Speaking by phone to a critic several weeks before the premiere of …(Iphigenia), director Lileana Blain-Cruz announced: ‘esperanza challenges the absurdity of this myth… Men must kill a young woman so they can go to war. Why repeat what does not work? What does it feel like to be a young woman thrust into this absurd story?’ In fact, the Wayne Shorter-esperanza spalding production exaggerates the myth's absurdity, minimizing the pain of Agamemnon and flattening the familial calamity at the heart of Euripides’ play until it becomes a conflict between aggressive men and suffering women. It is easy to judge these toxic male warriors with their Wagnerian helmets and hints of white nationalism. It is also easy for the female members of the audience to identify with Iphigenia, and with the series of Iphigenias whom the warriors put to death. Yet, at our moment, Shorter and spalding's reimagining of a myth about the sacrifice of a virgin to power a fleet invites us to consider our own implication in an urgent calamity, one in which we are both warrior and virgin.