Staging Ancient Drama: The Difference Women Make

Abstract

Staging Ancient Drama: The Difference Women Make Mary-Kay Gamel Sue-Ellen Case, an eminent theorist of performance, has issued a strong challenge to feminists who work on ancient Mediterranean drama.1 The ‘classics’ of Athenian, Roman and Elizabethan drama were all produced by cultures that denied women access to the stage and allowed them few legal and economic rights. The values of a patriarchal society are embedded in the texts of these periods. Female characters reflect the absence of real women from the stage and the reasons for their absence. Each culture that regards it as valuable to revive those classic plays actively participates in the same patriarchal subtext which created those female characters as ‘Woman.’ Case urges contemporary feminists to refuse to participate in this subtext. Instead they should seek to expose “the methodology and assumptions of patriarchal production” and the alliance of theatre with patriarchal prejudice …. The feminist theatre-practitioner might, for instance, understand Lysistrata not as a good play for women, but as a male drag show, with bur1 Feminism and Theatre (New York 1988) 12. Gamel: Staging Ancient Drama 23 lesque jokes about breasts and phalluses playing well in the drag tradition. The feminist director might cast a man in the role of Medea, underscoring the patriarchal prejudices of ownership and jealousy and the ownership of children as male concerns. The feminist actor may no longer regard these roles as desirable for her career. Overall, feminist practitioners and scholars may decide that such plays do not belong in the canon—and that they are not central to the study and practice of theatre.2 As a feminist, I agree that all theatrical productions—not only contemporary dramas, but “subsequent performances” of older plays—have ideological implications, whether overt or veiled. But Case’s polemic contains several overgeneralizations and mistaken assumptions . She lumps together plays which differ greatly in theme, ideology, and theatrical form. She allows for no critique of the patriarchal subtext either within ancient scripts or on the part of ancient audiences. And she suggests, by her use of the word “revive,” that all productions of ancient drama replicate the meaning of these dramas in their original performance context. Overall, Case takes far too narrow a view both of the meanings and effects of ancient drama in its original context and of the performance traditions and staging choices available to contemporary performers of that drama.3 Twentieth-century performers’ and audiences’ understanding of the effects of ancient performance can be increased by productions which include elements of ancient staging, such as performing outdoors , dividing speaking roles among three actors, and staging choral odes with song and dance. Some modern productions of ancient 2 ibid., 19. 3 Useful guides to postclassical stagings of ancient drama include J. Michael Walton, Living Greek Theatre: A Handbook of Classical Performance and Modern Production (New York 1987); Hellmut Flashar, Inszenietung der Antike (Munich 1991); Marianthe Colakis, The Classics in the American Theater of the 1960s and Early 1970s (New York 1993); Karelisa V. Hartigan, Greek Tragedy on the American Stage (Westport , Connecticut 1995); Peter Burian, “Tragedy Adapted for Stages and Screens,” and Fiona Macintosh, “Tragedy in Performance: Nineteenth- and Twentiethcentury Productions,” both in The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy, P.E. Easterling , ed. (Cambridge 1997). The electronic journal Didaskalia (whose URL is http://didaskalia.berkeley.edu) regularly publishes reviews of productions around the world. 24 Syllecta Classica 10 (1999) drama use “authentic” elements in order to evoke the radical alterity of older performance texts. For example, in 1986 the New York Greek Drama Company staged Medea with the actors in masks and chitons speaking Greek in pitch accents, while the chorus choreography was inspired by Greek vase paintings. In his introduction to the videotape of this production William Arrowsmith declares that it is “meant to seem strange to us,” whereas presenting tragedy in English translation dispels “the otherness the achieving of which is presumably the chief reason for producing the play in the first place.” Other productions offer conspicuously non-authentic alterity. The Ninagawa Company of Japan toured a Medea to London in 1987 which combined Eastern and Western, ancient and modern elements. The onnagata (female impersonator) who...