Big Love Research Articles

Big Love: Relationality, Ethics and the Art of Letting Go

This article considers the performance of non-violent relationality. Focusing on a production of Big Love, it explores how performance might enlighten an ethic of non-violent being with others, and non-violent being in the world. While many theoretical models of identity emphasize the unavoidable aggressivity of intersubjective relations, this article focuses on scenes in which the subject is let go from violence and retribution. ‘Letting go’ is the strategically utilitarian term deployed here to think about a performative act that loosens the point of attachment between the subject and symbolic law, while paving the way for relatively non-aggressive conditions of being to emerge.

Rethinking Consent in a 'Big Love' Way

Rethinking Consent in a 'Big Love' Way

Big Love: The building of the largest Buddha in history calls to mind the construction of medieval cathedrals, for better or worse.

Big Love: The building of the largest Buddha in history calls to mind the construction of medieval cathedrals, for better or worse.

Review: Big Love, by Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman

Review: <i>Big Love</i>, by Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman

Supplices , the Satyr Play: Charles Mee's Big Love

company in the San Francisco Bay area, opened its new Roda theater in style this spring with Aeschylus' Oresteia (trans. Fagles), followed (on the more intimate thrust stage) by Charles L. Mee's adaptation of Aeschylus' Danaid trilogy, entitled Big Love. Seeing these productions in tandem reminds one of the similarities between the two trilogies, as if Aeschylus in his Oresteia developed and expanded ideas introduced five years earlier in Danaides. These include the horrific consequences of male violence, not the least of which involves the tragic female response of killing husbands and turning households into bloodbaths. The primal compulsions that affect human beings—particularly eros and vengeance, immortally hypostasized as Aphrodite and the Furies—drive through both trilogies, countered somewhat by the religious and moral impera- tives to grant beleaguered foreigners asylum. Reflecting Athens's radical democracy, Aeschylus emphasizes the perils and responsibilities of a polity that must face the consequences of its own decisions. In dramatic terms, both trilogies tap the power of choral lyric to wash over plot and action, almost like a force of nature, moving the human drama into a wider spatial and temporal context. Aeschylus also exploits the apparent finality of a trial in both works to bring matters to a dramatic close. However, ultimate resolution depends on the fundamentally comedic faith in the curative powers of marriage, family, and time to restore the human community. Addressing these themes in Big Love, Mee uses them to construct an entertaining romp. One could say he converts Aeschylus' Danaides into a contemporary satyr play, the paratragic genre for which Aeschylus was famous in antiquity (none of his survive, but one called Amymone ended the Danaid tetralogy). Although only Supplices is extant, most scholars agree on the