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Copyright Notice

MAY 1999

 

Staging Ancient Drama: the Difference Women Make
Mary-Kay Gamel University of California, Santa Cruz

Sue-Ellen Case has argued that Athenian, Roman and Elizabethan drama promulgate the patriarchal values of their societies, hence contemporary feminists should have nothing to do with these plays. Case takes too narrow a view, however, of both the meanings and effects of ancient drama in its original context and the performance traditions and staging choices available to twentieth-century performers. Agreeing with Jonathan Miller that "the artist cannot avoid seeing the past with the eyes of the present, and it is only through hindsight that the style of the restoration is seen to be different from that of the original" (Miller 51), I argue that ideas about "authenticity" and "alterity" need to be carefully defined and situated in particular performative situations. Moreover, twentieth-century productions which openly engage with contemporary issues and values are actually closer to ancient performance conditions. This is especially true of comedy. A 1998 version of The Birds by Latino comedians Culture Clash was far more Aristophanic in tone and effect than productions which keep the Athenian topical allusions. Mnouchkine's prefacing the Oresteia with Euripides' Iphigenia at Aulis in order to show Klytemnestra's motivation for the murder of Agamemnon can be criticized as tendentious, but revisions of ancient drama with masculinist agendas often pass without notice. In his film Iphigenia, for example, Cacoyannis' long prologue depicting pressures on Agamemnon suggests that Agamemnon really has no choice in agreeing to the sacrifice.

Contemporary feminist thought offers particular challenges and opportunities for the staging of ancient drama, including feminist readings of ancient scripts (Loraux, Zeitlin), critical analysis of contemporary scripts and theatrical practice (Austin, Dolan, Hart, Hart and Phelan) and feminist strategies for staging (Cima, Donkin, Green, and Solomon). In my stagings of ancient drama at UCSC my feminist commitment led in some cases to stagings which seemed true to the ancient script's meaning in its original context, in others to stagings which challenged or subverted what we took to be the original meaning. Translating Medea for a 1985 production, I found no evidence in the script for the traditional interpretation that Medea still loves Jason and is sexually jealous of his new bride, as in the 1982 Kennedy Center production of the Jeffers version, during which Medea turned and raised her hands to claw Jason's face and they kissed passionately. Our Medea knew that Jason's marriage to the princess was motivated by self-interest; what enraged her was his arrogance and hypocrisy, his violation of his oath to her, his betrayal of their children.

A UCSC production of Sophocles' Ajax in 1986 set the play in Vietnam. As the chorus and Teuker picked up Ajax's body and started off, Tekmessa, played by an Asian-American actor, tried to follow, but was roughly thrust aside. She then put her and her son's straw "coolie" hats on and they walked slowly away into the woods. This staging contradicted the importance of Eurysakês' survival, stressed by both Ajax and Teuker. Yet its lack of concern for Tekmessa accurately reflected, I would argue, not only the position of Vietnamese women but Tekmessa's status in Sophocles' script.

Male characters too are re-evaluated in feminist stagings, not necessarily negatively. In our Alcestis the actor playing Admetos argued that after his return from his wife's grave the king undergoes a genuine ethical and emotional anagnorisis, finally understanding his loss and accepting responsibility for his actions; hence he played Admetos' resistance to Heracles' entreaties as genuine. And as the actor playing the veiled Alcestis in her veil heard her husband insist on his loyalty to her again and again, she became convinced that he had really changed, and wanted to return to him. Much to my surprise the show ended with their joyful reunion.

Aeschylus' Oresteia offers special challenges to feminist staging because of its explicitly masculinist program. Klytemnestra's lament for Orestes' reported death Choephori 691-99 is usually staged as hypocritical because of the later claim of Orestes' Nurse; so Peter Hall's staging in his 1981 NT production. In a 1990 UCSC production of Choephori, we found that a hypocritical lament took all the dramatic tension out of the scene. The actor playing Klytemnestra argued that the queen could have hoped (however irrationally) that Orestes might perhaps come home, even be reconciled to her, and that he too might have longed for reconciliation. So during her lament, Orestes was facing downstage, but she uttered her words with deep feeling. When she paused he started to go to her, only to be stopped by a gesture from Pylades (Apollo in disguise, seen only by Orestes). The point of choosing grief for Klytemnestra was not just to heighten sympathy for her, but also to raise the dramatic stakes, making Orestes' matricide more emotionally and morally difficult for him and for the audience.

Hall wanted the conclusion of Eumenides "to involve the audience in as close an equivalent as possible to the original ritual of communal affirmation" (Parker 354) so as the Furies received new robes, the audience was summoned to a moment of social communion. In 1992, two feminist student directors and I staged a production we pointedly called The Furies. The play was set in the American fifties (seen, of course, from a 1992 perspective). The show began with a frame which served to give necessary background from the previous two plays: a graduate student assistant to "Dr. Aeschylus" welcomed the audience to his class on "the beginning of modern justice in ancient Athens." She apologized for the professor's absence, and presented a slide lecture with voice-over by the absent professor. This lecture, describing the background events in obviously slanted terms (Agamemnon as "hero," Klytemnestra as his "evil wife"), was accompanied by black and white slides of the actors in ancient dress. Suddenly the Furies broke in, and the show proper began, with Apollo and Athena as corporate lawyers, the Furies female beatniks and proto-feminists, and the chorus of Athenians middle-class Americans. After the trial ended with Orestes' acquittal, the Furies threatened Athens to a backdrop of slides of natural disasters-dust storms, toxic waste, and (most appropriate for Santa Cruz) earthquakes. At that point Athena played her trump card-commodity capitalism-as slides of 50s consumer goods appeared. The Furies, convinced, changed into sweetheart dresses and joined in the singing of "Bless Us, Athena" to the tune of "God Bless America." This Furies drew on 1992 concerns such as environmental pollution, Gulf War propaganda, the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings, the abortion gag rule, and Bush-era rhetoric about "family values." The non-naturalistic setting and acting, blatant anachronisms, and mixture of tones all contributed to a radical destabilization of the "classic" status of the script, raising questions about the social construction of female roles by masculinist institutions (including the theater). The show was not Aeschylean, but I would argue that the introduction of elements or meanings which the script could not have had at the time of its original production-if they are designed to provoke response and discussion rather than acceptance-may be more in the spirit of Athenian theater than are those which purport to offer neutral, antiquarian, "classic" performances. In conclusion, my response to Case's challenge is to argue that feminist productions can participate in the patriarchal subtext of ancient dramas not in order to confirm that subtext, but to examine and question it. "One of the reasons why Shakespeare continues to be performed is not that there is a central realizable intention in each play that we still continue to value, but because we are still looking for the possibility of unforeseen meanings" (Miller 34-35). Those who perform ancient drama seeking in these works as yet unforeseen meanings of the concept "woman" will help to ensure the continued study and production of these works.

WORKS CITED

Austin, Gayle, Feminist Theories for Dramatic Criticism (Ann Arbor, 1990).
Case, Sue-Ellen, Feminism and Theatre (New York, 1988).
Cima, Gay Gibson, Performing Women: Female Characters, Male Playwrights, and the Modern Stage (Ithaca, 1993).
Dolan, Jill, The Feminist Spectator as Critic (Ann Arbor, 1988)
Dolan, Jill, Presence and Desire (Ann Arbor, 1993).
Donkin, Ellen, and Susan Clement, editors, Upstaging Big Daddy: Directing Theater as if Race and Gender Matter (Ann Arbor, 1993).
Green, Amy S., The Revisionist Stage: American Directors Reinvent the Classics (Cambridge, 1994).
Hart, Lynda, Making a Spectacle: Feminist Essays on Contemporary Women's Theatre (Ann Arbor, 1989).
Hart, Lynda, and Peggy Phelan, Acting Out: Feminist Performances (Ann Arbor, 1993).
Loraux, Nicole,Tragic Ways of Killing a Woman, trans. A. Forster (Cambridge, Mass., 1987)
Miller, Jonathan, Subsequent Performances (New York, 1986)
Parker, R.B., "The National Theatre's Oresteia, 1981-82," in Martin Cropp, Elaine Fantham, and S. E. Scully, editors, Greek Tragedy and Its Legacy (Calgary, 1986).
Solomon, Alisa, Re-dressing the Canon: Essays on Theatre and Gender (Routledge, 1997)
Zeitlin, Froma I., Playing the Other (Chicago, 1996).

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RESPONSES

Lorna Hardwick, The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK

Mary-Kay has encouraged us to take a fresh look at an important and rapidly changing area (for which many thanks). It is a pity that in the past so many aspects of this debate have got bogged down in what I think can sometimes be a false dichotomy between accusations of 'complicity' with patriarchal texts and of (forced) 'contemporization' (horrid word). By contemporization I mean a directly didactic and often 'closed' equation of the issue with contemporary concerns (applies to other socio-political readings as well of course). Earlier in our discussions in this series (especially in response to David's paper on masks) we've been looking at ways of breaking away from that sort of double bind. Here I would like to suggest an alternative way of engaging with it and perhaps redefining the problem.

It seems to me that its not so much the impulse to contemporization which can have negative effects but rather the way in which that kind of awareness is linked to the debates and movement within the source play and between the source play and its own context. For example, Bernard Knox (and others) have described the Medea as a 'sacred text of the women's liberation movement'. Well, perhaps (at least in the 19th century and in parts of the 20th century first wave). But the statement seems rather meaningless unless explicated by sensitivity to Medea's exploitation of the polis rationales underlying the speech to the women of Corinth (to take one example). In other words, exploration of ancient texts and performance as icons for modern concerns involves a crossing of boundaries, not just between ancient and modern (the narrow sense of contemporization) but also within the ancient play and its context. Edward Said used the word interference to describe this crossing of borders and obstacles ( see pp 156-7 in 'Opponents, audiences, constituencies' in Postmodern Culture, ed Foster, 1985). Said's focus has been on the inter-relationships between the literary and the social, which come together in representation, while Zeitlin, for instance, took a slightly different approach which centred on the ironies of interplay between the self and the other, even within a paternalistic culture. How those ironies are represented within one culture and are communicated to an audience in another culture raises crucial questions about redirecting our attention to the source text and its conditions of creation, performance and reception in its own time and place.

Sometimes this may lead to a questioning of the extent to which the source can be said to be simply patriarchal (or at least unproblematically so). Edith Hall tackled this minefield in respect not only of women but also of slaves in her chapter on the sociology of Athenian tragedy in (ed.) P.E.Easterling The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy (1997) and her concluding section on polyphony challenges some aspects of the dialogic approaches which have become part of the conventional wisdom. Dialogue between ancient and modern polyphonies is much more demanding and presents quite disturbing challenges for feminist approaches! For instance, polyphonic approaches to the Antigone have brought out the way in which her actions and arguments both assert female insights and responsibilties but also embed these in traditional religious and social values. Transplanted into more recent socio-political contexts, this has given us the 'Antigone' figure in the film Anne Devlin in which female insistence on proper burial had to support and struggle with a patriarchal Fenian ethos. And no doubt there is a director somewhere currently grappling with the ironies of the situation of Antigone as both freedom fighter and defender of the funerary rights of the Disappeared. Which brings me back to Mary-Kay's insistence on  fluidity, not only in openness to the unforseen meanings of the concept 'woman' but also in its relationship to a succession of slippery environments (ancient and contemporary).

Marianne McDonald, University of California at San Diego, USA

I agree with Mary-Kay Gamel about rejecting Case's rejection of the classics. I also agree that the past is inescapable, and that one might be better off engaging with it in a creative rather than blinkered way. Mary Kay develops her topic well  "Staging Ancient Drama: The Difference Women Make." She speaks about some stagings, and also feminist interpretations in critical writings about drama, namely Froma Zeitlin's Playing the Other. In my classes on ancient theatre I cover the social situation of women, and deal with their representation in drama. I write on Euripides' introduction of a new type of heroine (who, like Iphigenia, becomes a heroine in her tragic choices) to replace the Homeric hero, or for instance, more traditional representations of women by Aeschylus and Sophocles (see my books, Terms for Happiness in Euripides, Euripides in Cinema: The Heart Made Visible, and Ancient Sun, Modern Light: Greek Drama on the Modern Stage).

First I shall address some points made by Mary-Kay. In Mary-Kay's staging of the Ajax, I thought it was effective to have Tekmessa walk off at the end, and show her being mistreated by the men, but having her leave with her son I think differs from Sophocles' text in a way which also detracts from Tekmessa's own tragedy. In the original, she will either be separated from her son or go as a nursemaid for her son to Ajax's parents. She will NOT be allowed to keep this male heir for herself. Perhaps Mary-Kay's interpretation reflects some American activity in Vietnam (namely abandon the Asian baby, since it would probably be inconvenient to bring it home) and on that basis I applaud the new version, but that might be pointed out, and one must realize that this makes Tekmessa's situation less tragic. As a woman and a mother, I could face anything as long as I were not separated from my child, and Mary-Kay's ending shows Tekmessa leaving with her child.  I think that Sophocles made Tekmessa totally dependent on what decisions were to be made for her later, and her theme not important enough to resolve: she was a war prisoner, and not much better than a slave. She would not have the freedom to leave with impunity, AND Eurysakes WILL be cared for by Ajax's parents.

I really enjoyed Mary-Kay's treatment of Alcestis...and it reminds one that Admetus may, in fact, have some virtues after all (cf. Anne P. Burnett's "The Virtues of Admetus") if only that he can be educated.

I also agree completely that the Oresteia is stronger if Clytemnestra's grief is staged as if it were genuine...same for Sophocles' and Euripides' Electra.

I thought the Harrison/Hall version of the Eumenides was effective, and not anti-feminist. Hall may have fallen into the trap of seeing the ending as an affirmation, but Harrison never did, nor did his staging. Harrison said, if he could have, he would have divided the audience itself into male and female, to stress the opposing polarities. He openly admitted some of his feminist intentions, whereas Mnouchkine denied having any in her production of Les Atrides. Nevertheless, it is hard not to see the feminist implications of putting Euripides' IA first. Mnouchkine also had three of the furies leave at the end waving to the audience, co-opted into accepting Athena's bribes...but the rest of the furies were about to attack the audience, feeling their leaders had sold them out. I deal with this version at length in two articles for TheatreForum: "The Atrocities of Les Atrides:  Mnouchkine's Tragic Vision," and  "The Menace of Mnouchkine's Eumenides: Midnight Madness at Montpellier."

I am now working on my translation of Antigone to be directed by Athol Fugard, with him playing Teiresias, to be performed in Cork this summer. I have a video preface, and there are definite decisions which one might call those of a woman. I link documentary pictures with the choruses which I recite at the same time. For the words that celebrate victory, I show British tanks rolling into Belfast; for the words describing man's wonders, I show the people being shot on Bloody Sunday (Jan. 30, 1972); for the chorus on love, I show pictures of patriots, including many women, like Bernadette Devlin; for the chorus on mythological figures being imprisoned, I show people interned, and the hunger strikers...the mourning mothers outside the prison...and Niobe weeping ceaselessly; for the chorus on Dionysus I show pictures of plays, and women fighting back, like Medea and Antigone, and finally the epilogue:

If a person is to be happy,
He needs good sense.[I show Bernadette Devlin]
Never show disrespect to the gods.     [I show a Catholic grave, ancient cross]
Loud words from those with high pretensions    [ I show a picture of Ian Paisley ]
Lead to heavy blows of punishment;
Good sense is hammered out on the anvil of age.  [I show an ancient vase pic of Antigone]

I also chose Antigone. So there are still some women who think the classics are alive and well, and a useful tool for education, and potentially for political change...or as one of my articles claims:

"A Bomb at the Door:  Kennelly's  Medea, 1988."

Final Response from Topic Leader Mary-Kay Gamel

Both Lorna's and Marianne's comments were very helpful. I agree with Lorna about polyphony, and a production of TARTUFFE at American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco yesterday seemed to embody what you were saying. Discussions in the U.S. recently about race and theater, including the debate between August Wilson and Robert Brustein, have raised some of the same issues as those raised by feminist theater. Directed by Charles Randolph-Wright and using the Wilbur translation unchanged, the ACT production was set in Durham,North Carolina, in the 1950s. Orgon and family were Southern black bourgeoisie, Tartuffe a charismatic black preacher a la Daddy Grace. The historical connection was genuine: an upper-class black man like Orgon, isolated from the mass of his fellows yet unaccepted by whites, might be vulnerable to Tartuffe's appeal.

Commedia-like stereotypes were also used--Mariane resembled Annette Funicello of the Disney Mouseketeers, Valere was a motorcycle-riding Latino "j.d.," Damis metamorphosed into a budding Black Panther, and in an amusing turnaround Dorine was white trash--but with a light enough touch that the characters and relationships were illuminated rather than obscured. Varied Southern accents and choreographed movement complemented the formal language.

Avoiding both offensive stereotyping and p.c. didacticism, this production was both thought-provoking and hugely enjoyable. Its connection with contemporary American issues gave it an impact that historicizing productions of this play I've seen have not had. The final scene of the King's deputy typified its polyphony: the (white) deputy was a Federal agent, and both Laurent and Madame Flipote's maid turned out to be undercover agents; I almost expected to see an image of Robert F. Kennedy appear. The deus-ex-machina was treated with appropriate irony, yet to be transported back from 1999, when the promises of the civil rights movement seem so hollow, to a time when those promises were still bright, was comic in several senses.