Electra.

The new Broadway Electra is a heroine with an attitude. Mourning for her father, King Agamemnon of Mycenae, years after her mother Clytemnestra killed him, the eponymous heroine of the Sophocles tragedy Electra is obstinate, opinionated, and more than a little smug. "I will never cease to call out my pain and my complaint!" she wails in this electrically tense production, which David Leveaux has directed from Irish playwright Frank McGuinness's newly adapted script.

Camping outside the palace, where Clytemnestra is living with a lover, Electra wallows in grief so ostentatious it makes sackcloth and ashes look like confetti. Playing the title role, the elfin Zoe Wanamaker mopes around in a brown coat that must be a man's extra-large (it's her father's, no doubt) and wipes her nose with a cuff so long it obscures her hand. She throws herself full-length on a stylized altar and then pitches herself off it to roll on the ground in utter despair. The actress's short spiky hair appears to be balding in places, and when she laments, her voice sometimes rasps as if she were at death's door.

Which, in a sense, she is - the creepily stark set (designed by Johan Engels) consists of a gray brick wall enclosing a gigantic gray sheet-metal door that is left partially ajar so people can slip in and out to murder each other. Downstage, a dingy white plank, suggesting both an altar and a hospital bed, and a few broken chairs rest on the dirt that covers the entire stage surface.

The spot looks devastated, and it is not surprising to read, in the program, director Leveaux's note comparing the play's "cycle of violence" to the war in the Balkans. And certainly the deliberately guarded bitterness of Electra and her long-lost brother Orestes (Michael Cumpsty), and their refusal to consider their mother's point of view (Clytemnestra killed her husband because he had sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia to the gods), seem eerily similar to the resentments described in dispatches from Bosnia and elsewhere.

But the play's near-unwavering focus on its heroine - from the unnerving offstage wail that heralds her first appearance to her final vindication - suggests a less literal meaning for the desolation at Mycenae. Just as the play's drab color scheme appears, after her entrance, to echo the brown of her coat, so the blight on her family and their dependents begins to seem an extension of her mood. Everyone she meets falls under her spell - even the Chorus of Mycenae (played as a knowing peasant woman in a headscarf by actress Pat Carroll) is fascinated by her. Similarly swayed by Wanamaker's charisma, the audience can almost see Electra giving the cycle of violence a helpful little push.

The emphasis on personality comes as a surprise, because classic tragedy more often seems impersonal; governed by attitude in its traditional sense (an arrangement or posture) rather than its slangy modern sense (a sort of egoistic crankiness). Individuals in tragedy often fade into the stately pattern of life, death, and fate. "The tragic writers believed easily in greatness just as we believe easily in meanness," the literary critic Joseph Wood Krutch wrote, describing the solemnly beautiful tragic order. But if we can spot greatness in Electra - in the dignity of Claire Bloom, dressed in scarlet as the regal, doomed Clytemnestra, for example - we can see the meanness as well.