Seattle Shakespeare Company touts a production of Sophocles’s Electra that will leave you “shocked, dazed, and breathless for more”—though it only delivers on two out of three. It’s hard not to be shocked and dazed by Marya Sea Kaminski’s compelling performance as the title character. She so embodies the vengeful daughter—yanking at her shirt like a girl gone mad (not wild)—you half-believe she’ll finish off Ellen Boyle (playing adulterous mother Clytemnestra) in the dressing room if Darragh Kennan (brother Orestes) can’t do the job onstage.

But by the end of this 90-minute performance, I was wishing for less, not more. With emotions running as high as they do, any additional direction by Sheila Daniels seems superfluous. The chorus in particular distracts with its chanting and chest-pounding. Breaks from the hysteria come infrequently; it makes for enthralling drama, to be sure, but it’s exhausting—the kind of breathless I could do without.

Seattle Shakespeare Company’s ‘Electra’ runs through January 31.