Classics in Contemporary Culture

Achilles: Just One of the Girls

A Red Orchid Theatre in Chicago is presenting a novel stage version of the Iliad (until Dec. 19):

Granted, it might sound entirely counterintuitive to create a stage adaptation of “The Iliad” — Homer’s massive epic about the madness and horrors of war — that is specifically meant to be performed by a cast of 13 young girls, a few of whom are still in fifth grade and probably weigh less than 50 pounds soaking wet.

Yet as it turns out, the concept works brilliantly. Just take a peek at playwright Craig Wright’s eloquent hourlong version of the ancient Greek classic (based on work by translator Robert Fagles and Ian Strachan) now onstage at a Red Orchid Theatre — the same company that in earlier holiday seasons presented a memorable production of “A Very Merry Unauthorized Children’s Scientology Pageant.”

 

The girls, members of A Red Orchid’s Youth Ensemble, easily hold their own as soldiers wielding swords and shields and varying degrees of power. And in director Steve Wilson’s spare but evocative production, they impress with the ferocity of their emotions, the sureness of their intellectual attack and the force and clarity of their diction. The fact that you wouldn’t expect the Greek and Trojan warriors of ancient myth to take this form is enough to make you listen to this very adult story in a whole new way. Wilson and fight choreographer Sarah Fornace, were able to elicit surprising things from their young actresses.

It all begins with two “men” arguing over a Barbie doll...

Oh, indeed...

Orphic Revival

The University of Alabama at Birmingham recently sponsored a trip to Greece and Bulgaria in furtherance of their study of theatre and their production of a new play, "Orpheus:  An Experimental Myth."  The trip culminated with a performance of their new play in Sofia.

According to [Emilie] Soffe, “It was a piece that was created by all of us, with some text that was borrowed from poetry and song lyrics. It was about 30 minutes long and was comprised of several different pieces which we wove together to create one show.”

“Within the one piece there were actually eight smaller sections which were connected by transitions,” she said. “We focused mainly on three different aspects of the myth that we found interesting: Love, Loss, and Memory, and the pieces each commented on one of those themes.”

...

[Kristina] Howard says that the group spent two weeks in May traveling through Bulgaria and Greece and that they visited several historic sites throughout Bulgaria and Greece. Among the highlights, according to Howard, were, “Peperikon, the ancient Thracian palace and temple; the Devil's Throat cave, which is said to be where Orpheus entered the Underworld; Orpheus' supposed burial place; the Acropolis, which contains the Parthenon; the ancient temples at Delphi.”

...

Soffe notes that the students compared and contrasted modern day theatre acoustics and those of the ancient Greek theatres they visited. “It was sad for us to realize that theirs were, for the most part, much better,” she said.

The benefits will spill over into next season's "Eurydice"...

Legendary Tale / Legendary Ballet

Clytemnestra, a full-length dance drama by choreographer and dancer Martha Graham originally produced in 1958, was revived earlier this month at (New York) City Ballet.  Robert Gottlieb, who saw the first production, reviews the current version in the New York Times:

IS Martha Graham’s Clytemnestra one of her masterpieces, or is it Hollywood kitsch? People have been arguing about this for half a century, but I’m not the person to settle the question: As it happens, this full-evening version of the Oresteia was the first work of Graham’s I ever saw, back in 1958, its first season, (I’d spent the previous 10 years soaking up ballet), and I was overwhelmed.

Clytemnestra was a revelation—of a great imaginative genius at work, a startling new (to me) dance language, and a dance company at its zenith. I didn’t know Graham’s previous Greek dramas—Cave of the Heart, Night Journey, Errand into the Maze, all of them more compressed, more charged. I only knew I had come upon something awe-inspiring.

Since then, we’ve had to witness the tragedy of Graham’s collapse, both as a choreographer and as a responsible guardian of her own work. She herself wore out, although even during the sad spectacle of the end of her dancing career (when she was well into her 70s), she could lift her arm and thrill you. The company, alas, drastically deteriorated when she dismissed all her chief disciples, and her later works were pathetic shadows of her great accomplishments.

Despite certain vacant passages and strained effects, Clytemnestra still seems to me a landmark achievement, its architecture valid and its force undeniable. It’s been meticulously re-created (it was last seen 15 years ago), so that Graham’s remarkable reimagination of the material unfolds seamlessly and effectively.  But then do we ever get over a first love?

The current dancers have achieved a remarkable level of proficiency, and have been carefully prepared. None of them is of the stature of the original cast (Maurizio Nardi, for instance, is a credible Aegisthus, but he’s no Paul Taylor). I particularly admired Blakeley White-McGuire as a flaming Cassandra and Tadej Brdnik’s tormented Orestes. Tall, severe Jennifer DePalo was an involving Electra, though radically different from Helen McGehee’s ferocious little attack animal.

The key role, of course, is Clytemnestra herself, and the performance of the remarkable Fang-Yi Sheu demonstrates the crucial change that’s come over the Graham repertory. Sheu has been the finest Graham interpreter of recent years, but although she gives us an honest and careful performance, she simply lacks the power, the rage, the passion, the intensity of Graham herself. Throughout the excellent company, in fact, it’s this diminished level of expressivity that fatally marks the difference between the way they dance and what I fell in love with in 1958. Graham, however, is not alone in this. Take today’s New York City Ballet: It’s suffered the same sea change. Wherever you look, in fact, technique is in, feeling is out.

And here's another review, with more description of the dance:

The story here begins in the underworld, with Clytemnestra already dead, and is told in flashbacks. All is seen through her eyes, as she remembers the various events [from her marriage to Orestes' acquittal]. Opera-like supertitles (shown on a screen above the stage) tell you what is going on, which part of the story you’re seeing and when. There was a lot of animosity to the supertitles, which I know from attending a press conference last Thursday are a new addition. The company felt not enough people today were familiar with the story.

In the Company of Myths

Bash:  The Latterday Plays - a trio of one-acts by Neil LaBute - is being staged in Wilmington, NC.  The plays include two apparent adaptations of Greek tragedy:  "Medea Redux" and "Iphigenia in Orem."  From the review in Encore Online:

Morganna Bridgers is equally appealing in “Medea Redux.” This title is more suggestive of a disturbing plot, in fact, based on the Greek myth that has become a contemporary psychological term, the Medea complex. The plot is not unusual; a teenage girl has an affair with her teacher and gets pregnant. The most disturbing aspect of the story is that the character has presumably planned her revenge for years. Bridgers’ dispassionate account of her actions is chillingly revolting and brilliantly acted.

Just like it’s impossible to ignore a car accident, this trilogy captivates. It would be sensible to walk away from the evil, but some inner perversity immobilizes the audience. It couldn’t possibly get worse, but it does. Anthony Lawson plays the protagonist, “just a regular guy,” in “Iphigenia in Orem.” Like “Medea Redux,” the title is revealing. Orem, Utah, is the character’s hometown, but it is also the birthplace of Joseph Smith, founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints. Iphigenia, which ironically means “strong born,” is the daughter of Agamemnon in Greek mythology.

The most shocking element in this story is the absolute denial of culpability; although, it is apparent in different degrees in each story. Lawson’s “aw shucks” performance captures a character who shows no remorse and, in fact, seems to attribute blame to others and to fate. Apparently, life just goes on after committing an unspeakable act: eat pizza, have sex, go to church.

This is a powerful play that should be seen; it is shockingly brutal, but it is real. Ted Bundy was a likable guy. Susan Smith drowned her children because her boyfriend didn’t want kids. The juxtaposition of normal people and insane behavior is not fiction. Don’t go alone.

Is LaBute a modern-day Euripides?  He has the reputation for misogyny and putting despicable characters on stage down pat...There is more information on these plays in a review of an earlier performance.

Septem (Fabulae) Circa Thebas

Seven plays on the subject of Thebes presented in succession?  Don't they know that the ancient world is not relevant these days?  No, but seriously, what an ambitious project! [Globe and Mail]

Ned Dickens has been working on his first play for, oh, about 15 years now.

Of course, when Dickens turned from acting to play writing as his eyesight failed in 1994, he wasn't planning on creating what may be the largest theatrical project in Canadian history.

Back then, he was simply commissioned to pen a new version of Seneca's Oedipus – an appropriate tale of blindness, both literal and figurative, for an artist suffering from advanced glaucoma.

But after tackling the story of the king who gouges his eyes out for Toronto's Die in Debt company – and winning a Dora Award for it – Dickens became interested in expanding his vision to further consider Jocasta, the mother Oedipus loved too much. Then, he became curious about the aftermath of Oedipus's downfall.

Six years later, Dickens's Oedipus had turned into a trilogy. And then he realized what he really wanted to dramatize was the entire history of Thebes.

City of Wine – which recounts the 150-year lifespan of the ancient city from conception to destruction in seven plays and 14 hours – finally gets its full public premiere this week in Toronto. The whole cycle of seven plays will be performed twice, starting today.

It's a fittingly cathartic moment for Dickens after a decade and a half of writing, subsidized by work ranging from teaching to stone masonry.

“It's a pretty wonderful feeling,” he says over the phone from his home in Kingston. “Not everyone gets a magnum opus.

...

City of Wine's two performance cycles at Theatre Passe Muraille this week are part of an unprecedented collaboration between seven of Canada's top acting programs from Simon Fraser University in Vancouver to Sir Wilfred Grenfell College at Memorial University in Corner Brook.

Each school has produced one of the cycle's chapters as a final-year project – in chronological order, they are Harmonia, Pentheus, Laius, Jocasta, Oedipus, Creon and Seven – and they are bringing them together for the first time in Toronto.

While developing City of Wine, Nightswimming's artistic director Brian Quirt realized that partnering with theatre schools was the only way the play cycle could be affordably workshopped.

“The primary goal of the marathon is to allow us and an audience to see the seven plays in sequence, see how they weave together,” says Quirt, who also worked as dramaturge on Dickens's original Oepidus and thus has spent a third of his 45 years working on this project.

...Theatres certainly seem to have an unending passion for the myths of Thebes. Sophocles wrote the most famous plays about the city – Antigone, Oedipus Rex and Oedipus at Colonus – and other playwrights, including Jean Anouilh, Bertolt Brecht, Athol Fugard and Wajdi Mouawad, to name a handful, have been inspired millennia afterwards.

Dickens's cycle isn't simply an adaptation of these older works. Though based on the original myths, it goes off on its own course and fills in the blanks about the city's most famous inhabitants, from founder Cadmus and his goddess-turned-mortal wife Harmonia onwards.

...

Notably Dickens has ditched the Greek chorus for seven individuals who reappear in different guises in each of the plays. These archetypal characters don't have names, but are identified by the props they carry when they first appear in Oedipus: Bowl, Blood, Glass, Bread, Cloth, Firewood and Water.

The central protagonist of City of Wine, however, is Thebes itself.

It's primarily the story of the life and death of a great city.

...

The City of Wine performances start today [4 May 2009] at 4 p.m. and run until Saturday evening at Toronto's Theatre Passe Muraille ( www.nightswimmingtheatre.com ).

Thanks to JS on Classics-L.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Agora

The Girl, the Grouch, and the Goat--a new musical, based on Menander's Dyskolos, by the composer of Urinetown, Mark Hollmann, and co-conspirator Jack Helbig--is now playing in Anaheim at the Chance Theater:

Journey...into a parched village on the outskirts of Athens, that has been in a drought for decades. The only working well in town is controlled by a nasty old grouch named Clemnon, who delights in price-gouging his neighbors. His obsession with maintaining his water monopoly is only matched by his determination to keep his daughter away from all the men in town! However, what will happen when she falls in love with the son of Clemnon’s sworn nemesis, a wealthy and strong-willed widow? Will the gods create mischief? Will it finally rain? And will someone catch one of those wild goats?!?

Reviews:  LATimes; OCRegister; Backstage.

Rock 'n' Roll Sappho

Tom Stoppard's 2006 play, Rock 'n' Roll, now on stage in DC (until the end of May), brings back Sappho's poetry as part of his evocation of the spirit of '68, thus Sappho as a sort of Muse of the Velvet Revolution...I'm all in favor.  Here's part of the Washington Post's review:

...Stoppard's restlessly curious brain takes you down paths that will strike more than a few playgoers as exotic, even opaque. The Prague Spring and Velvet Revolution; the Czech leaders Alexander Dubcek and Gustav Husak; the poetry of Sappho and the music of an obscure underground band, the Plastic People of the Universe; all figure prominently in a story that has as a backdrop the gradual erosion and then rapid collapse of the Soviet empire.

See also DCist...which helpfully links to Lattimore's translation of the Sappho poem (31) in question.

A Wee Bit o'Bacchus

At the National Theatre of Scotland, a new version of Euripides' Bacchae (by David Greig) kicks off the August festivities--starring a buttock-baring Alan Cumming:  campy but not only campy, as Michael Billington (the Guardian) relates:

Greig and [director John] Tiffany, however, lay great stress on the story's sexual quality. The results can be very amusing, as when Tony Curran's stiff-backed Pentheus, eyeing up Dionysus, announces: "You're very good looking - at least that's what a woman would say." But there's more than a touch of camp when after a truly astonishing burst of flame, symbolising the destruction of Pentheus' palace, Cumming strolls on and says "Too much?" And later, coaxing the uptight Theban ruler into donning a slinky green cocktail dress, Cumming cries, "Pentheus, come out, you know you want to." All one can say is that being savagely torn to pieces by murderous Bacchantes seems an excessively high price to pay for being reluctant to emerge from the closet. Even if the first half of the evening sometimes owes more to Julian Clary than Attic tragedy, Tiffany's production builds up a formidable head of steam later on.

The description of Pentheus' death is powerfully delivered by an unnamed member of the chorus who, in their feathered red dresses, possess a foot-stamping, hot-gospelling fervour. From the entrance of Paola Dionisotti as the hapless Agave who, in a fine Bacchic frenzy, has hunted down and killed Pentheus, we are in the realm of gut-wrenching emotion. What makes the scene so moving is the delusion of Agave. "Look at him, my lion," she says defiantly holding up her son's head. And when Ewan Hooper's fine Cadmus tries to intervene, Dionisotti mutters "Dear father, you're so grumpy."

All this is first-rate: camp has been struck and we are into the realm of high drama. Tiffany also pulls off another coup by blinding the audience with a bank of light for Dionysus's final appearance so that we seem to be dazzled by his divinity. We are also reminded that the once fey charmer has now turned into a savage god. On surveying the catastrophic violence around him, he says: "I did not force you - you chose your own path." It seems a deeply disingenuous argument confirming Euripides' cynicism about the gods.

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.