Classics in Contemporary Culture

Gospel of Sophocles Reaches Athens

Another American adaptation of Sophocles crosses the pond for a performance this weekend:

The famous gospel version of Sophocles' tragedy "Oedipus at Colonus", entitled "Gospel at Colonus", will be staged on Saturday at the Herod Atticus Odeon, at the foot of the Acropolis, within the framework of this year's Athens Festival. 

The show was created in New York City in 1985 by Lee Breuer, the experimental-theatre director, and composer Bob Telson, founders of the troupe called Mabou Mines. 

Breuer told a press conference in Athens on Wednesday that in the 'Gospel at Colonus' "a link is established between paganism and Christianity, resulting in the redemption of the tortured Oedipus by a happy death." 

Taking part in the cast are The Blind Boys of Alabama, The Legendary Soul Stirrers and The Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York City.  

The performance is taking place in cooperation with American-Hellenic Arts Centre and under the auspices of the US embassy.

Antigone on Behalf of the Homeless

This weekend, a Scottish incarnation of an New York Antigone adaptation will be staged:

Known for finding inspiration in outdoor spaces, Theatre Found will transform Glasgow’s Kelvingrove Park into Central Park for a production of Janusz Glowacki’s Antigone in New York as part of the West End Festival. This lively promenade performance begins outside the GilmorehillG12 theatre where the audience will be led into the park by a shadowy figure known as ‘the policeman’.

Glowacki’s tragi-comedy follows three immigrants who come to America and end up living in the park. The Antigone myth surfaces when a Puerto Rican woman named Anita searches for a dignified way to bury her lover, Paulie. With its moving dialogue and challenging themes, members of the company are hoping the play will raise people’s awareness of Scotland’s own homeless people.

Stage News: Aeschylus Up and Coming

The Philadelphia Theatre Initiative has announced grants, including one to the People's Light and Theatre Company:

...to produce the local premiere of Ellen McLaughlin's adaptation of THE PERSIANS by Aeschylus with original music by Daniel Kluger. A tale of war and national grief, this classic play tells the story of the Athenian defeat of the powerful Persian Empire in 480 BC. After opening on the People's Light mainstage, the production will tour to local high schools.

Meanwhile, more Aeschylus (et al.: specifically, Aeschylus' Agamemnon, Sophocles' Electra, and Euripides' Orestes) is in the works for NYC:

In March, CSC [Classic Stage Company] will present the world premiere of An Oresteia from the pen of acclaimed poet Anne Carson whose work Susan Sontag hailed as "a spellbinding achievement." This ambitious two part theatrical event gathers together the works of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides to tell the epic story of the fall of the House of Atreus. Part One will be directed by CSC Artistic Director Brian Kulick with Gisela Cardinas who received a Drama Desk nomination for her direction of Agamemnon in 2006. Part II will be directed by Paul Lazar whose recent production of Major Bang was a Critic's Choice for both The New York Times and Village Voice.

And in a somewhat less august venue [not that there's anything wrong with that!], the Collin Theatre Center (at Collin County Community College in Plano, Texas), there will be yet another Aeschylean offering:

Big Love by Charles L. Mee, based on The Suppliant Women by Aeschylus. From October 9 - 19, 2008. Fifty brides flee their fifty grooms and seek refuge in a villa on the coast of Italy in this modern re-making of one of the western world's oldest plays. The fifty grooms catch up with the brides, and mayhem ensues: the grooms arrive by helicopter in their flight suits, the women throw themselves over and over again to the ground, pop songs and romantic dances are performed. Finally, unable to escape their forced marriages, 49 of the brides murder 49 of the grooms… and one bride falls in love! Directed by Robin Armstrong.

Classical Western

On the occasion of the Criterion Collection's release of The Furies, by Anthony Mann, some fanfare:

The 1950s were arguably the greatest years of the Western — the period in which cliches were sustained and destabilized through psychology, revisionism, high style, and the kind of grandeur that follows when the most durable cliches are reframed against classical paradigms. Consider "The Furies," in which a baggy reworking of the Oresteia is played out in an agora that stretches to the horizon, encompassing endless cattle pastures, mountainous outposts, a city strip with a saloon and bank, and communities of squatters. Yet ponderousness has no place on this Ponderosa. Anthony Mann was a director who knew his Aeschylus well enough to keep the story front and center, goading it with efficiency and brio, confining the poetry to visual effects that make the story memorable and, in two instances of sudden violence, awful — but in a good, Greek way.
...
"The Furies" is based on a novel by Niven Busch that Criterion includes with the DVD. A long-forgotten generational saga with a subtext of miscegenation that had to be laundered for the movie, it is a reminder that the themes of fratricide and patricide that haunt Mann's best films, as well as the infusion of Freudian motivations, were introduced to Westerns by Busch, as the novelist behind David O. Selznick's production of "Duel in the Sun" (1946) and as the author of the original screenplay for Raoul Walsh's "Pursued" (1947). Both of those films involve murdered fathers, fratricidal obsessions, and pasts that won't let go.
...
Here and in the four subsequent Mann-Stewart Westerns, as well as in Mann's 1958 Gary Cooper Western, "Man of the West," the furies are in the maddened eye of the protagonist. Generational slaughter is either a stain that fratricide expunges or a necessity to cleanse the son.

Odysseus, Model Father

Scott Huler holds up Odysseus as someone to think about--and/or someone whose story one could have purchased for the purpose of gift-giving--on Father's Day (whoops):

When we meet him in "The Odyssey," Odysseus isn't fighting a dragon or charming a goddess - he's doing nothing more noble than staring toward home, weeping because he misses his wife and son. In fact, those famous adventures actually constitute barely a sixth of "The Odyssey" - fully half the poem takes place after Odysseus has arrived home, finding the place overrun by suitors terrorizing his wife and son.

Odysseus rolls up his sleeves and sets things right. And those adventures? Odysseus actually recounts them himself, over drinks. At the time of the poem's action, he's not some young fire-eater. He's a mid-40s guy, sick of it all, who just wants to get home.

Think about it. First off, Odysseus has a job he hates. He knows this Trojan War is a terrible idea, but some cabal (including the boss, Agamemnon) drags him there, against his will, away from his wife and infant son. (He even tries faking illness as an excuse - it doesn't work any better for him than it usually does for you or me.)

In Troy, Odysseus thinks up the Trojan-horse trick that wins the war, but Agamemnon is King of Kings, so don't think Odysseus gets the lion's share of the bonus. And let's not even talk about the commute home, which takes 10 years.

So, there's long hours working a junky job for a lousy boss, where he doesn't get paid what he's worth and misses way too much time with his family. Then an ungodly trip home - and when he gets there the place is in chaos, and instead of putting his feet up for nice cup of honeyed wine, he needs to take a firm hand with the help.

Can you blame him for stopping on the way to have a drink and tell a bunch of strangers some stories that make him look like a hero? Sounds like the daddy track to me. Yet you read about Odysseus as an adventurer, a warrior, a hero, even a husband, but never a dad.

Lynch and Herzog Take on Sophocles

David Lynch and Werner Herzog are reported to be collaborating on a film this summer, entitled My Son, My Son, and drawing on the reservoir of classical drama...

My Son, My Son is based on the true story of a man who, based upon a play by Sophocles, kills his mother with a sword. Lynchian enough already, the film will tell the story in a flashback structure. Also following Lynch's style, it will be shot in DV rather than film.

I take it he has a sister?

UPDATE:  Ah, of course, the RogueClassicist picked this up back when the stories began circulating.

Hadrianus Philosophus?

File under:  People hate to be disabused of their misconceptions about antiquity that are rooted in Victorian prejudices.  Also file under:  Academics love to disabuse people of such misconceptions.  Also also file under:  But sometimes academics are people too.

The real subject:  a famous statue of Hadrian in a philosophical guise, now being re-assessed. [Thanks to RogueClassicism.]

A cherished image of the Roman emperor Hadrian as a gentle, philosophical man wearing the robes of a Greek citizen has been shattered with one blow of a conservator's chisel at the British Museum.

The head, with its neatly trimmed beard and fringe of exquisitely crimped curls, is certainly Hadrian but it seems the body it has been attached to for almost 150 years belongs to somebody else. The statue, a unique piece that has been cited in many biographies of Hadrian as proof of his love for Greek culture and customs, and illustrated countless times, is an ingenious Victorian confection.

Thorsten Opper, curator of the exhibition on Hadrian which opens at the British Museum next month, said he initially felt "gutted" as Tracey Sweek, a stone conservator, delicately removed the layer of Victorian plaster masking the join of head and body.

As soon as the team saw that the carved draperies continued under the plaster, and how awkwardly the head sat into the neck socket, they knew immediately that the two pieces could never have belonged together.

Opper always intended the exhibition to re-examine the myths and truths about the Spanish-born general who became a highly unusual Roman emperor, but had not planned such a literal piece of iconoclasm.

Note to Self

Note to self (and anyone else who cares to listen in):  Read this book. 

• Nancy Shumate, Nation, Empire, Decline: Studies in Rhetorical Continuity from the Romans to the Modern Era. Classical Interfaces, vol. 5.   London:  Duckworth, 2006. [BMCR review here]

Troyjam Revisited

Since I was not entirely clear on the concept when I first learned of it, I suppose it's only fair to return to the subject of Troyjam (now having been the schooled by the composer and his wife apparently, in the comments section, and this Washington Post review of the performance).  Bottom line:  A positive experience. 

When orchestras commission newworks for children's concerts, the results are often cutesy, pandering or forced. Happily, Michael Daugherty and Anne Carson's "Troyjam," presented by the National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center on Sunday, is, instead, something you see all too seldom: a piece of quality work, with strong music and beautiful language, conceived for children. Whether it will actually appeal to children is another question, but one hopes that other orchestras will pick it up and give everyone a chance to find out.

The strength begins with the libretto by Anne Carson, a gifted poet who has created here a luminous assemblage of words. The piece depicts a Trojan War fought with instruments rather than weapons. Most children today may not know what the Trojan War is, and some of Carson's language is almost certainly over their heads ("Another empty evening slumps against the wall of Achilles' heart . . . Night is gristle. He chews it, he ponders. Who will ever end this stupid war if he does not?" or "All the flutes on Hektor's back are picking up the tune, as if a bunch of gods with tiny silver lips were loose inside his quiver"). But the story is reasonably clear, and I would argue, possibly impractically, that exposing children to words of this caliber is a good thing.

Daugherty's music sets lines equally clear and strong, delivered in small doses that leave you wanting more, highlighting the different sections of the orchestra without being for a moment didactic. It is not an inconsiderable feat to create small fragments of music that are catchy and illustrative without smacking of a cartoon soundtrack; Daugherty creates a couple of strong themes, builds the piece around them, and then lets the orchestra have its head, all too briefly, in a narration-free sequence of no more than a few minutes at the end.

The concert as a whole was designed to introduce kids to the various sections of the orchestra, with the help of Mike Rowe, the host of the TV show "Dirty Jobs," who between numbers went among the players to talk about the dirty aspects of what they did (Violinists use hair from a horse's bottom! The brass release spit from their valves!). However, the jokes were not necessarily clear enough for kids to understand them; it was never explained, for example, that horsehair is a component of a violin bow, so the humor went right over some small heads.

Bring on the Tragedy! Bring on the Reception Studies! Bring on the Classless Canadians!

Carey Perloff may be bringing Greek --> Roman --> French --> English drama to the Stratford festival's stage in 2009:

Recently, Perloff has been working on a new version, by the British writer Timberlake Wertenbaker, of Jean Racine's Phedre, the most celebrated of French classical tragedies and a notoriously hard nut for the English-speaking theatre to crack.

...

Canadians speak the classics in a manner that's essentially, and blessedly, classless. So Perloff phoned Antoni Cimolino -- then executive director of the Stratford Festival, now in overall charge as general director. -- and a Stratford workshop was set up. Perloff came as director, bringing with her Olympia Dukakis to play the nurse. The Festival supplied the other actors, with Seana McKenna playing the desire-ravaged Phedre, Scott Wentworth as her husband Theseus, and Jonathan Goad as Hippolytus, her stepson and love-object: practically dream-casting for these roles.

The resulting rehearsed reading was, by all accounts, sensational; there has been talk ever since-- though as yet no official confirmation -- of a full-scale production at the festival in 2009. It would, on the face of it, be criminal for it not to happen.

McKenna, reflecting, in a conversation earlier this year, on the "very intense five days" of the workshop, noted that "you have to go with the Greeks; you can't dip your toes into the Aegean Sea -- you have to jump in."

Housman's Fortunes

Alex Larman at the Guardian's blog comments on Radio 4's recent bio of A. E. Housman:

Housman's reputation burgeoned in the 20th century, partly because of the support of writers such as Kingsley Amis and Betjeman, and partly because in the poetry of Larkin (who described him as "the poet of unhappiness"), there were clear echoes of Housman's wry, wistful reflections on a bygone England that probably never had existed in the first place. Seventy years after his death, Tom Stoppard's masterly and underrated play The Invention Of Love sought to compare the repressed existence of Housman with the fin-de-siècle of Wilde and the Aesthetic movement, giving Housman a sympathetic hearing as a passionate, brilliant man unable to break out against the strictures of society.

This century, Housman's reputation seems to have plummeted. There has been no major biography of him, perhaps on account of the dullness of his life, nor any serious reevaluation of the poetry. He was unfortunate in that he was neither a flashy aesthete nor a daring modernist, producing old-fashioned verse that used simple forms and unflashy language to evoke time, place and mood with consummate skill. Perhaps surprisingly, it was Alan Hollinghurst who has been his most public advocate of late, writing a well-considered and moving foreword to a recent collection, which made a cogent argument for why Housman should be considered first and foremost a queer writer. In his work, with its subtle themes of disguise, ever-shifting personae and, of course, "the love that dare not speak its name", Housman now seems to be closer to his decadent and modernist peers than before. Perhaps Stoppard's comparisons with that great dissembler Wilde are more apt than ever.

Very strange:  "This century, Housman's reputation seems to have plummeted" --- ?

Odyssey: Cartoonish?

In a post on the film Iron Man, Derek Fincham at the blog Illicit Cultural Properties argues that comics are the modern myths, and explores some of the cultural resonances involved:

...Godzilla is a product of Japanese unease in the 1950's following the dropping of the atomic bomb. Spider Man is the first superhero whose skin we can't see in his costume, because in the 1960s Stan Lee wanted to create a superhero for all races. It's hard not to see the struggle of World War II in Tolkien's work. Now, perhaps I'm just an aging fanboy whose read too much Joseph Campbell, but is the story of the Odyssey really that different from a comic book? The point, I think, is not to choose ancient myths over modern pop culture, but to see how the two inform each other. David Simon has openly acknowledged that the Wire is nothing more than Greek tragedy, save instead of gods and goddesses he substitutes in their place modern institutions like police departments, the media, and the school system. If you're paying attention, I think this nexus between Simon's depiction of the Baltimore drug trade with ancient tragedy can inform both our understanding of urban cities, and realize that many similar struggles existed thousands of years ago.

Now, maybe it's just me, but at least could ICP have done the Odyssey the service of comparing it to a "graphic novel" rather than a more lowly "comic book"...?

Department of Corrections

The paper of record needs to stick a post-it in one of its travel resources; actually, defacing the book with a hand-written note would seem to be justified.  Here's Iva Skoch:

One of my favorite corrections sections is in the Travel section of The New York Times. I bet nobody else reads it ,although it can be quite entertaining. This is my favorite correction of this week: "An article on April 20 about Rome at night misidentified the figure from mythology represented in the centerpiece sculpture of the Trevi Fountain. It is Oceanus, the Titan who the ancient Greeks believed ruled the watery elements - not Neptune, the Roman god of the sea."

That wouldn't be so bad, but this is what they included as an excuse: "The error has appeared for years in travel guides about Rome, is found extensively in Internet references, and has infiltrated at least five other articles in The Times since 1981."

Great. Some slacker once put a false piece of information in a guidebook and it's been picked up repeatedly in the last 27 years. You would think that the NY Times wouldn't rely on guidebooks for their fact-checking.

Only don't click on that Wikipedia link, because the entry identifies the figure as Neptune!

What does it matter, anyway?  Well...Neptune is just one of those Johnny-come-lately Olympians, whereas Oceanus is the more primordial and more philosophically amenable being...or so Nicola Salvi (the original designer of the Trevi Fountain) saw it.  In his explanation, which I'm getting from The Art Bulletin 38 (1956), 169-71, he says:

Oceanus, whose statue will be placed on the Fountain of Trevi should certainly be considered as belonging to the same series as the other ancient deities who, under the cloak of mysterious imagery, have always symbolized useful lessons in moral philosophy or have contained hidden explanations of natural phenomena. This god, according to those authors who have had occasion to speak of him, has never been the subject of fanciful legends, but has always been referred to in terms which denote a Power as superior to other Powers, as a universal Cause is superior to particular Causes. This clearly shows us that he was thought of by ancient philosophers as one of those prime, most powerful agents among natural phenomena, and was one of the original sources of an infinite number of products which depended on him.

In more specific terms he may be described thus. Oceanus has been represented at times as a figure traversing the seas on a chariot drawn by dolphins, preceded by Tritons, and followed by a numerous train of sea Nymphs. This image signifies that the visible and immense body of ocean waters are held together and constrained in the broad bosom of the Earth, and this water when it is in its assigned place we call the Sea. This Sea is, so to speak, the perpetual source which has the power to diffuse various parts of itself, symbolized by the Tritons and the sea Nymphs, who go forth to give necessary sustenance to living matter for the productivity and conservation of new forms of life, and this we can see. But after this function has been served, these parts return in a perpetual cycle to take on new spirit and a new strength from the whole, that is to say from the sea itself.

At other times Oceanus has been called the father of all things, and was believed to be the son of the Sky and of the Earth; in this role he is not the symbol of the powerful operative forces of water gathered together in the sea so much as the actual working manifestation of these powers, which appear as moisture; in this form water permeates all material things, and winding through the veins of Earth, even into the most minute recesses, reveals itself as the everlasting source of that infinite production which we see in Nature, which water also is capable of perpetuating in its productivity by its untiring ministrations.

Thus, in whatever way we choose to visualize Oceanus, it will always be true that the image must embody an impression of power which has no limit, and is not restricted in the material world by any bounds. It is completely free and always at work in even the smallest parts of the created Universe. Here it is brought and distributes itself to make useful those parts of Earth which give nutrition and birth to new forms. At the same time it quenches the excessive heat which would destroy this life. Thus water can be called the only everlasting source of continuous being.

[...and he goes on for a page or two after that, with the specifics...]

Pre-Med Classics

In an article on the various possibilities for prospective doctors at Stanford:

Other pre-meds have found themselves gravitating towards Classics, a traditional home for students who want to spend time with Plato and Catullus, for a kind of complexity different from that of organic chemistry.

“Classics has done wonders to complement my science classes,” said Classics major Nikita Vashi ‘09. “Not only does it have direct applications, for instance in that a lot of medical/scientific terminology has linguistic roots in Ancient Greek, but there are so many connections between the fields that, to this day, surprise me every time they pop up.”

Classics major Jiahui Lin ‘10, who had been pursuing a degree in Biomedical Engineering, also found a home working with the ancients and revisiting the Latin she had taken in high school.

“It sounds cheesy, but when I switched in I fell in love with it again,” Lin said.

“Plus at the Classics socials they have better food, and I’m a big foodie, so I definitely think it was a good decision,” she added.

Lavinia Revisited

Ursula K. Le Guin has rewritten the Aeneid from the perspective of...Lavinia (cf. Margaret Atwood's Penelopiad), using a Vergilian narrative device - Lavinia is visited by the (future) shade of the poet himself.  "Oh Lavinia," he tells her, "You are worth ten Camillas. And I never saw it."  From Laura Miller (Salon):

Lavinia makes for an unlikely heroine, which is just what Le Guin likes about her. From Mulan to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, sassy, kick-ass girls are preferred nowadays to circumspect homebodies like Virgil's Latin princess. There may even be a touch of self-reproach in Le Guin's choice of Lavinia as her main character, since the heroine of her 1971 novel, "The Tombs of Atuan," is a priestess named Tenar who rebels against a life entirely devoted to serving a pantheon of nameless, implacable gods. Lavinia, by contrast, embraces the ritual aspect of her designated role, all the humble and solemn daily sacrifices, the scattering of sacred salt, the tending of clan totems, and even her own fate, as a woman destined to have little choice in who her husband will be.

..."Lavinia" is also not a revisionist fiction in which a minor character from a famous book (Mr. Rochester's wife or Dr. Jekyll's maid, for example) finally gets to correct the official record. Le Guin clearly loves Virgil and the "essentially untranslatable" beauty of his verse, and so does her heroine, who gets a chance to hear the latter when the poet's shade appears to her during a pilgrimage to a sacred grove. Aware of her fictionality (all of the characters in the "Aeneid" are derived from old legends but are otherwise inventions of Virgil, although only Lavinia realizes this), she sees her own tale as the completion of her creator's work, a subject that (in this telling at least) he regretted not getting the chance to explore before his death. "I'm not sure of the nature of my existence," Lavinia explains. "As far as I know, it was my poet who gave me any reality at all." Perhaps "the events I remember only come to exist as I write them, or as he wrote them."

Karen Long (The Plain Dealer) likes it:

"Like Spartan Helen, I caused a war," Lavinia tells us. "She caused hers by letting men who wanted her take her. I caused mine because I wouldn't be given, wouldn't be taken, but chose my man and my fate. The man was famous, the fate obscure: not a bad balance."

This wry, original voice meditates the treachery, terror and warfare that preoccupy the last six books of "The Aeneid." Le Guin brings an almost anthropological preciseness to cobbling her alternative universe. She works hard over the maps, figuring where the rivers and hills met the poetic legend, how many miles her characters might actually have to walk.

Sam Munson (NYSun), however, finds it prosaic:

It seems clear that Ms. Le Guin harbored no epic ambitions for her book. Which may, indeed, have been her central problem: To contend with titans requires arrogance and outsize will. But Ms. Le Guin chose to examine the rich and troubled inner life of a wise-beyond-her-years girl confronted with her romantic and sexual destiny. Even in this small fragment of an epic, there's enormous potential — a spurned prince, a war, a forced marriage that fosters real love, an insane mother. But Ms. Le Guin makes almost nothing of this rich material, instead allowing over-ample time to Lavinia's flaccid introspections...[ouch!]

[Ah, now I see that once again, I'm late to the party:  the RogueClassicist has of course already linked to a couple of reviews.]