the Watchman for bringing the plague with her when she was resurrected. Epimenes and his friend Cheriander appear with the intent to kill King Agis in revenge for the deaths of Admetus and his children. They meet Alcestis, and after some discussion and the usual appearance of an identifying token (a belt in this case), mother and son recognize one another. Alcestis and Cheriander argue strongly against the killing of Agis. Alcestis says, “Epimenes, remember your father’s words: that the murderer cuts the sinews of his own heart. . . . A man who has known the joys of revenge may never know any other joy” (Collected Plays 426). King Agis in the meantime is torn between the danger to himself from Epimenes and his terror and the life of his twelve-year-old daughter Laodamia, whom he has locked in the palace to protect her from the plague. In the final scenes Alcestis becomes arbiter of the action, persuading Epimenes and Cheriander to leave the stage to help provide a cure for the plague, and bringing Agis to understand a way out of his own cruelty and despair. Finally left alone, she crumbles from age and exhaustion as Apollo appears and instructs her to drag herself to his (offstage) sacred grove. Alcestis desires her grave but Apollo says, “The grave means an end. You will not have that ending. You are the first of a great number that will not have that ending. Still another step, Alcestis.”Alcestis: And will there be grandchildren and the grandchildren of grandchildren?Apollo: Beyond all counting.Alcestis: Yes. . . . What was his name?Apollo: Admetus.Alcestis: Yes, and the shining one I wanted to serve?Apollo: Apollo.Alcestis: Yes. . . . (Near the gate.) All the thousands of days . . . and the world of cares. . . . (Raising her head, with closed eyes.) And whom do I thank for all the happiness?Apollo: Friends do not ask one another that question. She goes out.Those who have loved one another do not ask one another that question . . . Alcestis. (Collected Plays 429–30)Wilder said, “My third act makes free use of the tradition that Admetus and Alcestis in their old age were supplanted by a tyrant and lived on as slaves in the palace where they had once been the rulers” (qtd in “Notes”; see also Fogel 242). There is no such tradition in the ancient sources, and I have not been able to locate it elsewhere, so what he had found, or thought he remembered, is a mystery. In fact, act 3 is entirely free invention on classical themes. Except for Alcestis, the human characters’ names are invented or are brought over from other ancient sources. He structured the action in part from elements in the Electra tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. In these dramas Orestes and his friend Pylades return from exile to take vengeance on his mother Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus for the murder of Orestes’s father Agamemnon. They discover his sister Electra now reduced to wretched servitude, and together brother and sister plot the murder. Wilder weaves this Electra plot together with scenes suggested by Sophocles’s Oedipus the King for the mysterious plague that has struck Thessaly, and Oedipus at Colonus for Alcestis’s final steps into a sacred grove and immortality.There is, as a result, a little too much going on here and at the same time not enough. On the one hand, we are distracted from the dramatic arc of Alcestis’s life by a plague that is slaughtering the population, a vengeance plot, and Agis’s fear and grief for his twelve-year-old daughter. On the other hand, the three classical Electra tragedies share two dramatic high points: the first is the recognition scene played out between Electra and her returned brother Orestes, and the second is the enactment of the murder of their mother and her lover. Wilder takes the wind out of both these sails with a brief and somewhat unfocused recognition sequence between mother and son, and then a half-hearted assassination plot that is aborted by the objections of Alcestis and then the deaths of a guardsman and Agis’s daughter from the plague. In fact, while imitating the Greek tragic forms Wilder rejected the ancient Greek approach to the material. The Euripidean ironies of Admetus’s acceptance of Alcestis’s death in exchange for his own were undercut in Wilder’s play by Admetus’s ignorance of her sacrifice even as it is happening. In act 3, bloody Greek revenge plots are examined and then rejected in favor of an implied Christian allegory of self-sacrifice, suffering, forgiveness, and resurrection. Yet the Christian allegory of divine love sits uncomfortably amid the overt paganism and the brutal sacrifice of the Thessalian people and Agis’s innocent daughter to Apollo’s plague, which is somehow a sign of the will of the God (capital G in Wilder’s text).At one point in his process of composition Wilder subtitled The Alcestiad “A Play of Questions.”3 Well and good, but the direction of the first two acts suggests there will be progress to some answers, and the third act does not effectively commit to any, as the inconclusiveness of the final lines illustrates. Alcestis tells Epimenes that she has not been unhappy in her wretched servitude because “there is only one misery, and that is ignorance. . . . The God is bringing things to pass in His own way” (Collected Plays 419, 420). And yet, as witnessed by the final lines, to the end of the play she appears still unable to understand the gods’ intentions and her role in them. This was certainly Wilder’s point—he was interested in Kierkegaard’s explorations of the difficulty human and divine have in communicating with one another—but it makes for aporetic and rather frustrating drama.4Indeed, Wilder himself did not think The Alcestiad viable, calling it “not a workable play,” and “a pan of rolls that didn’t get cooked in the in the of of The Alcestiad in English at its 1955 in Edinburgh is not the A German of the play received in and in The recent on New by the in the roles of Alcestis and Hercules, and its the of the third of the plague and the of Agis’s to a an production the and its operatic version of The Alcestiad by Louise Talma was in even while the Edinburgh was Talma and Wilder had been for years a after he had her music at a concert in New They work on a but after Talma Wilder a reading from The Alcestiad, she was that that was the text she wanted to set Blank Wilder Talma the in the for act 3 Wilder the original play to make for the music Blank The libretto an scene in the play that the fear of plague and Agis’s friend who takes an role as between Epimenes and Alcestis in the play, is reduced to a the plot Agis’s daughter Agis is to leave the after his dying of plague, Epimenes as is that one the third act of an opera to be than the first and I I could that the in dramatic to the but this third act to to be even than its much is that is to the unexpected of dramatic It is not as one Alcestis Epimenes and Cheriander that they are in do we know most of the way the act Epimenes to kill Agis. The of Agis’s with his and his into a of a tyrant and Alcestis of a for Epimenes not to kill Agis’s terror of the plague and his death are the way of with his murder of Admetus and of the the libretto, are reduced to or an of the and without them to any As a of dramatic the is much a of have in a as and if we got of all the there be a opera. even a libretto be and made by an opera’s According to Timothy at the IN Series it was in Talma’s music that the to her opera a The original intent had been to The Alcestiad as the final performance in in a of resurrection that with version of Euripides’s Alcestis that included music from and his music for a In the The Alcestiad was to this audience with both the play and the the IN Series made to provide for the work and it was important to present this material. and for and a of the In the of the were left on so that the audience could the and the The introductory of the of the based on letters between Talma and Wilder by Madison and Marvin Wayne, with Timothy as was of as a of the of for an opera The readers also a of the and Wilder and Talma from that 3 of The Alcestiad takes over an to and play. Talma’s music for The Alcestiad is that is to of the suggested Talma had from and The music is not to hear and effectively the dramatic and by the The material in the libretto is presented in an sung by the Apollo, Death, and Alcestis that effectively the of the the of the act, Agis Alcestis and Apollo for bringing the plague to Thessaly. Alcestis herself and the god with a for and without by this “The gods are not as we They do not love for a a then the they She then the to with her the they as as are Admetus and Alcestis’s final with Apollo as she to his grove is set to in its effect of the final of Alcestiad had been by both Wilder and Talma on a going to a Wilder Talma. of the in In an with Talma that it a opera company and even then it was to because there were so many and it was so All the more to IN Series for on this with in that some will take an this was a concert reading there was no or in or for Alcestis and and for Agis and the Watchman. To their Brian Arreola as Apollo and Rob McGinness as Death were by for the consisted of on so that one both the and the of the god at the same time had in the production when with the and In this in they were out of place and a little have been as a did by Talma’s was in his role as Death and also as the tyrannical and King Agis. was to the role of the Epimenes, both in and in with Alcestis. As Apollo he was somewhat by McGinness and with the the that it was Death, and not Apollo, who was the Joe Watchman the dramatic to the and of the As Alcestis, Elizabeth Mondragon to the as she that she was for the plague, to more in her of and over Epimenes and Agis, and then as she into Apollo’s the of the performance was Joy and of the on the She the while a continuous musical narrative the There was of between for Alcestis and the and that the angry between the with or mysterious in the The performance did interest to hear what a performance would I have a that there are where piano more than original I that I have a reluctant for the that to to and and I not or many of the would to the three acts of the opera. is a of IN Series has an in a at this and from two important of the
Robert C. Ketterer (Sun,) studied this question.