“Well, doesn’t really matter what you think, I mean, I care, I do, I want you to listen to this, here me out, but it’s not really important how you feel about it all in the end…it’s happened now.”

‘iphigenia in orem’ is the first play in Neil Labute’s three one-act collection, ‘Bash: Latter-Day Plays’. It is a modern retelling of the story of Iphigenia, who in Ancient Greek mythology is the daughter of King Agamemnon and is sacrificed by him so that his troops can reach Troy. In Labute’s play, a young man retells his own story of family sacrifice to an unknown listener (us, the audience?). He’s an Utah business man, early 30s, who committed something so horrid to keep his job. And he tries to rationalize his actions to us, or maybe to himself because as he states, “it’s not really important how [we] feel about it.”

The language in this play is very normal, like a friend talking to you. I mean I wouldn’t be this guy’s friend because he just sounds like some white business man that likes sports and movies, and was probably in a Frat in college, etc. But I guess this means that the characterization is on point.

But going back to the plot, I think it’s very interesting to connect losing a job to fighting a war. Because, and especially in capitalistic US, if you lose your job you might as well lose everything. And I’m not saying that what the young man did in the play is right but I can totally see how someone might have a moment of desperation stemming from the potential loss of income.