This book features an original translation by playwright and author Edward Einhorn of the classic play by Euripedes, accompanied by high-quality black-and-white illustrations by Eric Shanower.
The play itself is moving and certainly worth reading, although this is likely as true of other translations as of this particular one. The opening scenes are not quite as engaging as those later in the text: it's only once characters with different agendas begin engaging in dialog that the strengths of the author are truly evident. Iphigenia's final speech is particularly effective, but at the same time sounds what feel like at least a few false notes to the modern audience member, which are discussed briefly in an appendix.
The illustrations are not so frequent as to overwhelm the text but complement it well by allowing one to read the facial expressions of the characters, much as one might in a dramatic rendering. (Of course, this wouldn't be the case in a traditional tragic performance of the play, in which the actors are masked. Somewhat ironically, the supplementary text reveals that this was the path the director took when staging this translation, meaning that viewers would have experienced the work very differently from readers despite the common text.)
There are a few appendices with details of the stage production and thoughts on the text, as well as a glossary and family tree. These endnotes should probably be taken critically. In particular, the suggestion in the director's notes that 'the mob' is the true antagonist in the play seems dubious to me: I am half inclined to take the (always offstage) protests of the soldiers as merely an excuse for the male characters onstage to act according to their preexisting inclinations. Additionally, I believe that the glossing of "Centaurs" is simply mistaken: modern scholars have hypothesised that centaurs were inspired by horse-riding cultures who interacted with the early Greeks, but within Greek myth itself they were clearly human-horse hybrids.
