Director Stephen Wadsworth’s production of Aeschylus’ ‘Agamemnon,’ presented at the Getty Villa in 2008, set the stage for this month’s production of Sophocles’ ‘Elektra,’ which resolves the emotionally tortuous cycle of justice and revenge that has cursed the House of Atreus for generations. As if blown onto the stage on a fair summer breeze, the Villa’s production brings together American Conservatory Theater Director Carey Perloff, Timberlake Wertenbaker’s new translation and a remarkable ensemble of actors. The story unfolds years after the murder of King Agamemnon. His widow, Clytemnestra, and her lover Aegisthus rule the city of Argos, and confine Elektra to slave status. Seething with thoughts of revenge, Elektra beseeches the gods to bring back her exiled brother, Orestes, to avenge their father’s death. ‘I commissioned this translation two years ago,’ Perloff says, adding that Wertenbaker reads Greek and is a playwright herself.   Perloff, who is a Palisadian by association’her parents Marjorie and Joseph and her sister Nancy are residents’chose ‘Elektra’ for a number of reasons, including its set of fully rounded characters, each with a strong point of view.   ’You are compelled by Clytemnestra’s argument for having murdered her husband,’ Perloff says. ‘Orestes starts out as a cocky hero, thinking that it’s going to be easy to carry out his plot. It never occurs to him the emotional damage to Elektra. Chrysothemis (Elektra’s sister) represents the audience. She just wants to accommodate. All of this keeps the audience interested.   ’The plot is always in motion,’ Perloff adds. ‘At every moment there is a left turn. This is a study of what happens when someone refuses to forget.’   Euripedes’ ‘Electra’ is more psychological, but much less concerned about justice versus democracy, Perloff explains. ‘Sophocles ‘Elektra’ thematic focus is really about the moral consequences of justice and vengeance.’ A classics and comparative literature major at Stanford, Perloff studied the Greek plays and was encouraged by her teachers to read Latin and Greek out loud. Later while on a Fulbright at Oxford, she started directing, which dovetailed with her background in dance, visual arts, literature and archeology. Having grown up in Washington, D.C., she recalls her weekend forays to the Smithsonian with her father and shared his enthusiasm for archeology. ‘At 11, my heroine was Iris Cornelia Love, the archeologist who discovered the Temple of Aphrodite at Knidos, Turkey, considered lost for centuries.’   Perloff pursued classical theater, not only writing plays but also running the Classic Shakespeare Company in New York for five years. In 1992, at 32, she was offered the artistic director job at American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, where she is celebrating her 18th season.   Known for directing innovative productions of classics and championing new writing for the theater, Perloff returns to the Greeks, who she believes still help us make sense of what we’re living through in our times.   In 1988, Perloff directed the world premiere of Ezra Pound’s translation of Sophocles’ ‘Elektra,’ but believes that it’s important to return to the original Greek for an updated perspective on the text. ‘We commissioned a new translation as a kind of bridge between the 5th-century Athens culture, which doesn’t move, and our culture which does, as do our perceptions,’ Perloff says. ‘Notions such as blood-letting and injustice in the world are, sadly, now understood. I treat Timberlake’s translation as if it were a new play.   ’One of the things that is fascinating about classical plays is that we think that we understand the impulse of what went into the play despite the fact that we are not seeing them in the original space.’   Greek plays were performed frequently in ancient Greece. In the 5th century, Athens was the center of cultural, political and military power, and the locus for the festival of Dionysia, which provided a venue for tragedies and comedies.   ’In the original setting, the audience was always present and central,’ Perloff explains, adding that for Olympia Dukakis, who plays the Chorus in this production, the ability to talk directly to peers in the audience was a revelation and incredibly thrilling. ‘Theater was a communal event, where the city could come together to ask questions about important themes, such as vendettas and guilt.’   Perloff views the Villa’s amphitheater and surrounding Mediterranean climate and landscape as a perfect site for the play. ‘Greek theater is larger than life,’ she says. ‘This big, round performance space allows us to move around freely. This is incredibly helpful because it cracks open the play and makes it feel very real.’ To convey the feeling of Clytemnestra’s fear of being murdered and her self-imposed seclusion within a heavily guarded compound, Perloff has wrapped the Villa with caution tape and chain-link fencing.   She points out the irony that Greece was a testosterone-driven society. ‘Women were sidelined, not even allowed to attend the theater. And yet, the Greeks have created the great female roles, where the men, for once, have to sit and listen.   ’It has been a long journey for modern women in terms of directing,’ Perloff says. ‘We visually vest authority with men. There are the BIG plays that require harnessing an enormously big vision. It just took long for women to claim their place.’   (Sophocles’ ‘Elektra’ plays Thursdays through Saturdays, tonight through October 2 at 8 p.m. For tickets ($42; students/seniors $38) call 310- 440-7300 or visit getty.edu.)

Whenever Pacific Palisades resident Dorothy Reinhold brought a dish or dessert to a potluck, everyone would ask: ‘Can I have that recipe?’ Instead of sending out mass e-mails, Reinhold decided to start a food blog, shockinglydelicious.com, to share her scrumptious secrets. She launched the site in April and has received more than 19,000 page views to date. ‘I’ve always loved to cook, starting from my childhood,’ said Reinhold, whose mother taught her recipes from her Italian heritage. Reinhold, a former newspaper editor who lives in the Sunset Mesa neighborhood, has written a food column, ‘Tried and True,’ for the San Gabriel Valley Newspaper Group since 1993 and her recipes have been featured in Taste of Home and Sunset Magazine. Currently, her recipes appear on ThisWeekInThePalisades.com. Especially known for her pies, Reinhold has received 16 ribbons from pie contests in Malibu and Pacific Palisades. Her blueberry pie was recently featured on chef Evan Kleiman’s KCRW’s ‘Good Food’ blog and is also the most popular on her Web site. Other favorites on her blog this summer include recipes for agua fresca watermelon lemonade, strawberry sherbet and grilled Mexican street corn (similar to what is served at Caf’ Habana in Malibu). Since April, she has posted more than 40 recipes to her blog, which she promotes through other food Web sites. People can subscribe to her blog and receive e-mail alerts whenever she posts a new recipe. ‘Some of my recipes are original and others are inspired from someone else’s recipe,’ said Reinhold, who doesn’t anticipate making any money from her blog; it is purely to share her passion and knowledge of cooking. She features seasonal recipes from different ethnic traditions. Her only criteria: The recipe has to result in food that tastes ‘shockingly delicious’ or another one of her favorite phrases, ‘scary good.’ ‘I really think we ought to enjoy what we eat,’ Reinhold said, adding that she likes explosive flavors. Her recipes are not time-consuming, and she writes them so that people can double up on bowls and cooking utensils to reduce clean-up time. ‘With the pace of everyone’s life, time is crucial,’ said Reinhold, a stay-at-home mom who is busy raising her two children, Katie, 13, who attends Malibu Middle School, and Nick, 8, who attends Webster Elementary in Malibu. Through her children, she is active in Theatre Palisades Youth and has served as president of Webster’s PTA for a couple years. Her husband, Andrew Shaner, is a psychiatrist with the VA Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System. To further help her blog readers, she often provides pictures of the entire cooking process. ‘I had a reader thank me for the step-by-step photos because she is a visual learner,’ Reinhold said. Reinhold finds inspiration for her recipes from magazines, dining out at restaurants, friends and the more than 400 cookbooks that she owns. Sometimes, she creates a new recipe using whatever ingredients are in her kitchen. ‘I am a voracious reader of all things food,’ she added. A graduate of USC with a degree in journalism, Reinhold landed her first job out of college as a reporter at the Santa Monica Evening Outlook. ‘It was super fun; I loved it,’ she said, noting that she covered city council and school board meetings. After the Outlook, she worked as managing editor of features for the L.A. Daily News for 10 years. She then spent the next seven years of her career as executive editor for the San Gabriel Valley Newspaper Group. After accepting that job, she began writing her food column. ‘I was looking for something to link me to the original reason that I got into newspapers ‘ writing,’ Reinhold said. ‘As I moved into management positions, I got further away from writing.’ After 25 years working in journalism, Reinhold decided in 2000 to stay at home to raise her daughter, then two years old.   ’It was an extremely hard decision,’ said Reinhold, who commuted to work from Pacific Palisades. ‘Working at a newspaper was the only thing I wanted to do, but I would leave for work and my daughter was asleep, and I would get home, and she would be asleep’I didn’t want to miss her life.’ Ten years later, Reinhold feels content with her choice as she spends time with her children and pursues her joy of cooking. In 2005, Reinhold won a national ‘Peak Rewards’ recipe contest sponsored by the Colorado Potato Administrative Committee for her oven-parmesan fries. Several years ago, she developed more than 100 recipes for Cut ‘N Clean Greens, a grower/packager of cooking greens in Oxnard. While working on that project, she admits her children grew tired of eating so many greens. ‘My son wants me to get a job with Haagen-Dazs next,’ Reinhold said, laughing.

Joe Stern can’t be trusted. The veteran producer of theater, film and TV can’t be trusted to navigate in tame waters. In a conscious from-the-gut decision, the award-winning Stern has made a 180-degree turnabout in his focus and programming at The Matrix, the theatre he has operated on Melrose Avenue since 1976.   Long considered a great white-bread bastion of good theater, The Matrix over the years has produced a remarkable catalogue of award-winning plays, including Becket’s ‘Waiting for Godot,’ Pinter’s ‘The Birthday Party’ and George M. Cohan’s ‘The Tavern,’ all starring top-notch professional actors.   ’The mission of the Matrix has always been staging classical work using great actors,’ Stern explains in prefacing his change of direction.   Somewhere around 2005, the Pacific Palisades resident began to feel the need to branch out, to widen the scope of material to reflect more of the ethnic diversity and issues that concern race, immigration and assimilation in Los Angeles. After all, he had braved the conservative culture of television during his three seasons of as executive producer of ‘Law & Order’ and six-year run of ‘Judging Amy.’   ’In my three years at Law & Order, I had minorities playing lawyers and white-collar professionals. I was breaking down racial stereotypes and tore down the conditioning of the audiences.’ In ‘Judging Amy,’ he altered scripts in terms of gender and race to provide more opportunities for actors.   Determined to see more colors in the audience, Stern achieved a certain satisfaction with the staging of Lydia R. Diamond’s ‘Stick Fly’ in 2009, the first production to reflect his change in orientation.   The story, set in the Martha’s Vineyard summer home of an upper-middle class African-American family, explored parental expectations and sibling rivalry amidst the intertwining issues of class and race.   The play was a success, enjoying sold-out performances throughout the entire run. ‘It was thrilling to see another race in the audience,’ Stern recalls.   Buoyed by the enthusiastic response to the play, Stern took on the decidedly controversial Branden Jacobs-Jenkins play ‘Neighbors,’ which he liked for its re-examination of race that reflects the view of younger African Americans.   ’Neighbors,’ currently on stage at The Matrix, looks at the unraveling of an upwardly mobile mixed-race family when confronted with the new next-door neighbors, the sort of ghetto brethren that assimilated African Americans disdain at a deep emotional level. In the play, college professor Richard uses the N-word when he first sees the uncouth family of black actors, who perform in black face. Fact or simply Richard’s prejudiced projection, the feelings of repulsion, fear and guilt hit both black and white audiences profoundly.   According to director Nitaki Garrett, we look at a group of people who might embarrass us in certain situations and we think to distant ourselves.   ’Many people think this play is old hat,’ Stern says. ‘Older generation African Americans say ‘Enough is enough. Why are we dragging this stuff out?’ I don’t think so. I don’t think any of it is old hat. Other critics think that the sexuality and satire that borders on the grotesque is not funny.’   Indeed, when ‘Neighbors’ was first workshopped at the Matrix last December, and subsequently mounted by New York’s Public Theater in February, it touched off a firestorm, Stern recalls.   When the play opened at The Matrix last week, ‘the KPFK reviewer walked out before the end,’ Stern says. ‘He said that he was repelled by the white audience laughing at blacks. I think the thing is that these ‘liberal whites’ think that they’re the conscience bearers.’ Stern, who was born in Los Angeles and graduated from Fairfax High and UCLA, aimed to become a professional Shakespearean actor. He auditioned at Joe Papp’s Public Theatre and was hired there’his first paid acting job. ‘I did six plays for Joe,’ Stern says, adding that after he turned Joe down for the company’s first cross-country mobile tour in 1971, Joe held it against him. ‘He was a pretty abrasive guy.’ Soon after, Stern was cast in a network series, which brought him back to Los Angeles. He was fired from the show, which led to soul-searching and an honest assessment of his talent. ‘I was just a working actor,’ Stern says. ‘I never wanted it bad enough.’ Nevertheless, Stern has always been a champion for actors and now more than ever thinks that they are an endangered species. ‘The culture doesn’t support them. There is no respect. This is due to a number of factors: the technological age, busted unions and runaway production. A lot of actors are retiring. Many producers think that actors are interchangeable. They’re not!’ Stern has always cast his plays at The Matrix, just as he insisted on final say for his television and film projects. He enjoys a great deal of flexibility at the 99-seat waiver theater, with no board of directors to please, and more recently no subscription series, because his projects materialize over an indeterminate time frame. Of course, this freedom also carries with it the burden of funding the theater, which so far he has managed from ticket sales and his own pocket book. In 1993, Stern and his late wife, Peppy, moved to a house perched overlooking Las Pulgas Canyon with a sliver of an ocean view. Peppy became a force in Pacific Palisades and a stalwart at Kehillah Israel, serving as president from 1983 to 1990. She died in 2002 at 62, after 38 years of marriage.   Stern is now married to photographer and filmmaker Karen Bellone and is enjoying his new life. ‘She’s a bohemian, animal activist. Here I am almost 70 and I have never had a pet, and now we have two dogs.’ Karen’s daughter, Sophia Hedgecock, just entered seventh grade at Wildwood and is in the same class as one of Stern’s grandchildren. Stern has two grown sons and four grandchildren.   Stern is confident that the conversation about race continues to be important in our lives. ‘It’s just as needed as ever because people think that we’re OK now because we’re elected a black President.’   Interestingly, he encountered several surprises in casting ‘Neighbors.’   Some actors didn’t audition because they thought black face was demeaning. Others didn’t want the job of Richard because they thought it an unsympathetic and demeaning role. ‘It takes a lot of courage to put on black face,’ Stern admits. ‘When the actors came out into the lobby after the play, people didn’t recognize then. Recognition is key for an actor.’   Stern knows that he’s onto something and while he has yet to settle on a more cohesive ‘season,’ he wants to continue the exploration.   ’I believe that we’re moving forward with being color blind and becoming more tolerant. But, in the end, the truth is that people don’t like to be uncomfortable. That’s why we can’t look at homeless people.’ And that’s why at the end of ‘Neighbors,’ the black-face cast stands staring at the audience, silent, expressionless, leaving us hanging.   Performances run Thursday, Friday, and Saturday at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday at 2:30 p.m. through October 24 at the Matrix, 7657 Melrose. For tickets ($25) call (323) 852-1445.