Into the Light

Marc Castle's new play Into the Light (which I'm directing) opens tonight, so get your tickets while you can!

In addition to writing the play, Marc Castle is starring as Sol, a newly departed soul who arrives in the hereafter only to find that none of the people waiting for him there are the ones he expected. Marc's previous plays have been done at EST, the Neighborhood Playhouse, and La Mama. In another age, he toured as a child actor in the first national company of the musical Camelot. He later wrote about it in his one-man show One Brief Shining Moment.

Acting opposite Marc is Terri Campion, who also wrote My Girl, one of the one-acts going up together with Into the Light. She's perhaps best known for her novel, Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow, but she also has a long list of acting credits, including Hetty in Alice Gerstenberg's Overtones at Metropolitan Playhouse and Clytemnestra in Euripides's Iphigenia in Aulis with Greeks & Company.

Ralph Pachoda appears in the play as Jake, an old acquaintance of Sol's. Ralph is a regular at ARTC's weekly developmental workshop, but he also has had a long career as a classical actor. He appeared Off-Broadway as Creon opposite James Earl Jones in Oedipus by Sophocles. He also did a national tour of Lanford Wilson's Talley's Folly with Maryanne Plunkett.

Rounding out the cast is Jeannie Dalton, who plays Sol's mother Goldie. She's a brilliant comic actress who has played everything from Dunyasha in Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard to Raina in Bernard Shaw's Arms and the Man to Puck in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream to Fanny in Eric Overmyer's On the Verge to Elmire in Moliere's Tartuffe. 

After tonight, we have only three more performances as part of the Two by Four festival playing at HB Studio's 124 Bank Street Theater. We're on again tomorrow, January 24th at 7pm, Sunday the 25th at 3pm, and then our final performance is on Tuesday the 27th at 7pm. I hope to see you there!

Unmasking Electra

Last night, I attended a virtual talk on Eugene O'Neill's trilogy Mourning Becomes Electra by the mother-daughter team of Carole and Beth Wynstra.

Beth, who is an associate professor at Babson College, noted that her mother Carole, the co-president of the Eugene O'Neill Foundation Board, is a much better parent than the character of Christine in the play. Carole said that's a pretty low bar, being that Christine is an adulterous and murderous fiend.

Masks come up frequently in the play, including in the stage directions. Not only were masks used by actors in ancient Greece, but O'Neill originally intended the play to be performed masked, as was his earlier play The Great God Brown when it premiered in 1926. Later, O'Neill decided to discard the mask idea, and when Mourning Becomes Electra premiered in 1931, it was performed unmasked.

O'Neill based the work on another trilogy, The Oresteia by Aeschylus. However, the story of Electra was also told by other Greek dramatists. Both Wynstras agreed that the version by Sophocles is probably the best. Euripides also wrote a play called Electra, though, which goes a little off the rails in spots. In his version of the story, Electra is forced to marry a peasant, but is later rescued by her brother Orestes and his friend Pylades.

In O'Neill's telling of the story, that doesn't happen, but there's still plenty of room for other varieties of familial dysfunction. As the Mannon family tears itself apart, the action is commented upon by the community. In Greek plays, this would have been done by the chorus. While O'Neill did not introduce a chorus per se, he did provide the character of Seth to provide a choral element, along with several minor characters. Carole noted that the singing of the song "Shenandoah" also adds to the feel of a chorus.

Beth pointed out that the actress who originally played Christine, the Clytemnestra figure in O'Neill's work, also appeared in soap advertisements at the same time as she was featured in the play on Broadway. The actress, Alla Nazimova, seemed to be playing with her own image, both on and off stage, emphasizing her own good looks even as she acknowledged that she was an older woman. Nazimova, by the way, went on to perform other important roles on Broadway, including the Priestess in Bernard Shaw's The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles.

The Electra-like role of Lavinia was originally played on Broadway by Alice Brady, who later performed in numerous Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. Apparently, she and Nazimova did not get along. (Neither did their characters, as Lavinia plans her own mother's murder.) Carole mentioned that there was also a film made in 1947 with Rosalind Russell as Lavinia.

Next month, the play is scheduled to run at the Eugene O'Neill Festival in Danville, California. Tickets are already sold out, though, so you'll have to settle for the movie, or perhaps reading the play.

Talfourd's ION

In the latest issue of Theatre Notebook, Christopher Butcher has an excellent article on William Charles Macready bringing Thomas Noon Talfourd's play Ion to the stage.

Though the play shares its title with a tragedy by Euripides, Talfourd's take is quite different, and involves the young prince Ion sacrificing his own life for the good of the state. The author had the piece printed privately and circulated it among a number of notables, including Macready.

The actor was excited about the play, but recognized that audiences might consider him too old to play a young character like Ion. However, impressed by Macready's performance in another tragedy on classical themes, Virginius, Talfourd requested the star actor to appear in the starring role. Macready was only too happy to oblige.

Originally, the play was supposed to be performed for Macready's benefit night at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. Unfortunately, Macready had a violent quarrel with the theatre's manager, Alfred Bunn. Macready had to turn to Talfourd for legal advice in the matter. The actor wanted out of his contract at Drury Lane, and so he ended up using Ion as a pretext for gaining his own dismissal. He wrote to Bunn demanding that the play be brought into rehearsal as soon as possible. Bunn fired Macready for his impudence, which is precisely what the actor wanted.

Even before Bunn had fired him, Macready had begun negotiations to appear at the rival Theatre Royal, Covent Garden. Included in his contract was a stipulation that Ion be performed. Eventually, the date of the premiere was set for May 26, 1836, which was also Talfourd's birthday. Macready wanted the painter Clarkson Stanfield to provide the scenery, though he was unfortunately unavailable.

Ellen Tree agreed to play the role of Clemanthe, and the piece was advertised as being for one night only. Joanna Baillie, the most highly regarded dramatist of her day, was in the audience, as were William Wordsworth, Walter Savage Landor, Henry Crabb Robinson, Henry Hart Milman, Robert Browning, Sheridan Knowles, and Charles Dickens.

The play was a success, with the audience calling for the author to take a bow. Talfourd received numerous letters congratulating him, and plans were made for a lengthier run, rather than just the one-night-only event. Macready had introduced cuts that greatly reduced the role of Clemanthe, and when the play later began its official run, Helen Faucit replaced Ellen Tree. At first, Faucit was disappointed by her own performance, but Talfourd wrote her a kind letter that buoyed her spirits.

Ion was performed June 1, 3, 6, 8, 9, 10, and 11 at Covent Garden, and would have run longer, except Macready had engagements elsewhere. It even led to a minor revival in Greek themes on the London stage. Though the play has been largely forgotten, Butcher's article brings new attention to this important moment in theatrical history.

Incidentally, if you want to read more about Macready, you can find plenty of information about him in my new book, Romantic Actors, Romantic Dramas. Though I don't have a full chapter on Macready, his career is discussed at length, as is the work of Baillie, Browning, Faucit, Knowles, Milman, and others.

And though I don't have an article in this issue of Theatre Notebook, my article "War, Pandemic, and Immortality: 1918 and the Drama of Eternal Life" appears in the latest issue of Shaw. Check it out!

Notes on Post-War Drama

Singing and Dancing Through War

As disastrous as the First World War was, the Second World War was even more devastating for humanity. Eight and a half million soldiers died in World War I, the majority of them in the trenches of Europe. Civilian casualties were even higher, especially when factoring in a world-wide pandemic of influenza, spread by the massive deployment of soldiers. During World War II, however, the distinction between military and civilian deaths became almost irrelevant, as both sides targeted cities in massive bombing campaigns. Perhaps ten times as many people died during World War II than perished on the battlefields of World War I.

Moreover, the end of the war in Europe brought the revelation of what had been going on inside the concentration camps set up by Germany's Nazi government. Prisoners who weren't worked to death, starved, or summarily shot had been ushered into gas chambers to be murdered, and their bodies cremated at an astounding rate. This purposeful liquidation of human life shocked people not so much because of its cruelty, but because of the cold, calculating manner in which it had been carried out by people who had once been the friends and neighbors of many of their victims. Then, the end of the war came, not with a whimper, but with two terrifying atomic blasts over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The world learned that more than a hundred thousand people could be killed by a single bomb.

Throughout all of this, the theatre not only continued, but thrived. For the most part, theatre produced through the war was unabashedly escapist. In Europe this meant that variety acts and musical reviews predominated, while in the United States, where the civilian population was relatively safe from the ravages of war, the musical dramas that had developed before the war became ever more sophisticated, integrating song and dance ever more into a fully imagined storyline. The idea of having an integrated musical with song and dance serving to advance plot and characterization rather than just provide entertainment, was hardly new. Playwright Oscar Hammerstein II and composer Jerome Kern had been able to do that in their 1927 musical Showboat, and George and Ira Gershwin had even won a Pulitzer Prize for drama with the politically themed Of Thee I Sing which opened in 1931.

After the Second World War broke out over Germany's invasion of Poland, however, the still neutral United States churned out musical after musical featuring toe-tapping tunes that were in the service of something far more serious than just selling sheet music. In 1940 lyricist Lorenz Hart and composer Richard Rodgers opened the musical Pal Joey based on the popular short stories of John O'Hara. Songs like "Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered" brought a new level of sophistication to the musical genre while helping to establish vibrant characters on stage. Having to flee Europe, Kurt Weill made a new home on Broadway, penning integrated musicals like Lady in the Dark in 1941. Rodgers and Hammerstein then teamed up to write Oklahoma!, which opened in 1943, two years after the U.S. had officially entered the war. The dark yet still nostalgic look at frontier life seemed to fit the mood of the country perfectly, and the show was a hit, in no small part due to choreography by Agnes DeMille that communicated story and character through dance.

While the war was still raging, Rodgers, Hammerstein, and DeMille opened a new show, Carousel, which went even further both in integrating song and dance with story, and in dealing with serious and even disturbing themes. Based on the Hungarian playwright Ferenc Molnar's play Liliom, the musical Carousel addresses domestic violence, suicide, and speculations about the afterlife. After the war ended, Rodgers and Hammerstein turned their attention to telling the stories of those who had fought it, adapting James A. Michener's book Tales of the South Pacific into the musical South Pacific. The play opened in 1949, just a few years after the events it recounts. In the years that followed, Rodgers and Hammerstein continued to have hits with the musicals The King and I, Flower Drum Song, and The Sound of Music.

Questioning Society

As serious as those musicals were, they still tried to create a happy ending that could reconcile audiences to the disturbing aspects of the world they presented. Other dramatists, however, having lived through the horrors of World War II, used the theatre to openly question a society that could create such death and destruction. Eugene O'Neill, who rose to fame as a writer of expressionist dramas, wrote his most famous plays during the war, though they were not performed until later. O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh was completed in 1939 when World War II first broke out, and returns to a much more realistic style than many of his previous plays. The play opened on Broadway in 1946, and was followed the next year by another play O'Neill had written during the war, A Moon for the Misbegotten. That piece includes a character from the previously written Long Day's Journey into Night, a play considered by many as O'Neill's masterpiece, but which the author did not allow to be performed until after his death in 1953. 

Tennessee Williams, who rose to fame during the war with his memory play The Glass Menagerie, continued to challenge the conventions of society after the war with A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, both of which make allusions to the forbidden topic of homosexuality. While Williams was questioning conventional sexuality, Arthur Miller was questioning economic and political assumptions with plays like All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, and The Crucible. Miller's plays, which were basically realistic, but included harsh social comedy, helped to inspire similar American plays in the 1950s that urged reform. These included William Inge's popular dramas Come Back, Little Sheba, Picnic, and Bus Stop. The professional theatre in New York also began to open up more to African-American dramatists, allowing Alice Childress to have an Off-Broadway success with Trouble in Mind and Lorraine Hansberry to reach Broadway with A Raisin in the Sun.

The American theatre, while pushing boundaries in terms of subject matter, tended to remain very conventional in terms of form. Occasionally, plays like The Glass Menagerie or Death of a Salesman might utilize flashbacks and memory sequences, but they still remained essentially realistic. European writers were more adventurous. The poet T.S. Eliot had already had moderate success with verse dramas in Britain, including Murder in the Cathedral and The Family Reunion, when he wrote The Cocktail Party, a modern drama inspired by Alcestis by Euripides. The play premiered at the Edinburgh Festival in 1949, later transferring to London and New York.

By that time, the French playwright Jean Genet had already shocked audiences with his 1947 play The Maids. Though based on a real-life murder, the play brought a non-realistic sensibility to its subject matter, portraying servants who role-play their employer in a sado-masochistic game. Genet followed up that play with his prison drama Deathwatch. Though the play has elements of realism, it purposefully pushes characters to outrageous extremes to show the venality and purposelessness of mundane ordinary life. In his most famous play, The Balcony, Genet pushed these ideas to a new level, blurring the identities of authority figures including judges, generals, and bishops, and the ordinary people who merely pretend to occupy these roles. Life's meaning itself seemed to be flexible and uncertain, an idea picked up upon by a new movement in the theatre.

Theatre of the Absurd

When the critic Martin Esslin wrote his 1960 essay on Theatre of the Absurd, he was looking back over more than a decade of drama that had mystified audiences. Esslin focused on three playwrights who entertained crowds in spite of the fact that their plays seemed to lack any sort of coherent plot. These authors were the Irish writer Samuel Beckett, the Armenian writer Arthur Adamov, and the Romanian writer Eugene Ionesco. All three seemed to write not so much plays as "anti-plays" in which neither the time nor the place of action is ever clear. Rather than telling a traditional story these plays are pure theatre, creating a magic on the stage that exists completely outside of any normal framework of conceptual reality. Works of Theatre of the Absurd portray the world as an incomprehensible place where dialogue moves in circles and full meaning is never revealed.

Beckett's 1953 play Waiting for Godot draws upon vaudeville acts and circus performances to tell the story of two tramps waiting for a man who might or might not show up to meet them. To call the play an allegory about mankind's search for meaning is not incorrect, but the play does not present clearly identifiable allegorical figures, as a work like Everyman does, or as might be found in expressionistic drama. Instead, the characters are individualistic and highly idiosyncratic. Their dialogue frequently repeats, and they face the world with incomprehension. Beckett's subsequent plays, including Endgame, Krapp's Last Tape, and Happy Days, all follow a similar vein, presenting fascinating characters in dreamscapes where little makes sense.

Arthur Adamov's works have largely faded from the theatre's collective memory, but his 1955 play Ping Pong managed to entertain audiences with nothing other than philosophical conversations about the nature of pinball machines. Ionesco's plays have had a greater staying power. His early one-act plays The Bald Soprano, The Lesson, and The Chairs make little sense, yet continue to entertain. In fact, The Bald Soprano and The Lesson have been playing continually at the Theatre de la Huchette in Paris since 1957. With his 1959 play Rhinoceros, Ionesco married the absurd with the political. The play shows a succession of ordinary people as each transforms into a titular pachyderm. For audience members who had seen many of their friends and neighbors embrace murderous totalitarian ideologies during the Second World War, the relevance of the absurd play to their own lives was clear.

Peter Brook and Director's Theatre

One of the most towering figures of theatre during the post-war era was not a playwright, but a director, Peter Brook. His career began with productions of Shakespeare and other classic authors in the 1940s, but his re-interpretations of classic plays were far from traditional. When asked to direct the Richard Strauss opera Salome, based on the play of the same name by Oscar Wilde, Brook commissioned sets by the surrealist painter Salvador Dali. His production of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus in 1955 utilized ritual techniques to have ribbons of red fabric stand in for the play's infamous bloodshed. Brook brought his non-realistic stagings even to the works of playwrights generally known for their realism, as when he directed the premiere of Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge, complete with a choral character providing narration as if the play were an ancient tragedy. Brook also introduced a number of foreign experimental playwrights to English-language audiences, including the Swiss writer Friedrich Durrenmatt, whose play The Visit Brook directed in 1958.

Brook was heavily influenced by the theories of Antonin Artaud and attempted to bring his hypothetical Theatre of Cruelty to life on the stage. This included performing Artaud's play The Spurt of Blood for the first time, albeit in a modified version. In 1964, Brook combined the theories of Artaud with the Epic Theatre of Bertolt Brecht in a production of a play by the German writer Peter Weiss called The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade, often called Marat/Sade for short. Based on the fact that the notorious pornographer Donatien de Sade frequently did stage plays that were enacted by his fellow inmates in an insane asylum, the drama imagines what one of those performances might have been like if it had portrayed the assassination of a famous leader of the French Revolution. Though the play takes place in 1808, and the play-within-the-play is set in 1793, both reflect on the conditions of a society in the shadow of the Holocaust and nuclear warfare.

Some of Brook's productions departed from the written text, occasionally replacing words with shrill screams or intense physical movement. Though he frequently had productive relationships with playwrights, actors, and designers, critics tended to hail Brook as the genius behind the productions he staged. Other directors followed Brook's lead in taking a strong hand in the work they staged, frequently leaving their own unique stamp on a piece, whether it was a revival of a classic or a brand new play. This was true of the Polish directors Tadeusz Kantor and Jerzy Grotowski, as well as other directors later on, including Ariane Mnouchkine in France and Peter Stein in Germany. For better or for worse, Brook paved the way for theatre moving away from the spoken word and toward a total experience of the senses.

Theatre of the 1960s

The 1960s were a tumultuous decade for the theatre, as well as for the world in general. Durrenmatt, in his 1962 play The Physicists, pictured the world as an asylum, just as Marat/Sade would do later. What made The Physicists so powerful was its overwhelming pessimism, predicting that mad, evil individuals would gain ever greater power. The following year, Durrenmatt premiered Hercules and the Augean Stables, which had begun its life as a radio play. Like The Physicists, it was strikingly pessimistic, portraying an environmental catastrophe for which there is simply no solution.

In the United States, dramatists frequently blended pessimism together with optimism, as was the case in Edward Albee's play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? During the Black Arts Movement, African-American authors brought the civil rights movement to the stage in plays like Blues for Mister Charley by James Baldwin. LeRoi Jones, who later changed his name to Amiri Baraka, captured the spirit of the era in his short play Dutchman. The same year Dutchman premiered, Adrienne Kennedy pushed African-American drama further away from realism with her play Funnyhouse of a Negro, which fractured one woman's personality into a variety of characters played by different actors. She followed that play up with The Owl Answers and A Rat's Mass, which pushed boundaries of form even further by combining the human world with the animalistic.

The British stage was still subject to censorship until 1968, but some playwrights like Joe Orton tried to bring forbidden topics to the stage in spite of government prohibitions. Orton's early play Entertaining Mr. Sloane was a financial failure, though it drew praise from some critics. Orton's break-out play was Loot, a hysterical farce set in a funeral parlor. The work refuses to honor anything, even the dead. Orton's last play, What the Butler Saw, premiered after the abolition of censorship in Britain, so it was able to be even more outrageous. Unfortunately, the production was posthumous, as Orton had been murdered by his lover two years previous to the premiere.

Censorship was also a problem with theatre in Eastern Europe. The Polish writer Slawomir Mrozek began writing Theatre of the Absurd, and his first play The Police was performed in Warsaw and subsequently abroad as well. As Mrozek's work became more political, however, the communist government in Poland became less amenable. His play Tango premiered in the small town of Bydgoszcz rather than in Warsaw, and many of his subsequent works had difficulty getting past censors. In Czechoslovakia, the absurdist writer Vaclav Havel had even greater problems with censorship. His 1965 play The Memorandum made fun of constant changes in language and the government's efforts to spy on its citizens. Though the play managed to get by censors, many of his later plays were not so fortunate, and the writer endured multiple imprisonments for speaking out against the government. Later, however, after the fall of communism, Havel was elected his nation's president.

An Oresteia without Aeschylus

Last night, I saw Robert Icke's original drama Oresteia, a Euripidian meditation on the Iphigenia myth that also includes the story of her brother.

You might be thinking, "Wait, didn't Aeschylus write Oresteia? Isn't it about... you know... Orestes...? Hence the title? What does this play have to do with Euripides and Iphigenia?

The answer is everything. Icke's mis-named four-act drama, which does have some passing resemblances to Aeschylus's trilogy, begins with what is essentially an adaptation of the Euripides play Iphigenia in Aulis. This is the longest act in the play. (Or at least it felt like it.)

What's wrong with adding yet a fourth play onto the cycle Aeschylus wrote (other than that it makes the performance four hours long)? After all, Greek tragedies were originally performed as a tetralogy, with three tragedies followed by a satyr play? (Sadly, we don't have the satyr play that originally accompanied the three tragedies in Aeschylus's Oresteia.)

Nothing's wrong with it, I suppose (other than the disturbing tonal shifts it creates and the before-mentioned four-hour-long running time), but it's not what Aeschylus would have done, or indeed any other Greek dramatist, for that matter. As Aristotle wrote, the ancient Athenians believed that tragedy was the imitation of an action, not a recital of an epic tale. (That was kept for epic poetry.)

Aristotle observed in his Poetics that playwrights "who have dramatized the whole story of the Fall of Troy, instead of selecting portions... either fail utterly or meet with poor success on the stage." Aeschylus's Oresteia (including its lost satyr play Proteus) tells only the story of what happened in the aftermath of the Fall of Troy. By including the the story of Iphigenia, Icke expands the play to include events that happened even before the fighting at Troy began.

Perhaps the thinking was to include the things that ultimately caused the events in the Oresteia, but Aeschylus makes it clear that ultimate causes extend back generations. If one is to include Euripides's Iphigenia at Aulis, why not also include Seneca's play Thyestes, since it tells the story of how the troubles of the House of Atreus actually started? Well, never mind. Icke includes an adaptation of Euripides before sending the audience off on a 15-minute intermission.

The play's second act roughly recounts the events of Agamemnon, the first play in Aeschylus's cycle. Occasionally, Icke includes some sly allusions to passages Aeschylus wrote, such as Klytemnestra discussing global communications in a manner reminiscent of that character's speech about signal fires in Aeschylus. What this play lacks, however, is a chorus, though perhaps the reporters are supposed to be stand-ins for the chorus.

After Aeschylus, the role of the chorus declined, and many of the plays of Euripides can easily be portrayed with no chorus at all. The elimination of the chorus makes this play feel more modern, as Euripides tends to be in general. Icke's third act (performed after a second intermission of ten minutes) sometimes mirrors the Libation Bearers of Aeschylus, but in spirit, it feels closer to the cynical Electra of Euripides.

A third five-minute intermission in Icke's drama is followed by a trial scene somewhat similar to that of The Eumenides by Aeschylus. Icke also takes advantage of some logical inconsistencies in Libation Bearers to create an interesting plot twist that does not exist in Greek mythology. The result is somewhat interesting, but why call this play Oresteia and why list Aeschylus as the playwright?

Had this original drama not claimed to be by Aeschylus, I probably wouldn't have seen it, and therein might lie the answer. If you want to see original plays that actually claim to be original, you might instead want to go to the Secret Theatre in Queens this Saturday, August 13th for the semifinals of their one-act festival.

My play My Fellow Americans made it to the semifinals, so you'll be able to see it on Saturday if you missed it earlier in the run. For more information, watch this space!

Atalanta in Calydon

The Victorian poet Algernon Charles Swinburne is probably best known for his 1866 book Poems and Ballads, but the year before that he published a rather curious verse drama called Atalanta in Calydon.

Just as Swinburne's hero Percy Shelley had written Prometheus Unbound inspired by a lost play by Aeschylus, Atalanta in Calydon takes as its jumping-off point a lost play by Euripides, Meleager. At the beginning of his own drama, Swinburne quotes a Greek fragment from Meleager, roughly translated as: "Do good to them while they live, for every man when he is dead is earth and shade, and nothingness comes to nothing."

Atalanta in Calydon tries to mimic Greek tragedy in form as well as content. Greek dramas typically began with a prologue prior to the entrance of the chorus. In some cases, like Antigone by Sophocles, this prologue was a dialogue between two characters, but Euripides frequently had a single actor relating the prologue, often portraying a character who might never again appear in the play. This is what Swinburne does, having a "Chief Huntsman" recite a hymn to Artemis at the beginning of the play.

The huntress goddess is also honored by the chorus, which sings a classical parados while entering. Their opening lines are frequently anthologized:

     When the hounds of spring are on winter's traces,

         The mother of months in meadow or plain

     Fills the shadows and windy places

         With lisp of leaves and ripple of rain;

     And the brown bright nightingale amorous

     Is half assuaged for Itylus,

     For the Thracian ships and the foreign faces,

         The tongueless vigil and all the pain.

The fact that the chorus is singing about Philomela and Procne hardly bodes well. To avenge the rape of her sister Philomela, Procne murdered her own son Itylus and fed his flesh to her husband, the King of Thrace, who was also Philomela's rapist. In the world of this play, children are precious, but siblings more so.

Atalanta, the title character, is not so much the protagonist of the play as is Althea. The legendary mother of Meleager, Althea had heard the Fates say that her son's life would only last as long as a brand burning in the fire. She plucked the brand from the fire, doused its flames, and preserved it so that her son might live. Althea relates this story to the chorus, who then sing a new hymn:

     Before the beginning of years

         There came to the making of man

     Time, with a gift of tears;

         Grief, with a glass that ran;

     Pleasure, with pain for heaven;

         Summer, with flowers that fell;

     Remembrance fallen from heaven,

         And madness risen from hell;

     Strength without hands to smite;

         Love that endures for a breath:

     Night, the shadow of light,

         And life, the shadow of death.

This grim view of existence precedes the entrance of Meleager, who catalogs all of the heroes assembled to hunt the famous Calydonian boar that is wreaking havoc on the land. It is only after the chorus sings another hymn that Atalanta finally enters. Meleager praises her virtue and beauty, but the other members of the hunting party just want him to shut up so they can go after the boar.

Atalanta is a great huntress, which is why Meleager invited her along on the boar hunt to begin with, but the men want nothing to do with her. Meleager's sexist uncle Plexippus goads him, saying, "Why, if she ride among us for a man, / Sit thou for her and spin; a man grown girl / Is worth a woman weaponed...." Later, he suggests the way she can help with the hunt is by being a human sacrifice. Atalanta speaks up for herself, though, and proclaims her own worthiness.

Ultimately, Atalanta not only joins in with the hunt, but even helps to kill the boar. After Althea gets this news, however, she receives darker tidings. Her two brothers have been killed, and by the hands of her own son. A messenger relates how Meleager tried to give the boar's head and hide to Atalanta, but this enraged Plexippus and his brother Toxeus, who assaulted her. Defending Atalanta, Meleager killed both his uncles, an act that sends Althea into a rage.

Of course, Althea had the means to exact revenge on her son. She burns the brand she once plucked from the fire, and Meleager wastes away and dies. Greek tragedies frequently ended with a kommos, or mixed song shared by both the chorus and main characters. During the final kommos in Atalanta in Calydon, Meleager and Atalanta say their final farewells, and then the young man enters eternal night.

Swinburne went on to write other plays in imitation of older styles, and Poems and Ballads contains a verse drama called The Masque of Queen Bersabe, written in a medieval style and subtitled A Miracle-Play. The poetry of Atalanta in Calydon has had a longer-lasting impact, though.

The Alcestiad

Yesterday, I saw Thornton Wilder's rather wild play The Alcestiad on Roosevelt Island. The outdoor production by Magis Theatre Company is just what New York needs as we head towards the end of a long plague.

A plague, in fact does figure prominently in the work, though it doesn't make a appearance until the third part. The first act shows the princess Alcestis (played beautifully by Mae Roney) decide ultimately to marry young King Admetus, in spite of the fact that she feels called to something higher in life. We then flash forward in time, and a older Alcestis (now played by Margi Sharp Douglas), chooses to take her husband's place in death.

It is that second part that is famous to students of Greek drama, since Euripides dramatized it so effectively, but there was more to the myth, and Wilder wanted to explore what happened after the demigod Hercules brought the queen back from the realm of the dead. When a plague strikes, Alcestis is blamed, since her return from the underworld is the only rational cause people can see for the disaster. Characters stumble about the stage with their faces covered in cloth to protect them from disease. (Yup, been there, still doing that...) They also take any chance they can to blame the disease on some outside force that isn't their fault. (Also sounds familiar.)

Fortunately, the third part of The Alcestiad brings hope for those wearied by disease. A dying girl's call for help can be interpreted as an invitation to despair, but it can also be interpreted as a way forward, a plea to create a better world. All of this is aided by the production's setting, directly behind a decaying smallpox hospital in a park dedicated to the four freedoms heralded by FDR.

As the virus that has afflicted us for so long finally recedes, we begin to experience the first of these freedoms, the freedom of speech and expression, in the form of returning theatre. We can only hope that the other freedoms, freedom to worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear, will not be far behind.

Lillah McCarthy as Dionysus

Euripides's masterpiece The Bacchae won a posthumous first-place prize for the author when it originally premiered at the City Dionysia in 405 BCE. However, it was not generally performed after the collapse of the classical world. In fact, the play's premiere in English did not occur until 1908, when the role of the great god Dionysus was played by none other than the actress Lillah McCarthy.

David Bullen has an excellent article on this production in the most recent issue of Theatre Notebook. Originally, Dionysus would have been played by a man, of course, given the conventions of Greek drama, and throughout the twentieth century, the part has almost always been cast as male. However, Bullen puts McCarthy's portrayal in the context of nineteenth-century actresses like Elizabeth Vestris who expanded the repertoire of female performers by taking on traditionally male roles.

The 1908 production lasted only two matinees, due to a dispute between translator Gilbert Murray and director William Poel, who was famous for his stagings of Elizabethan classics but appears to have been unsuited for a Greek revival. In spite of the fact that the chorus was supposed to consist of frantic maenads, Poel had the women speaking the chorus's lines stay virtually still for the entire play, while other dancers playing maenads danced in a small space at the center of the stage.

McCarthy herself complained about Poel cutting many of her lines and having her stand like "a statue in Ivory & Gold." This was quite a change for the vigorous actress who had originated the role of Ann Whitefield in Bernard Shaw's Man and Superman. The production was apparently so far away from the Dionysian passion Murray imagined that the translator withdrew his consent. McCarthy asked Murray for permission to re-stage the piece if she could find a new director, but alas, nothing came of those plans.

Bullen argues that the ill-fated production still had an effect on British drama, though, including influencing Shaw's Misalliance. Shaw originally crafted the part of Lina Szczepanowska in that play for McCarthy, though the part ultimately went to another performer. Lina literally descends from the heavens in Misalliance (albeit in an airplane rather than on a cloud of glory) and introduces a new Bacchic energy into the lives of a rather staid English family. As Bullen notes, the play is not an adaptation of The Bacchae, but it is certainly influenced by it.

Even more important to Bullen is the play's engagement with the women's suffrage movement, which was backed by many of the artists involved in the production, McCarthy included. Sometimes simply performing a role can be a political act, and the on-stage maenads in many ways reflected the frenzied protests of suffrage advocates off the stage.

Amphitryon

We generally think of the Greeks and Romans as dividing their plays into clear examples of comedies and tragedies, but Plautus's play Amphitryon turns that idea on its head.

In the prologue, we have Mercury, messenger of the gods and patron of thieves and tricksters, tell us the performance will be a tragedy, but then he quickly walks back that declaration:

What? Frowning because I said it's tragedy!

I'm a god. I'll change it for you:

Transform this selfsame play from tragedy to comedy and never blot a line.

Later, Mercury says that instead the play will be a tragicomedy, since you don't have kings and gods in all-out comedy. Thus, the genre of tragicomedy was born, blending together the conventions of two different genres. Later authors who wanted to mix genres could point back to Amphitryon as a model for their own experiments.

In the first act, the conquering general Amphitryon has returned from a war against the Teleboians on behalf of the king of Thebes, Creon. He's brought back with him his faithful servant Sosia, but little do they know the god Jupiter has just spent the night with Amphitryon's wife Alcmena. Jupiter has disguised himself as Amphitryon, and Alcmena is ignorant of the deception. What is more, Mercury has disguised himself as Sosia, who gets beaten up by his own doppelganger.

When the real Amphitryon shows up, Sosia doesn't know how to explain what has happened. Things get even more confused when the general sees his wife for the first time in months, but she assures him that they just parted. Sosia compares Alcmena to the same type of ecstatic women who appear in Euripides's play The Bacchae:

These raving maenads when they're raving--

You mustn't cross them... 

Or you'll make the crazy things still crazier 

And get yourself torn in two. 

Alcmena isn't about to tear anyone in two, yet she has been possessed by a god... though in a different way from the maenads who worshipped Bacchus. She shuts herself up in her house, and when Amphitryon tries to get inside, Mercury as Sosia mocks him and dumps water on his head. This scene provided the model for the first scene of Act III in Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors, though most of that play is inspired by another Plautus work, Menaechmi.

Amphitryon gets resolved when Jupiter miraculously reveals to the general and his household what has been going on the whole time. Alcmena gives birth to two sons, one biologically Amphitryon's, while the other is the child of Jupiter and destined to become the great hero Hercules. The general doesn't mind being cuckolded as long as it was by a god, and he accepts his situation, sending away the prophet Tiresias, who had been called in to sort out the matter.

So many of the characters--Creon, Tiresias, Hercules--appear in other ancient tragedies we have, and apparently the tragic dramatist Sophocles even wrote a play about Amphitryon, though it is now lost. Overall, though, Plautus's Amphitryon presents the action in a decidedly comic manner.

Wole Soyinka

Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka studied at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom, so he was already at home in the U.K. when the Royal Court Theatre premiered his early play The Lion and the Jewel in London in 1959.

An English-language verse comedy of Shakespearian proportions but dealing with the traditional culture of Soyinka's own Yoruba people, The Lion and the Jewel blends together European and African traditions to deal with the conflict between modernization and traditional culture. Sidi, the jewel of the village, gets her picture published in a magazine and comes to think of herself as too good for any of the local men, but she ends up falling for Baroka, an aging leader who is the lion of his community.

Soyinka's play A Dance of the Forest premiered in Nigeria's capital city of Lagos on October 1, 1960, as the new nation celebrated its official first day of independence. Soyinka also started an influential new theatre company that year, the 1960 Masks, which sought to create a distinctly national theatre for Nigeria. Though ethnically Yoruba, Soyinka chose to write in English both to create a unified national theatre that could transcend tribal divisions within the country, and to appeal to an international audience.

The writer's Yoruba heritage still comes through in his plays, though. This is especially true of his 1964 drama The Strong Breed, which is centered around the Yoruba masquerade festival of Egungun. During the festival, an individual designated as a "carrier" is expected to carry all of the evil in the area away from the community. The Strong Breed shows a conflict between the individual and the community come to a head during a celebration of Egungun that does not go as planned--and with tragic results.

The year after he wrote The Strong Breed, Soyinka was arrested for going into a radio station and replacing a tape of a speech by a government official with a tape accusing officials of election fraud. He was held by the government for months, and only released following protests by the international community. His arrest did not stop him from continuing to write plays critical of the authorities, but a greater crisis arose in 1966 when a military coup led to a bloody civil war. During that period, Soyinka was jailed for an even longer period.

Ironically, while he was languishing in prison, Soyinka's plays were achieving international success around the world, including a New York City production of The Trials of Brother Jero. The play pokes fun at a corrupt seaside prophet in Nigeria who cynically uses Christianity to promote his own interests. After a military dictatorship took hold of the country, Soyinka penned a darker sequel, Jero's Metamorphosis, in which the characters in the earlier play align themselves with a murderous government to continue to enrich themselves.

Nigeria's brutal political situation also came through in adaptations Soyinka wrote of Western classics, including The Bacchae of Euripides and Opera Wonyosi, the latter of which reworks Bertolt Brecht's The Threepenny Opera (itself an adaptation of The Beggar's Opera by John Gay) with topical references to contemporary Nigeria. His 1971 play Madmen and Specialists bitterly probes Nigeria's civil war, and had to be written while the author was living in exile due to the country's difficult political situation.

Perhaps Soyinka's most famous work, however, is Death and the King's Horseman. The piece is based on real events that took place under the period of British colonial rule and shows the futility of attempting to force people to change tribal customs. The play greatly increased Soyinka's international profile, and in 1986 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, the first African writer to be so honored. Since winning the award, Soyinka has continued to write, including penning the radio plays A Scourge of Hyacinths and Document of Identity. He has also continued to voice his opinions on a variety of political issues inside and outside Nigeria.

The Importance of Being in the Park

This year, The Public Theater is producing three big-budget plays at the Delacorte in Central Park: Much Ado About Nothing, Coriolanus, and a stage adaptation of the Disney movie Hercules, the last of the three done as part of the theater's Public Works program. However, there are plenty of other great shows to see in the parks this summer, including New York Classical Theatre's delightful new production of The Importance of Being Earnest.

Last night, I saw the classic Oscar Wilde comedy at the north end of in Central Park. Ushers greet you at the entrance at 103rd Street and Central Park West. Bring a blanket or a low folding chair, but make sure it's easy to carry, as you'll be moving from place to place. Each act is performed at a different location around the pond.

And be prepared for a potential surprise. I saw the show with the manly Ademide Akintilo playing Algernon while the charmingly feminine Connie Castanzo played Cecily. However, every other performance, they switch roles, so he plays Cecily, and she plays Algernon. All the other cast members switch roles as well, so every other performance is gender-swapped, which must be rather interesting, to say the least.

The Importance to Being Earnest is only playing until June 16th in Central Park. From June 18th to 23rd, the production will move to Brooklyn Bridge Park at Pier 1. Then, from June 25th through 30th, they'll be at Carl Schurz Park at East 86th Street in Manhattan. You can get more information and sign up for rain cancellation notices here.

Wherever you see it, and whether with a traditional cast or with the roles reversed, do make sure you get to the show. The cast, which includes Jed Peterson and Kristen Calgaro as Jack and Gwendolen, and Tina Stafford and Clay Storseth as Miss Prism and Dr. Chasuble, is excellent. I saw Kate Goehring as a wonderful Lady Bracknell and John Michalski as a deadpan Merriman, but they might be just as good when they switch roles!

William Shakespeare is a perennial favorite for outdoor productions, and tomorrow night Hudson Warehouse is opening a new production of Antony and Cleopatra at the Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument in Riverside Park at 89th Street. As is the case with New York Classical Theatre, they pass a basket, and it's pay-what-you-can. Starting July 4th in the same location, Hudson Warehouse will be putting on a stage adaptation of the Alexandre Dumas novel The Man in the Iron Mask, and in August they'll be back to Shakespeare with The Merry Wives of Windsor.

If Coriolanus and The Merry Wives of Windsor aren't your cup of tea, and you're looking for more familiar Shakespeare territory, Black Henna Productions is doing Hamlet, Viking Prince of Denmark in parks throughout Manhattan, Queens, and Brooklyn this month. Also, Smith Street Stage will be doing Romeo and Juliet in Carroll Park, and starting in July Hip to Hip Theatre Company will be doing traveling productions of A Midsummer Night's Dream and Richard III.

For those who are tired of work by that upstart crow Shakespeare, The Classical Theatre of Harlem is doing a real classic, The Bacchae by Euripides this July in Marcus Garvey Park. Last summer, they did a great job with Sophocles's Antigone, so it should be worth seeing, and once again, donations are appreciated, but there is no admission charged. For those who complain that theatre is too expensive in New York, this summer offers an appropriate response.

Yes, We Do Need Announcements About Taking Photographs During the Show

When you're sitting in a theatre, and a play is going on, a play that your neighbors probably paid good money to see, you don't take pictures. You just don't.

I remember going to see a musical adaptation of the Euripides play Cyclops and the woman right next to me whipped out a large camera and started taking pictures of the action. I motioned to her to put the camera away, but she didn't respond. "You're not supposed to take pictures during the show," I whispered. "Actors Equity has rules against it."

The mention of Actors Equity seemed to register with her. After the show, she told me that the guy playing the cyclops was a former roommate of her son, and she was very excited to see him. She said she had no idea that the union had rules about that sort of thing, and she apologized for using the camera. I told her not to worry about it. She knew now for the future.

Of course, it isn't just Actors Equity that has issues with people taking photographs of plays. The set of Charles Mee's First Love at the Cherry Lane Theatre was quite extraordinary, and a friend of mine decided to take a snapshot of it before the play began. An usher immediately rushed over and asked her to delete the photo. "Intellectual property," she explained. Set designers don't want their work exploited either. It's simple. When you're at a play, you don't take pictures.

Except when you do. When I saw History Alive present the play Cry Innocent at the ATHE conference in Boston, the performers announced that photographs were permitted. However, they explicitly said that we were not allowed to record any video. Well, during the show an audience member started recording video and had to be told by a neighbor to stop it. As with my experience during Cyclops, a conscientious audience member was able to stop a banned practice.

Unfortunately, audiences these days don't seem capable of policing themselves without an announcement from the theatre. Last week, I waited in line for hours to see The Public Theatre's production of The Gospel at Colonus in Central Park. I then spent most of the first act being distracted by a sea of digital screens belonging to people trying to record video of the performance. At first, the ushers didn't seem to care in the slightest. Eventually, the screens started going out, including (at long last) the one being used by the woman with pink hair right in my line of sight. (You know who you are!) Perhaps ushers did belatedly give some warnings.

Before the play began, though, there were no pre-show announcements. I imagine that was to preserve the artistic integrity of the production, which included actors mingling with the audience, welcoming us all to the town of Colonus. We all know not to behave like animals (right?) and a pre-show announcement might have interfered with the mood the production was trying to create. I agree that pre-show announcements shouldn't be necessary before a play, but the fact is, tons of people (and one very annoying person several rows in front of me) apparently can't be relied upon to just do the right thing.

Last night I saw a great show at the Producers Club called Rum & Pirates. The performers announced at the beginning of the show that audience members were welcome to take photos, but could not take video. In spite of the fact that each member of the audience was served three rum drinks over the course of the show (or perhaps because of it), everyone behaved themselves. There were a few screens visible occasionally as folks took single pictures, but for the most part people weren't jerks, and no one tried to take video for minutes and minutes, annoying fellow patrons.

There's a big difference between a boozy audience at the Producers Club and the cultured spectators going to the Delacorte Theatre in Central Park, but if anything you would expect the audience at the Delacorte to be more respectful, and that wasn't the case. The fact is, audience expectations are changing, and if you want audience members to behave themselves, perhaps they simply have to be told what they can and cannot do.

Of course, it wouldn't hurt if the ushers at the Delacorte were a little more quick on their feet, either.

Trojan Women at The Flea

Last night, I saw The Flea Theater's production of The Trojan Women in a new adaptation by Ellen McLaughlin.

Set in modern times, this production remains faithful to the spirit of the original play by Euripides. It begins, like the original, with a prologue by the god Poseidon (played here by Thomas Muccioli). McLaughlin leaves out the conversation between Poseidon and Athena, however, and goes right into the chorus of captive women, led by Hecuba, once Queen of Troy, now a slave.

DeAnna Supplee (in spite of being way too young to play an old woman like Hecuba) does an admirable job, summoning up a queenly grandeur, despite her degraded position. Even more impressive is Lindsley Howard as Hecuba's mad daughter Cassandra. Granted by Apollo the gift of prophesy, but cursed to have no one believe her, Cassandra has known all along precisely what will happen to everyone, but has always been as powerless as the rest of the women are now.

The biggest change McLaughlin introduces into the play has to do with Helen, the woman whose abduction and subsequent faithlessness caused the whole Trojan War. Euripides makes the conflict in his play between Helen and her husband, Menelaus. Helen blames her affair with Paris (also known as Alexander) on Hecuba, claiming (in the Richmond Lattimore translation):

                    She mothered the beginning of all this wickedness.
                    For Paris was her child. And next to her the old king,
                    who would not destroy the infant Alexander, that dream
                    of the firebrand's agony, has ruined Troy, and me.

Though for Euripides, any justice Helen will receive will be at the hands of her husband, McLaughlin decides to show a more harrowing account of the legendary beauty. Anticipating that Menelaus might relent and let Helen live, the chorus turns on her, torturing her savagely offstage. The Flea's production allows the audience to picture the brutality in their imaginations. When Helen (touchingly played by Rebeca Rad) re-emerges, we see the depths of depravity of these women. They are now not only victims, but perpetrators as well.

The heart of the play, however, is the story of Hector's wife, Andromache (played here by Casey Wortman). The Trojan princess cradles an infant son able to--perhaps--one day return and rebuild the towers of Troy. It is a credit to Anne Cecelia Haney's directing that for a moment in this production, we actually believe that there could be a happy ending, in spite of what we know comes next. The soldier Talthybius (Phil Feldman, from The Flea's wonderful production of The Place We Built) enters to take the boy away and hurl him to his death from what remains of Troy's walls.

It has been said that if theatre really could change the world, after The Trojan Women there never would have been another war. Even if it seems like we can't change the world, however, that doesn't mean we can't try. Kudos to McLaughlin and The Flea for at least trying to do their part.

Staging Medea's Chorus

I just saw the Argus Eyes production of Medea at Saint Peter's University in Jersey City. Staging a Greek chorus in a modern-dress production can often be a challenge, but director Mason Beggs found some interesting ways to make it work.

Argus Eyes used the new Robin Robertson translation, which was first published in 2008. The opening passage, given by Euripides to the nurse, instead came over the loud speaker:

                    If only it had never happened like this.
                    If the Argo hadn't opened its sails and flown
                    to Colchis through the Clashing Rocks.
                    If the pines were still standing
                    in the glens of Mount Pelion,
                    not cut and turned 
                    to oars for the Argonauts.
                    If Pelias the king hadn't sent those heroes
                    off to do his bidding, to cross the sea
                    and steal the Golden Fleece.
                    It would all be different. Not as it is.

Periodically, the production returns to the loudspeaker device, which makes sense, as audiences today are more familiar with voiceovers in movies than with soliloquies addressed on stage to an audience.

This first passage, however, is not a from the chorus. The choral lines, if I am not mistaken, were divided among characters listed in the program as "Maid" and "Handmaiden" and--most interestingly--Agathe.

Agathe? I don't remember a character with that name in Medea. But Beggs creates a nosey neighbor who comes over bearing cupcakes and scant comfort for Medea. Why she is named Agathe, I'm not sure, but the device works.

Of course, the chorus in Euripides is usually more peripheral than it is in Aeschylus or Sophocles. The star of this play is clearly Medea, as comes through in Robertson's translation. In one passage, Medea eloquently laments:

                    Of all living, sentient creatures,
                    women are the most unfortunate.
                    We must save and raise a dowry;
                    then the man agrees to marry us
                    becomes master of our bodies:
                    a second burden greater than the first.
                    Loss and insult: that is all we have.

If you'd like to see this production, you have two more chances: Saturday at 2:00 and then again at 7:00 at the Roy Irving Theatre at Saint Peter's University.

Last two chances to see The Bacchae!

You've only got two more chances to see Faux-Real Theatre Company's production of The Bacchae at La Mama. The production is beautifully directed by Mark Greenfield and is well worth seeing.

By all accounts, the Greek dramatist Euripides was an odd fellow. His plays seem by turns feminist, and by turns misogynist. That certainly comes through in The Bacchae, where a roving band of Maenads subverts male authority, running amok in the woods, tearing animals to pieces with their bare hands.

Even more problematic is the relationship Euripides had with the gods. Many people accused him of being overly skeptical, siding with Socrates and helping to corrupt the traditional values of Athens. His final tragic trilogy, however, consisting of The Bacchae, Iphigenia in Aulis, and the now lost Alcmaeon in Corinth, demonstrates a much more complex relationship with religion.

The god Dionysus (played in this production by the magnetic Andrew Bryce) is sympathetic in his love for his mother, Semele, a mortal beloved by Zeus, but who was destroyed be seeing her lover in his full glory. Semele's family didn't believe her, though, and doubted the existence of the new god Dionysus. In revenge, he drives Semele's sisters--Ino, Autone, and Agave--mad. They wander the hills with the other crazed revelers, dancing, drinking, and engaging in all sorts of excess.

As the play goes on, though, the god's revenge seems increasingly gratuitous. Agave's son Pentheus, the new ruler of Thebes, aims to crush the cult of this strange god. PJ Adzima, who portrays Pentheus in this production, plays him as an overconfident politician, winning little sympathy from the audience. As he converses with a stranger (actually Dionysus himself in human form), Pentheus begins to change, though. He comes to appreciate the importance of the irrational urges celebrated by the new god, only his change comes too late.

Being torn to pieces by your aunties can never be a fun experience, but this grisly action usually takes place off stage. Greenfield instead uses puppetry (designed by the talented Lynda White) to dismember Pentheus before our very eyes. When Agave (heartbreakingly portrayed by Fionna Robberson) realizes what she has done to her own son, the god's revenge becomes beyond excessive.

Even more unjust, Semele's father Cadmus (played with comic dexterity by Jy Murphy) has seen the error of his ways, and at the beginning of the play has gone out to join the revelers. Yet Dionysus transforms him into a snake, and drives his daughters out of Thebes.

Is the god good? Evil? Indifferent to humanity. In the end, Euripides seems to be saying that it does not matter. There are forces in the universe more powerful than mere mortals, and we all ignore them at our peril.

If you want to see The Bacchae, it is playing tonight at 7:30 and Sunday at 2:00. For more information, go here:

The Bacchae at LaMama

Stendhal on Theatre

The novelist Marie-Henri Beyle, better known as Stendhal, the author of The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma, also wrote some dramatic criticism in the 1820s, before his career took off as a novelist. In Racine and Shakespeare, Stendhal compared the playwright most praised by classicists with the dramatist most favored by the romantics.

Much of Stendhal's argument relied on oversimplification. For instance, he wrote that the entire dispute between Racine and Shakespeare could be reduced to deciding whether playwrights should observe the unities of place and time. For Stendhal, the answer was clearly no, they shouldn't, and in a long mock-dialogue he made fun of academicians who still clung to the unities.

In the third chapter of Racine and Shakespeare, Stendhal makes the bold claim that Sophocles and Euripides where romantic, and even that Racine was romantic. This is because these authors all tried to suit the age, rather than writing "literature which gave the greatest possible pleasure to their great-grandfathers." Stendhal's alleged romanticism, however, amounts to little more than embracing all that is new. He had harsh words for Byron, calling his tragedies "boring." Schiller had merely "aped Shakespeare" according to Stendhal. On the other hand, he praised Etienne de Jouy's now forgotten play Sylla.

Stendhal is most upfront in his preference for all things modern when discussing triumphal archesof all things:

When Louis XIV had the triumphal arch known as Porte-Saint-Martin erected, the bas-relief on the north side depicted French soldiers attacking the walls of a city. They were armed with helmets and shields and arrayed with coats of arms. Well, I ask you, were the soldiers of Turenne and the Grand Conde who won Louis XIV's battles armed with shields? What good is a shield against a cannonball? Was Turenne killed by a javelin?

According to Stendhal, the Romans were romantics, because "they depicted what was true for their time." Louis XIV's sculptors, by contrast, were classicists, and Stendhal makes clear how much he feels they deserve our contempt.

Was Medea African?

I was speaking yesterday with playwright and theatre scholar Dr. Henry Miller. He mentioned that when he was defending his dissertation back in 2003, he mentioned in passing that Medea was an African.

"What?" cried a member of his committee. "Medea wasn't an African. Medea came from Colchis. Isn't Colchis in Asia?

Fortunately, another member of his committee came to his rescue. "Actually, Colchis used to be ruled by the Egyptians," she said. "Medea could very well have been an African." He was saved.

So where is Colchis, anyway? Well, from a Greek perspective, it was at the ends of the earth. The ancient land of Colchis was in the Caucasian region on the far side of the Black Sea from Greece.

This is around where the present nation of Georgia is today, which might seem like an awful long way for the Egyptians to have traveled, but the Greek writer Herodotus thought differently.

According to Herodotus, the Colchians and the Egyptians were of the same race, and he linked both groups to the Ethiopians, in that all three were among the first to practice circumcision.

Here's what Herodotus says in Book Two of his Histories, in the 1890 translation by George Campbell Macaulay:

For the people of Colchis are evidently Egyptian, and this I perceived for myself before I heard it from others. So when I had come to consider the matter I asked them both; and the Colchians had remembrance of the Egyptians more than the Egyptians of the Colchians; but the Egyptians said they believed that the Colchians were a portion of the army of Sesostris.

Sesostis was a great pharaoh who according to Herodotus conquered "every nation which stood in his way." Herodotus goes on to describe the Colchians, noting "they are dark-skinned and have curly hair." Moreover, they share a number of Egyptian customs, and their language closely resembles Egyptian, Herodotus writes.

So whether the Colchians actually were African or not, Greek playwrights like Euripides probably thought of them as African, or at least as related to Africans. Today, we tend not to think of Medea as an African, but from the perspective of the Greeks, Dr. Miller was absolutely right.

Best Plays of 2013

It's that time of year when people put together their lists of the best plays they've seen over the past 12 months. I've decided to limit myself to performances in New York City that opened in 2013. (Sorry Sleep No More and Heute: Kohlhaas, but you don't qualify.)

So in reverse order, here they are:

#10 KAFKA'S MONKEY
Theatre for a New Audience clearly knew what it was doing when it brought over this one-woman show featuring Kathryn Hunter from The Young Vic in London. Franz Kafka's "A Report to an Academy" came to life like I'd never imagined.

#9 HERAKLES
Aquila Theatre revived this ancient play by Euripides using interviews with actual war veterans in lieu of the choral numbers. Unfortunately, there were only a handful of performances at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in March. Still, those who saw the show will not easily forget it.

#8 FIX ME JESUS
Helen Sneed's comedy about a Texas woman having a mental breakdown in the dressing room of a Neiman Marcus was surprisingly emotional. The Abingdon Theatre did a great job with this piece, which featured fine performances by Lee Roy Rogers, Polly Lee, and Lori Gardner, among others.

#7 NATASHA, PIERRE AND THE GREAT COMET OF 1812
Not everyone I've talked to has loved this show, but I find Dave Malloy's songs to be enchanting. Plus, that Tolstoy guy really knew how to tell a story! This immersive theatre experience was a triumph for the non-profit Ars Nova, and has moved on uptown with a commercial production near Times Square.

#6 THE MUTILATED
How could anyone possibly perform this outrageous late play by Tennessee Williams? By casting Penny Arcade and Mink Stole, of course. This all-too-brief run at the New Ohio Theatre deserved all of the praise it received, and then some. It's a pity the Christmas-themed show had to close before the holidays.

#5 THE COMEDY OF ERRORS
As much as I enjoyed the musicalized version of Love's Labour's Lost this summer, the Public did an even better job with The Comedy of Errors, setting Shakespeare's tale of mis-matched twins in upstate New York. Hamish Linklater and Jesse Tyler Ferguson were hysterical, and Heidi Schreck made a wonderful Adriana.

#4 SAINT JOAN
Bedlam's production of the classic by George Bernard Shaw uses only four actors to tell a magnificent story. This stripped-down, bare-bones version gets to the heart of the story of Joan of Arc, and breaks the audience's heart in the process. Special praise goes to Eric Tucker, who both directs and plays Warwick. It's still running, so get your tickets now!

#3 UNLOCK'D
Sam Carner and Derek Gregor have been working for years on this musical based loosely on Alexander Pope's mock epic poem The Rape of the Lock. Though the material does not seem the most likely candidate for becoming a musical comedy, they pulled it off with panache in Prospect Theatre Company's world premier of the work this summer. Just when you think you know where the play is headed, it goes in a delightful new direction. This show deserves to be done all across the country.

#2 TAMAR OF THE RIVER
Perhaps I'm a little biased, but Marisa Michelson and Joshua H. Cohen gave this town one of the most innovative new musicals it has seen in a long time, beating out even Unlock'd. Kudos to Prospect Theatre Company for producing two of the top plays on this list! I saw Tamar three times, and enjoyed it more with each performance. I know of no immediate plans for a larger production, but some bright producer needs to bring this musical to a larger stage, though hopefully keeping most of the brilliant staging by director Daniel Goldstein.

#1 DIALOGUES DES CARMELITES
This Poulenc opera blew me away when I saw it at the Met in May. They nailed the final scene, where the nuns are guillotined one by one, and all of those voices singing "Salve Regina" go quiet, one after another, until there is only one left, and then.... The world today still faces religious oppression, and far more serious attacks than the "War on Christmas" hyped by Fox News, or the bogus pseudo-attacks on "freedom of religion" that have the American Catholic Bishops constantly crying wolf. This tale of Sister Blanche (not quite a historical figure, but there were plenty of women like her) reminds us that true Christianity calls for self-sacrifice, not constant self-aggrandizement.


So that's my list. Honorable mentions go out to Atlantic Theater Company's The Jammer, La MaMa's Iphigenia at Aulis, Roundabout's The Winslow Boy, and Signature's Cheri.