Why did audiences find The Family Reunion difficult to understand?

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T.S. Eliot stands at a chalkboard, writing a diagram with letters and Greek symbols representing characters for a play, in his office at the Institute for Advanced Study. — T.S. Eliot T.S. Eliot working on his play *The Cocktail Party* in his office at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, 1948. The letters of the alphabet in his diagram represent characters in the play. The Greek letters represent characters yet to be invented.

Audiences found T.S. Eliot’s The Family Reunion (1939) difficult to understand because they were baffled by his attempt to translate the Greek myth of Orestes into a modern domestic drama.1

The public felt uneasy due to the play's jarring combination of disparate elements, which included:

Psychological realism1
Mythical apparitions appearing at a drawing-room window1
A comic chorus consisting of uncles and aunts1

While the play features moments of great poignancy and some of the finest dramatic verse written since the Elizabethans, these stylistic choices made the work less popular than his other theatrical efforts.1