The Entrances and Exits of Actors and Chorus in Greek Plays

Abstract

M ANY excellent papers and books have been written on the Greek theater buildings in the different periods, and there are many good reconstructions of the classical, Hellenistic and Roman theater buildings. I need only mention those by Fiechter and Frickenhaus and more recently those by Pickard-Cambridge, Stillwell and Dinsmoor.' But the scene building is only the background for the plays in the classical period, and attempts to show the scenes performed in the orchestra, like those of Bulle, called extraordinary by Dinsmoor, and fantastic and mostly wrong by the author,2 are at least unsatisfactory and misleading. Few attempts have been made to draw diagrams of the entrances and the movements of the actors, like the one by Flickinger for the Frogs, which, however, suffers from the fact that the Frogs was not performed in the theater of Dionysos, as Flickinger assumed but, as Anti has shown, in the Lenaion theater.3 Yet it is of the greatest importance to try to visualize a contemporary production of the only thirty-two Greek tragedies, two satyr plays, and fourteen comedies preserved to us against hundreds of others which are lost. The best way to visualize the possibilities of a Greek drama is, of course, to produce it or to see it produced. This is possible in Greece, where tragedies were performed in the Roman theater of Herodes Atticus at Athens, and the Greek theaters in Epidauros and in Delphi; in Italy particularly in the ancient theater of Syracuse; in Berlin in the Grosse Schauspielhaus, where Max Reinhardt produced Aeschylos' Orestie and King Oedipus of Sophokles, and Aristophanes' Lysistrate before he came to Hollywood, and in other German cities; in England in Reading, where the Agamemnon was produced by high school students under the leadership of Oxford scholars; and in the United States, where on the campus of Columbia University Euripides' Medea, Trojan Women, Iphigenia in Tauris, Iphigenia in Aulis were performed by students under the guidance of Milton Smith, and excellent performances of Aeschylos' Agamemnon in Fordham University; many other colleges in the United States have had more or less successful productions of Greek plays. On Broadway in New York City, Olivier played in King Oedipus and Judith Anderson in the Medea of Euripides. The best performances which I have seen are those by the Greek National Theater under Kathina Paxinu in 1E. Fiechter, Antike griechische Theaterbauten, 1-9, 1930-1950; A. Frickenhaus, Die altgriechische Biihne, 1917; id. in BonnJbb 125 (1919); A. W. PickardCambridge, The Theatre of Dionysos in Athens, 1946; R. Stillwell, The Theater in Corinth, in Results of Excavations conducted by the American School of Classical Studies at Athens II, 1952; W. B. Dinsmoor,