The stage goes black. Claudia lays her head on Cassius’s shoulder. He tightens his arms around her, his protective hold promising a safe place to let go, to feel everything all at once.
When the lights return, the large ship is gone, but a smaller one drifts slowly across the stage. Standing in the center of the small ship is Marcherie playing Iphigenia, clad in the dress Claudia tied at the shoulder. It’s lighter, whiter, under the stage lights. She looks every bit the star that Odette claimed her to be.
A soft, quiet string quartet sings beneath her gentle melody.
I have been good
And he, the why.
My Achilles, I never knew
It would be you,
Warrior that you would have been.
To him I say
Nothing.
Your temperament will be made lovely
By me’own hand.
Calchas returns to the stage like a cloud above Iphigenia. “A deer for a daughter, a daughter for a deer,” he sings. Enter the drums. The tone darkens. Her ship moves faster.
Carried on waves of centuries
Toward the fate of every maiden,
I heard the warning in the wind.
I knew.
Oh, how I knew,
My girlhood, a fulcrum
Offering me up to the world,
Countered by the weight
Of my want,
Heavier than instinct.
Iphigenia departs the ship. Far behind her stand Achilles, Agamemnon, and a sharpened silver sword. The daughter only looks up. She doesn’t let herself see her fate, though she knows just where it waits.
I kept my eyes above
On the stuttering blue between clouds.
No prophecy could be mine
For I am nothing
But a girl
Made for nothing
