http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/style/sundayarts/A25211-2001Aug31.html
 

Giving Them Hellenism

By William Triplett
 

If the ancient Greeks didn't believe in coincidences, why should we? I mean, come on: This week alone, Washington's two flagship companies launch their respective seasons with mighty theatrical expeditions from the 2,500-year-old origins of Western drama. On Tuesday the Shakespeare Theatre opens with not one but all three of the Oedipus plays by Sophocles -- "Oedipus Rex," "Oedipus at Colonus" and "Antigone" -- adapted for a single evening.

Arena Stage then weighs in next weekend with "Agamemnon and His Daughters" -- also a multi-play adaptation, primarily of the "Oresteia" trilogy by Aeschylus but incorporating versions of the story that both Sophocles and Euripides later wrote. Basically nine Greek plays from three tragedians on two nights, and that's just the beginning. In November, "The Gospel at Colonus," the second play of the Oedipus cycle retold through gospel music, opens as a joint production between the Theater Alliance and the Atlas Theater Project. Also in November the Kennedy Center will present "The Island," an early Athol Fugard play about two political prisoners trying to mount a production of "Antigone." Next comes an adaptation of Aeschylus's "Prometheus Bound" at Studio Theatre. Capping it off in June -- assuming no other theaters suddenly go Greek -- will be Woolly Mammoth's production of Charles Mee's "Big Love," essentially a modern riff on "The Supplicant Maidens" by Aeschylus.

As if that weren't enough, the Greeks are also proving strangely popular with actors, who ordinarily find most of the roles less playable than those in more recent drama. But moments before holding auditions in New York, Arena Artistic Director Molly Smith was met by the casting agent, who said, "We've never seen anything like this. We've received more submissions and head shots from people interested in this production than for some Broadway shows." The agent dropped a stack of résumés a good 18 inches tall. "And more and more people kept coming in," Smith recalls. "We couldn't get through everyone who wanted to audition."

It gets weirder. When Smith was first thinking she'd like to do an evening of Greek plays adapted for today's audiences, she recalled a production she'd mounted about 15 years ago of a similar extravaganza called "The Greeks" -- a three-evening rep of plays based on 10 Greek dramas that Kenneth Cavander and John Barton had originally translated and adapted for the Royal Shakespeare Company in the early 1980s. She got in touch with Cavander to see whether he'd be interested in taking a new look at that adaptation. Cavander started to laugh. He said he was about to call her to discuss the very same thing.

According to Greek mythology, there are no accidents. Some god or goddess is behind almost every earthly event or phenomenon. Yet if we are to believe some of the people who have decided to stage these plays this season, the current outbreak of Greek chic just sort of, well, happened. "The Greeks have always been part of my history as a director," Smith says. At the theater she founded in Alaska before coming to Arena, "we did everything from a version of 'The Odyssey' and the Oedipus cycle to 'The Birds,' the Iphigenia cycle and . . . 'Antigone.' If you were to look for a genre of play we often produced, it was the Greeks."

For her first three seasons at Arena, Smith wanted to focus exclusively on American plays. But in planning this season, her fourth, "I just sort of naturally went to the Greeks, because it's the beginning of Western civilization," she says. The Greeks, she adds, provide a historical context for American drama. "They're a way of looking at our own place and time in resonance with theirs." Meanwhile, Cavander, whose extensive credits include writing and directing a musical based on Boccaccio's "Decameron," which was produced at Arena in 1974, was ready to act on a long-standing idea. "I'd always wanted to take one story and create an evening of that story told in sequence, as a connected narrative, and allow people into the humanity and the real theatrical excitement of the Greek dramas," he says. Rather than simply update the translation and adaptation that he and Barton had done for the RSC, Cavander decided to focus on the Agamemnon story as it appeared in not just the works of Aeschylus but those of Sophocles and Euripides as well. "But I just wanted to be able to use the best parts of the [individual] texts to create a story." Remembering that Smith had once staged "The Greeks," Cavander decided to get in touch with her. Before he could, she called him. She liked his new idea. Things just went from there.

Michael Kahn says he, too, had been thinking of doing something Greek for this season, his 15th as artistic director of the Shakespeare Theatre. The Oedipus cycle appealed because of its strong narrative links. "It always fascinated me that in the first play a young Antigone leads Oedipus out at the end," says Kahn. "Then a grown-up Antigone appears in the second play, and also in that play [Antigone's brother] says to his sister, 'Bury me,' which is what the third play's all about." In Hellenic Athens, playwrights wrote trilogies to be performed all on one day. But try finding a modern audience that will have the time or interest to sit through eight or nine hours of theater. Indeed, say "Greek drama" and most people freeze up in fear, recalling images from bad educational films they saw in high school of posed, robed actors declaiming high-flown verse. As Cavander has done with the Agamemnon story, Kahn has edited and adapted the Oedipus plays to make for a roughly three-hour evening that has a decidedly contemporary style.

Smith recalls that when she found out Kahn was thinking Greek on a large scale, her reaction was "Omigod!" When she later saw him and told him that she'd had the same idea, he reacted more or less the same, she says. So much for any conspiracy theories about season planning. Howard Shalwitz, Woolly Mammoth's artistic director, says he didn't know anything about their intentions when he was putting together his season. The Greeks had simply been on his mind because of a production he saw four years ago in London of "Ion," a largely neglected tragedy by Euripides. "It was incredibly moving and very, very powerful," he says. "I was just sobbing and so was the audience, and English audiences don't sob. That got me thinking, 'Gee, would there be something I'd want to do with a Greek play?' "

Shalwitz thought about doing "Ion," but the adaptation he'd seen, as he says, "proved a little too straightforward a rendering for who we are as a theater." Not long ago, though, two people recommended to him Charles Mee's "Big Love," which premiered at last year's Humana Festival in Louisville. Shalwitz read it and loved it. "Chuck takes Aeschylus, who can be a little turgid, and gives him this very hip kind of spin. The language is just so fresh and wild."

And why does he think Greeks are busting out all over? "I don't know," Shalwitz says. "Is there something in the air?" In a way, the Greeks have always been in the air, and for good reason. The eminent scholar Bernard Knox titled his most recent study of Greek literature "Backing Into the Future," after the ancient Greek belief that the past and present lie visible in front of us, while the future -- invisible and unknowable -- is behind us, and thus we move backward into it. This kind of provocative conceit and its unsettling implications typified Hellenic Greece's view of life as often extremely complicated and unavoidably fraught with peril. If that sounds like it has overtones that have rung down through time, it's only because it does.

The tragic poets saw the whole of life as falling within their compass. Indeed, Knox argues that certain tragedies by Sophocles and Euripides provide as much insight into sexual behavior in classical Greece as anything the great philosophers specifically wrote on the subject. "All the underlying, universal themes of what it means to be a human being," notes Smith. "It's all there in the plays the Greeks produced."

The "Oresteia," the mother of all dysfunctional-family stories, chronicles the curse on the House of Atreus and features murder, lust, revenge and more murder, to name but a few of its highlights. Its multiple themes, all complexly interwoven, pose enduring questions: Must the sins of the father always be paid for in blood by successive generations? Do gods exist to comfort or afflict humankind? Is there ever justification for sacrificing the young to a cause that is ultimately not theirs? Some scholars and critics have viewed Aeschylus as a dramatic theologian, "obsessed with God and his stern edicts," as one put it; Sophocles as a dramatic artist preoccupied with human suffering; Euripides, the first to include social criticism in his art. One thing each writer shared, however, was a refusal to portray the living of an ethical life as anything other than nearly impossible.

Take, for instance, the action that sets in motion the forces that will destroy almost everyone in the "Oresteia." Menelaus's wife, Helen, one of Western literature's original tramps, has run off to Troy with her seducer, Paris. Menelaus prevails upon his brother Agamemnon -- the two jointly rule the kingdom -- to launch a thousand ships so that they can go get her back and smite the Trojans for this gross insult to Greek national honor. But Agamemnon learns that in order to gain favorable winds so that the armada can set sail, he must sacrifice his young daughter to the goddess Artemis. The legend of the House of Atreus first appears as a series of passing, one-sided references in "The Odyssey." As far as Homer was concerned, Agamemnon was a good guy who did what he had to do; his wife, Clytemnestra was a cuckolding, homicidal shrew; his son, Orestes, another good guy who did what he had to do, etc.

Fortunately, Aeschylus drew onother extant sources to tell the full story, beginning with a dilemma that makes "Sophie's Choice" look easy. His Agamemnon is a devoted husband and father who dotes on all his children; he also leads a nation that demands vengeance. If he doesn't agree to the sacrifice, he and his entire family will likely be killed, and without his expertise Greece may lose the coming war; if he agrees, he murdersthe love that binds his family together, along with his daughter.

After the death of the daughter that she, too, loves fiercely, and feeling betrayed and abandoned, Clytemnestra takes a lover, Agamemnon's cousin Aegisthus. Aegisthus used to have siblings, but no more: Agamemnon's father, now dead, slaughtered them long ago, and Aegisthus has been waiting years for payback. Together he and Clytemnestra plot their revenge upon Agamemnon when he returns from Troy.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but everyone has a reason for what he or she does. And not just in the "Oresteia" but in all the surviving texts of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. "That's what I love," says Smith. "It's not about right or wrong. It's about the difference between what is right and more right. It's all so gray." It's the kind of stuff that makes an audience argue, wonder, question. The kind of stuff that great tragic drama has always been about, and still is.

No coincidence there.