Ancient Drama Research Articles

Poderosa Afrodite: uma tragédia cômica

ABSTRACT: Many modern adaptations of ancient tragedies are not always well received by the public, either because the distance from the original, either because their fidelity to the original it seems impossible. In this paper we intend to show in Mighty Aphrodite by Woody Allen, the director makes the handling of themes and formal elements, like the Chorus, the ancient drama, in order to get a good reception by contemporary audiences

Comedy, Censorship and Metaphor

Comedy, Censorship and Metaphor

Toward a National Heterotopia : Ancient Theaters and the Cultural Politics of Performing Ancient Drama in Modern Greece

Performing in ancient Greek theaters in modern Greece is an activity which often finds itself embroiled in the cultural politics surrounding a classical heritage which is conceptualized as venerable, unbroken, and exclusive. The first ever instance of a non-Greek production of a Greek play at the ancient theater of Epidaurus was the British Royal National Theatre's Oresteia directed by Peter Hall in 1982. (1) Despite Hall's adherence to key conventions of classical theater, such as an all-male cast and the use of masks, the admission of a non-Greek group to the theater of Epidaurus did not go uncontested. Yannis Varveris, a well-known critic, maintained: I do not think that this generosity is to our own cultural benefit, especially when it comes to Epidaurus. We are--as Rondiris has at least proved--capable of articulating our heritage better than anyone. A place of such sanctification like this koilon [the spectators' area in ancient amphitheaters] could be reserved for the whatsoever most legitimate interpretation of ancient drama and not yielded as an arena for international theater acrobatics, especially if the genre itself is not amenable to them. It is a matter of category. The tragic word is not just one page in theater repertory. It is morally and aesthetically adamant, most of all because it is ontological. Epidaurus is its natural manger. On the contrary, the foreign director, having not the affinity of language and the umbilical cord--of both language and place--with the source deigns well-intentioned experimentations which are perhaps irreverent. (2) This passage encapsulates the most cherished Greek views about ancient drama: uniqueness, legitimate interpretations, and the authenticity of a highly acclaimed tradition established by past Greek directors (Dimitris Rondiris, 1899-1981). It is telling that the theatrical space is discussed in a language pregnant with religious allusions (sanctification, manger) which, in turn, generates the view of a sacredly ontological text. Most notably, performing in Epidaurus, in the critic's view, presupposes a biological relationship with the place and the language (umbilical cord, source) which naturalizes the idea of Greek continuity from antiquity down to the present day. The view of the theater of Epidaurus as a sacred place continues to come up in disputes over stagings of Greek drama by, most characteristically, non-Greek directors. In the 2009 production of Dimiter Gotscheff's Persians, for example, the audience was exasperated every time the actors set foot on the ancient thymele, the altar of the god Dionysus, which is not meant to be stepped over according to a well-established Greek theater custom. (3) The spectators responded in indignation against the supposed act of desecration with hisses, loud jeers, and massive walk-outs which nearly interrupted the performance. The sacralization of the ancient theater of Epidaurus within modern Greek culture requires serious scrutiny in relation to the Greek claim of an exclusive authority over classical antiquity and the sense of cultural preeminence. However, the idea of sacred ancient ruins was not unknown to the nineteenth-century European imagination. The foundation of Greek state itself in the mid-nineteenth century triggered the Romantic Hellenism of European travelers, by providing the actual place where they could connect to the classical past through the ruins of antiquity. (4) In this spirit, leading theater figures of that time sought the very origin of the theatrical art in the ancient theater of Dionysus on the slopes of the Acropolis. When great Italian tragic actresses toured to Athens, their visits to the ancient monuments was filled with a sense of worship. Adelaide Ristori marveled at the theater of Dionysus in 1865, (5) while it is submitted that Eleonora Duse went on a pilgrimage there on the evening before her Athenian performance in 1899. …

Menander's Theophoroumene between Greece and Rome

This article identifies and discusses a fragmentary fresco (Ufficio Scavi di Pompei 20545), which is of interest to scholars of both ancient drama and music. This panel, which reproduces an excerpt of the climactic scene of Menander's Theophoroumene , provides new and early evidence for the process of manipulation of the Early-Hellenistic archetype of this illustration. In particular, the gigantic pipe it features can be better identified as a Roman tibia than a Greek aulos . Re-elaborated and variously adjusted, the Theophoroumene boasts a rich visual record which is in stark contrast with the overall poor survival of this play as a text. Our sources for the ancient reception of this comedy point to the independence of its iconographic tradition from both its performance tradition and its textual transmission.

Parakatalogē: un altro sguardo

The concept of parakatalog ē has played a key role in how many modern scholars envision the performance of ancient drama, but its nature and role have been misunderstood. Close examination of the two passages where the word parakatalog ē occurs (Pseudo-Aristotle Problemata 19, 6 and Ps.-Plutarch De musica 28), of uses of the words katalog ē and katalegein , and of passages describing accompanied speech reveal that the vocalizing used in parakatalog ē was very similar if not identical to normal speech. Parakatalog ē could be used in the performance of a variety of meters, but there is no evidence that it was used extensively.

Theater Festivals, Total Works of Art, and the Revival of Greek Tragedy on the Modern Stage

In the last century and a half, the performance reception of Greek tragedy has been more widespread and varied than in any other similar period since the Wfth century BC. One could argue that, despite all its popularity in previous centuries, the revival of Greek drama on the modern stage was established as a cultural practice only with the consolidation of the modern nation-states in the second half of the nineteenth century. Greek tragedy was reinvented within institutional frameworks that today we can easily recognize as mod- ern, namely schools and universities, and professional and avant- garde theater. It is therefore hardly surprising that the study of the reception of Greek drama on the modern stage is usually based on categorical—and hierarchical—distinctions between such frameworks. For instance, scholars often privilege the reception of Greek tragedy in avant-garde theater for its critical approach to contemporary cul- ture. 1 Nor is it surprising that the performance history of Greek tragedy remains largely a history of national traditions. 2 The aim of this chap- ter is to explore some of the aesthetic and ideological forces that informed the reinvention of ancient drama in an institutional frame- work that does not quite Wt into the dominant categories of contem- porary theater practice and historiography. Theater festivals, and more speciWcally the festivals that emerged in the last two decades of the nineteenth century and up until the outbreak of the Second World War, have a historical signiWcance that has escaped the attention of scholars working within rather than across national and generic bound- aries. In their large-scale revival of Greek tragedy, theater festivals proved to be an international as well as national phenomenon. To de - velop a comparative perspective on this dramatic phenomenon, it is

Homer and the dual model of the tragic

This book offers a probing and much needed examination of 'the tragic' as a concept distinct from tragedy as a genre.With Homer and the Dual Model of the Tragic, Yoav Rinon fills a persistent gap in the study of ancient Greek literature. Too often in the study of ancient drama have writers and critics conflated the concept of 'the tragic' with tragedy as a genre, muddying the important differences between the two. By concentrating on the notion of the tragic as a characteristic, rather than on tragedy as a genre, Rinon has opened a fresh and important new perspective.In order to emphasize the independence of the tragic from the tragedy, Rinon focuses on two tragic epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey. Rinon's integration of classical philology, narratology, and post-colonial studies makes Homer and the Dual Model of the Tragic a widely interdisciplinary book, one that will appeal to both specialists and undergraduates in a variety of fields.

The Acoustics of Roofed Ancient Odeia: The Case of Herodes Atticus Odeion

Ancient Greek / Roman odeia were semi-enclosed theaters that currently survive without their original roof sections. The work compares the acoustics of the well-preserved Herodes Odeion in its current open-air form to a detailed acoustic model reconstruction of its original roofed version and illustrates the significant differences in acoustics between the two spaces. It is shown that in their original state, the odeia had acoustics appropriate for music performances in contrast to their current open-air form that have acoustic properties appropriate for speech reproduction, similar to the larger open-air theaters of the time which were used specifically for ancient drama performances.

Unveiling Euripides

Spring 2009 5 Unveiling Euripides Melinda Powers Since the time of the fifth century BCE, when the ancient Greeks defeated the invading Persian Empire, works such as Aeschylus’ 472 BCE Persians and Euripides’405 BCE Bacchae1 have constructed an idea of the Orient that persists in the West today.2 Regarding these plays, Edward Said in his 1979 book Orientalism notes, “[t]he two aspects of the Orient that set it off from the West in this pair of plays will remain essential motifs of European imaginative geography.” Said defines this process of constructing an imaginary idea of the Orient as “orientalism.” He argues that the West, from the time of ancient Greece, has marginalized and feminized the Orient by promoting “difference between the familiar (Europe, the West, ‘us’) and the strange (the Orient, the East, ‘them’).” Orientalism “tries to show that European culture [or the ‘self’] gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient [or the “other”] as a surrogate and even underground self.”3 Examining xenophobia in an ancient Athenian context, classicist Edith Hall has argued that “the polarization of Hellene and barbarian was invented in specific historical circumstances during the early years of the fifth century BC, partly as a result of the combined Greek military efforts against the Persians.”4 Such xenophobic inventions persist today, and some contemporary directors of Athenian drama, conscious of this danger, have challenged the East/West polarity by deconstructing the divide inscribed in the original plays.5 In this article, however, I discuss Bill T. Jones’s 2001 workshop The Bacchae Project, which, rather than avoiding East/West binaries, instead reinscribes this division, despite the director’s attempt to do otherwise. While the meaning and terms of East/West in an ancient and contemporary context are distinct, Bill T. Jones’s workshop demonstrates that the current division is nothing new, but rather a repetition, revision, and reinforcement of an ancient, classical model. Jones’s work6 , a student workshop7 produced at the University of California, Davis, in May of 2001, is significant. The choreographer/director staged it just prior to September 11th of that same year and characterized the chorus of Dionysos’ bacchae as “of the Islamic fundamentalist persuasion.” In Euripides’ day, the Muslim-East/Christian-West religious distinctions did not yet exist, but Jones’s Melinda Powers is anAssistant Professor in the Department of English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY. Prof. Powers’s teaching and research interests include ancient drama, historiography, performance theory, and especially the performance ofAthenian drama on the ancient and contemporary stage. She has published an Oxyrhynchus papyrus of Demosthenes XIX as well as articles and reviews on contemporary adaptations of the classics. She is currently working on a book project with University of Iowa Press titled “The (W)hole Story of Athenian Performance.” 6 Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism production contemporizes the play by costuming the chorus in what Jones refers to as chadoor,8 the black cloak revived in 1970s Iran under theAyatollah Khomeini but which is also worn by women in Islamic communities elsewhere. Jones describes his chorus as dressed in chadoor, and in doing so, he generalizes the garment by divorcing chadoor from its specific socio-cultural context. Implicitly suggesting chadoor is akin to any veil (e.g. burqa, boushiya, niqab), Jones uses the garment as a generic veil to evoke in his U.S. audience a fear of the other. Chadoor, in this case, becomes a metaphor for the other, a metaphor which develops in the production into a reiteration of the contemporary orientalist motif of unveiling, an image with a strong colonialist history and one that persists in the post 9/11 world.9 Jones is a dancer and choreographer, so his artistic bias, his interest in bodies and their movement, has largely influenced his decision to unveil the chorus. He says that “there is nothing quite like undertaking a great Western classic and asking it ‘Where are the bodies, where is the sexuality, where are the elemental forces of gravity and time, force in the text?’”10 Jones wants to dignify the chorus’s bodies through their dancing, and in doing so his...

Necessity versus Progress: Classical Greek Theatre and Equal Rights

Ancient Greek drama became the driving force in the Western theatrical revolution of the 1920s with Leopold Jessner's famous staging of King Oedipus in 1919. Once again theatre defined itself as the public tribune: the Athenian polis with its direct democracy giving way to the concept of a new social collective for the scientific age. The urgency of the impulse for social change coupled with the experience of World War I led to the investigation of images and action as forces of internal necessity arising from the existentielle Angst of a whole generation of artists who found themselves face to face with the spiritual bankruptcy of the bourgeois social order. The long-term effects of the new dramatists’ radical re-viewings of the Greek theatre's potential as a progressive social undertaking—revealing its use value—may be detected in current-day rehearsal practices. Some of these effects are the subject of this article, which presents the author's experience of directing Sophocles’ Antigone in 1986 at the ancient Greek theatre of Oeniades.

The Bone Gatherers: The Lost Worlds of Early Christian Women (review)

Reviewed by: The Bone Gatherers: The Lost Worlds of Early Christian Women Virginia Burrus Nicola Denzey. The Bone Gatherers: The Lost Worlds of Early Christian Women. Boston: Beacon Press, 2007. Pp. xxi + 290. $27.95. The Bone Gatherers is, for starters, a brilliantly titled book. The words boldly inscribed on the cover evoke loss and the rituals of recollection; they gesture towards the shadowy spaces of social marginalization; they allude, delicately, to an ancient drama that has survived only in fragments. If I were to add that this title also hints at the pleasures that a good mystery novel might afford, I would still be able to say that Nicola Denzey’s book delivers faithfully on its cover’s various implicit promises—no small feat! The image on the cover is as important as the words—the figure of a woman standing with arms outreached, familiar from early Christian art. Although Denzey begins with tales of ancient bones unearthed and repeatedly directs us toward those women who (in one way or another) gathered and tended such bones, her story circles most tightly around a series of paintings found in the burial catacombs of ancient Rome. This is a book about Christian catacomb art, then, and it is, more specifically, one that asks us to pay attention to the surprising prominence of women in the preserved paintings as well as to the histories encrypted therein—histories of the women who died, of the women who commissioned their commemorative art, and of the women who continued to visit their burial places. It asks us to engage these paintings and their settings imaginatively. Indeed, Denzey will speculate quite freely at times, taking up a feminist historiographic practice associated most famously with Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza’s In Memory of Her (1983). In so doing, she hopes to restore agency to the women of the ancient church of Rome. If necessary, she gives them names: “let’s call her Proba” (25). She imbues them with emotions—“the profound loss and wrenching grief of burying her own child” (54)—and assigns them social roles—“presiding over the meal” (100). She restores the sensual texture of their daily lives: “the wind wrings her long, striped red dalmatic around her ankles” (74). Throughout the book, Denzey draws with confident grace not only on the skills of a story teller but also upon the knowledge of an impressively learned historian. Each of the book’s seven chapters focuses on two “lost” women who lived and died in Rome between about 250 and 350 c.e. while using these women to introduce larger topics. What can the tomb of a young bride tell us about the physical and social realities that conditioned an ordinary woman’s life? What does [End Page 261] “Christianization” look like from the point of view of a pagan woman who is choosing the art for her Christian daughter’s burial site? How did women express themselves through religious images more generally, and how did they want their viewers to interpret those images? What kinds of ritual acts might women visiting the tombs have performed? And so on. Raising such questions, Denzey skillfully draws her readers into the adventure of interpreting not texts but spaces and paintings. At the same time, she tracks momentous changes taking place in the course of the third and fourth centuries. Many of the original female patrons who had provided and tended the Christian burial sites came to be misrecognized as apostolic or martyred figures, and once again women seem to have played major roles, participating prominently in the early development of a markedly feminized cult of saints in Rome. However, as memories were being reconfigured, power relations were also continuing to shift. By the late fourth century the already layered topography of female piety had been decisively reinscribed, as a newly centralized church hierarchy extended the reach of patriarchy into the catacombs themselves. Every good story needs a villain, and Denzey identifies hers quite forthrightly in the final chapter of the book—Damasus, bishop of Rome from 366 to 384, who was largely responsible for the masculinization of the Roman calendar of saints. Yet in Denzey’s account one could...

Contemporary soundscape of ancient theatres

Ancient drama is performed every summer in ancient theatres in the Mediterranean countries, especially in Greece. In many cases the performance conditions in terms of acoustics are poor, due to the effects of external noise sources. There is often a motorway constructed near an archaeological site, without careful consideration regarding the impact on the overall soundscape. Previous studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of purposely designed scenery on improving the internal acoustic conditions, and this study investigates the contribution of scenery to the improvement of the acoustic environment of ancient theatres in terms of reducing nearby traffic noise. The acoustic simulation for the theatre of Philippi, with scenery design in the form of a background wall in different sizes, suggests that there is a decrease in traffic noise by about 4dB. Further improvements have also been demonstrated with noise barriers of various heights and lengths. Different levels of traffic flow have been examined. It is expected that the results will be verified by on-site measurements and recordings of summer performances will be presented during the conference.

2006 Panel: Classical Drama as Political Drama

SYLLECTA CLASSICA 19 (2008): 183-185 2006 PANEL: CLASSICAL DRAMA AS POLITICAL DRAMA ERIC DUGDALE Ancient Greek drama is enjoying something of a renaissance at the dawn of this millennium. The plays of Aeschylus, Aristophanes and Euripides now regularly play in theatres across the globe, and the range of fresh interpretations of these ancient works has done much to dispel the shadow of elitism that previously cast these ‘classics’ as the purview of the privileged few.To take one example, earlier this year Molora played to critical acclaim at the Barbican Theatre. In this adaptation of the Oresteia by South African playwright Yael Farber, the cycle of revenge is set in the context of a hearing of theTruth and Reconciliation Commission , lending fresh urgency to the Aeschylean themes of dispossession, violence and justice. Scholarly research on ancient drama in modern performance is also burgeoning, aided by resources such as the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama (Oxford), whose database and collection make accessible a growing number of performance-related materials. Much of this recent work has situated modern productions and adaptations of ancient drama within the cultural and political contexts in which they were performed. The first year of this three-year colloquium on Performing Ideology focused on the topic of Classical Drama as Political Drama. Presenters were invited to analyze how plays from antiquity have served as vehicles for political commentary, broadly conceived. All five presenters focused on Athenian drama or modern works inspired by it. Between them, the four papers published here analyze the ideologies underlying works of Aeschylus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Mikis Theodorakis and Tony Harrison, as well as modern productions of Medea. They offer insightful case studies which in turn raise broader issues in the mind of the reader, such as whether it is justifiable for modern productions to press ancient drama into the service of political ideologies. Hallie Marshall’s paper on the oeuvres of Tony Harrison sets his works against the backdrop of the Cold War and the post-Cold War era, and highlights the degree to which the individual convictions of a playwright/director can shape his relationship with the past. It is tempting to wonder whether this was the same for the tragic poet/didaskalos at Athens. Is Harrison’s appropriation of the figure of Hecuba any different from that of Euripides, for example? Ann Suter’s examination of 184 SYLLECTA CLASSICA 19 (2008) the Oresteia interprets Aeschylus’ treatment of the myth in the political context of the Kleisthenic reforms, identifying elements in the plays that argue the importance of the legal bond over blood-bond. Thus even in tragedy, despite its habit of ‘going away to Thebes’, we see reflected the political concerns of its Athenian context. The second half of Suter’s paper, which focuses on the reception history of Sartre’s Les Mouches, illustrates just how open-ended the interplay between drama and political context can be, as audiences in occupied France and then post-war Germany related the play to their present situation and drew from it quite different political messages. Though tragedy is often culture and context specific, its tendency to avoid explicit contemporary reference lends it a universality and underlying multivalence. It is not only the playwright and audience who bring meaning to a play, as is powerfully attested by Nancy Rabinowitz’s account of The Medea Project, an initiative in which celebrated director and performance artist Rhodessa Jones uses acting as a way to give agency to the incarcerated women who make up her cast. The process of creating their own version of the play and acting in it allows them to process their own life-choices and gives them a voice on societal issues raised by the play. Rabinowitz’s paper presents a challenging case study of performance being used as an instrument for social change. Thus scholars, too, are key players in the forum of competing ideologies. They foreground particular works, and play an active role in interpreting them and delineating their features. Given that the United States was embroiled in a controversial war in Iraq at the time this panel convened, it is probably no...

The theatrical cast of Athens: interactions between ancient Greek drama and society

1. Introduction 2. The Theatrical Roles of Athens 3. Childbearing Women: Birth and Family Crisis in Ancient Drama 4. Visible Women: Painted Masks and Tragic Aesthetics 5. Horny Satyrs and Tragic Tetralogies 6. Metapoetic Females in Old Comedy 7. Recasting the Barbarian 8. The Scythian Archer in Aristohanes' 'Thesmophoriazusae' 9. Drowning Act: The Greeks, Swimming, and Timotheus' 'Persians' 10. Singing Roles in Tragedy 11. Casting the Role of Trygaeus in Aristophanes' 'Peace' 12. Lawcourt Dramas: Acting and Performance in Legal Oratory Afterword

Rebel Women: Staging Ancient Greek Drama Today. Edited by John Dillon and S. E. Wilmer. London: Methuen, 2005. Pp. xxv + 272 + 10 illus. £20 Hb

<b><i>Rebel Women: Staging Ancient Greek Drama Today</i></b>. Edited by <b>John Dillon</b> and <b>S. E. Wilmer</b>. London: Methuen, 2005. Pp. xxv + 272 + 10 illus. £20 Hb

Classics and Contemporary Theatre

Any discussion of ancient Greek and Roman drama on the contemporary stage must begin with a brief acknowledgment of both the radically increased worldwide interest in translating, (often radically) revising, and performing these plays in the past thirty-five years and the growing scholarly response to that development. Electronic resources are developing to record not only recent but many more past performances, from the Renaissance to the present.1 A group of scholars at the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama at Oxford—Edith Hall, Fiona Macintosh, Oliver Taplin, and their associates Pantelis Michelakis and Amanda Wrigley—are at the forefront, along with Lorna Hardwick and her associates at the U.K.'s Open University, in organizing conferences and lecture series; these have already resulted in several volumes that aim to understand the recent explosion of performances as well as to develop a more extensive picture of earlier reception of Greek and Roman drama (above all, Greek tragedy, to which this essay will be largely confined).2 These scholars, along with others, have also tried to confront conceptual issues involved in the theatrical reception of classical texts.3 Most earlier work has confined itself to studies of individual performances and adaptations or to significant directors and playwrights; an important and exemplary exception is Hall and Macintosh's recent Greek Tragedy and British Theatre 1660–1914.4 This massive study profits from an unusually advantageous set of archival materials preserved in part due to official efforts to censor works presented on the British stage. Oedipus Rex, for example, was not licensed for a professional production until 1910 due to its scandalous incest theme. This study makes a particular effort to locate performances in their social and historical contexts, a goal shared by other recent studies of postcolonial reception discussed below.5 For example, British Medeas, which repeatedly responded to controversies over the legal and political status of women, always represented the heroine's choice to kill her children as forced on her from the outside rather than as an autonomous choice. Such connections between the performance of Greek tragedy and historical feminism have proved significant in many later contexts worldwide. Work on the aesthetic side of performances of Greek drama, including translation, is at an earlier stage, but has begun to take advantage of important recent work on ancient staging, acting, and performance space.6

Ancient Drama Illuminated by Contemporary Stagecraft: Some Thoughts on the Use of Mask and Ekkyklema in Ariane Mnouchkine's Le Dernier Caravansérail and Sophocles' Ajax

Ancient Drama Illuminated By Contemporary Stagecraft:Some Thoughts on the Use of Mask and Ekkyklēma in Ariane Mnouchkine's Le Dernier CaravansÉrail and Sophocles' Ajax Peter W. Meineck In July 2005, the Lincoln Center Festival presented Théâtre du Soleil's epic production of Le Dernier Caravansérail, a six-hour performance divided into two parts that articulated the plight of contemporary refugees from predominantly Muslim countries and their attempts to seek refuge in the West. Conceived and created by the French auteur Ariane Mnouchkine, the production split audiences, critics, and commentators. 1 Always controversial, Mnouchkine's bold theatricality and collaborative creative process with her metamorphic Théâtre du Soleil brought a work to New York with a sweeping sense of on-stage dynamics, scenic movement, and visual dexterity that evoked Athenian staging devices of the fifth century b.c.e. and created astute parallels between the ancient and modern stage. Focusing on the use of the mask and the ekkyklēma in the suicide scene of Sophocles' Ajax, I will discuss the ways in which an understanding of the creative process of a contemporary dramatist such as Mnouchkine offers another paradigm for the comprehension of ancient texts. Mnouchkine's connection to the dramatic form of ancient Greece seems, at first sight, to be marked. In 1992 the Brooklyn Academy of Music [End Page 453] presented her version of the myth of the House of Atreus, Les Atrides, where Euripides' Iphigenia at Aulis was staged prior to the three parts of Aeschylus' Oresteia. Rehearsed and refined over several years, Les Atrides ran for over ten hours in the non-traditional space provided by the vast Park Slope Armory in Brooklyn. But Mnouchkine's method was not a recreation of Greek tragic theatre or even an updating to accommodate a contemporary audience; rather, it was a theatrical attempt to discern the nature of one of the great foundation myths of the West and to extrapolate the meaning of the myth as it relates to modern political and social institutions. In a 1990 interview, when Mnouchkine was asked if she drew inspiration from Greek theatre space, she responded, "Not at all! First of all, I wasn't familiar with it, and didn't want to be. I prefer to work by confirmation, to have my work confirmed by documents after the event." 2 Mnouchkine adopted an approach to Greek tragedy that was markedly Brechtian, a process of verfremdung (defamiliarisation), utilizing the dramatic styles of Asian theatre. In the case of Les Atrides, she adapted the Indian Kathakali tradition, which deeply infused the production's impressive choral work. Yet Mnouchkine believed that total alienation was a misnomer; her version of Greek tragedy must not become self-reflective or derisive, or use aesthetic realism to "sterilize" the imagination of the audience. In "translating" the techniques of Asian theatre to distance her audience from their preconceived notions of Greek drama, Mnouchkine may have brought us closer to an understanding of staging ancient theatre in her use of masks, scenic devices, stage machinery, choral delivery, and physical acting techniques. 3 Théâtre du Soleil's intensive work in Kabuki, Kathakali, and Commedia (whose origin she also sees in the East) has been influenced by the physical theatre movement encapsulated by artists such as Jacques Lecoq and the expression of the mythic elements of drama inspired by directors like Peter Brook. These elements, combined with a refashioning of some of the fundamental staging traditions inherent in Eastern theatre, have infused Mnouchkine's work with a mise en scene that not only transports her own drama but also can help form a greater appreciation of similar theatrical devices employed by the Athenians. After all, Greek drama was created, first and foremost, as a performative craft; any subsequent [End Page 454] life as a written text was a secondary effect of the presentation of the drama to a live audience in the theatre at one given time and place. With this in mind, what can Le Dernier Caravansérail reveal about a play such as Sophocles' Ajax? Ajax is a good choice for this discussion because the staging issues of the play continue to confound. 4 Ajax...

Stage by Stage: The Birth of Theatre. By Philip Freund. London: Peter Owen, 2003; pp. 811. $79.95 cloth; Women and Humor in Classical Greece. By Laurie O'Higgins. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003; pp. xviii + 262. $70 cloth.

Both Philip Freund's The Birth of Theatre and Laurie O'Higgins's Women and Humor in Classical Greece deal with Ancient Greek drama. Freund, a theatre historian, attempts a fairly comprehensive survey of both Greek and Roman drama as well as its influence on postclassical theatre, with particular emphasis on the past century. O'Higgins, a classicist, offers what at first glance appears a far narrower exploration that might only be of interest to other classicists. Of the two writers, it is O'Higgins who crafts a readable study that resonates well beyond its ostensibly narrow subject, whereas Freund's book, geared toward a more general readership, is hampered by serious problems of presentation and organization that compromise his more ambitious work's usefulness.

&amp;quot;Old Gentleman&amp;quot;: Age Differences as Plot Subversion

"Old Gentleman":Age Differences as Plot Subversion1 Valerie Barnes Lipscomb (bio) Shaw's plays have long frustrated the casual theatergoer interested in predictable entertainment; rather than allowing the audience to focus on a pleasant, formulaic plot, Shaw's works often draw attention to unpleasant social conditions, such as class structures and the limitations placed on women. Critics have discussed the methods that these plays employ in order to provoke audience response to issues and ideas, including the more recent literary criticism that addresses Shaw's use of gender, race, and class. One category that has not attracted a great deal of attention is age. Although there is some critical interest in the study of age in theater, that interest tends to focus on performances by groups of older actors, rather than on age itself as a feature in drama. In Figuring Age, Kathleen Woodward finds that scholarly "disregard of age is all the more curious because age—in the sense of older age—is the one difference we are all likely to live into."2 Alternatively, scholars' overlooking issues of age may be attributable to that very biological fact: they must face the passage into old age themselves. Such universal transformation, from youth to old age, makes age unique as a social category among the other issues, such as gender, race, ethnicity, and class, that have been at the center of literary studies. Only in the category of age does the subject—under typical circumstances in Western culture—move slowly from the "unmarked" or privileged end of the spectrum, as theorist Peggy Phelan shows, to the "marked" side, which encounters discrimination.3 Sociocultural as well as individual discomfort with this passage may contribute to critical neglect. Discomfort with age is reflected in literature, which often polarizes youth against age, as if mirroring a society so fearful of becoming old that it marks the aged with extra vehemence. This polarization dates at least [End Page 147] as far back as the senex blocking figure of ancient drama and is evident in plays as recent as Edward Albee's Three Tall Women, in which the younger and older version of the main character repeatedly, angrily deny each other. Shaw's plays use such strong reactions to aging and the aged as another tool to manipulate audience response. His works show a pattern of relying on the ages of the characters, younger and older, both to establish expectations for their behavior and then to subvert those expectations in order to foreground social issues. This pattern begins in the plays of the 1890s with Mrs Warren's Profession, continues through Candida, Caesar and Cleopatra, and Pygmalion, and culminates in Heartbreak House in 1919.Close attention to the construction of age in both the dialogue and the stage directions of each play reveals the pattern of subversion. By having the characters "act" their ages in both traditional and nontraditional, socially appropriate and not-so-appropriate ways, Shaw draws the audience's attention away from typical plotlines and toward his arena of ideas. Shaw's manipulations primarily target audience expectations about traditional ages for romance and marriage, but these expectations also involve the secondary undercurrent of taboo relations, touching on the issue of incest as he creates romantic possibilities across generational lines. Age, Romance, and Marriage Mrs Warren's Profession (1893–94) establishes the relationships among age, romantic attraction, and marriage with the introduction of Vivie Warren, who is twenty-two years old, is romantically involved with Frank Gardner, and has received a marriage proposal from Sir George Crofts. Since a woman of marriageable age is a main character, the audience might immediately expect a marriage plot culminating in the choice of a suitable husband. Shaw describes Vivie as "attractive."4 However, her actions from the beginning are those of the New Woman—independent, rebellious, and determined to make her own way—rather than the typical ingenue awaiting marriage. Mrs. Warren's friend Praed alludes to the courtship tradition: "When I was your age, young men and women were afraid of each other: there was no good fellowship—nothing real—only gallantry copied out of novels, and as vulgar and affected as it could be...

Quo Vadis, Performance History?

Frankly, I'm not much of a historian. That is, the past interests me mostly as grist for my theoretical mill. I am not nostalgic. I don't often trek through ruins—whether of stone, paintings, videotape, paper, library stacks, or my own many notebooks. Of course, I've done the right thing when it comes to this kind of activity. I have climbed the pyramids at Teotihuacan and in Mayan country, sat on stone benches of the Theatre of Dionysus in Athens and in Epidaurus (where I was tormented by some really awful productions of ancient Greek dramas), and visited the theatre museums of four continents. On the art-history front, I've gazed at more paintings and sculptings than I can readily organize in memory. But my strongest meetings with “history” have been at the cusp of the past and present—living events always already changing as they are (re)performed. This has been the core of my “anthropology-meets-theatre” work whether among the Yaquis of Arizona, at the Ramlila of Ramnagar in India, in the highlands of Papua–New Guinea, at Off-Off Broadway in New York, in the interior of China, and at very many other events in a wide variety of places.