As the classical scholar Edith Hamilton so wisely taught, you can’t overestimate the contributions of the Greeks to Western civilization.
Many areas of thought over which we still scratch our heads began with them: democracy, poetry, history, philosophy and the naturalistic style that infuses so much of our art. Put simply, the Greeks invented our way of life, and for centuries since we’ve been in a period of refinement.
Drama is no exception. And yet, strangely, for all the repertory theater on view in recent decades, the Greeks have been treated with only token representation. While not completely ignored, Greek drama is certainly not produced on a frequency equal to its importance. (One noteworthy exception: European Repertory Company’s two-year-old “Agamemnon” on the North Side.)
“Greek drama is terrifically difficult to make work for contemporary audiences,” admits Charles Newell, Court Theatre’s artistic director. Court is once again tackling that drama nonetheless with an ambitious, rare pairing of two works by Euripides, both steeped in the story of the House of Atreus and both featuring the great warrior Agamemnon’s daughter, Iphigenia.
They are bringing out some pretty big guns to unveil “The Iphigenia Cycle,” a combined presentation of “Iphigenia at Aulis” and “Iphigenia in Tauris,” opening Monday. JoAnne Akalaitis, the celebrated but brief successor to Joe Papp at New York’s Public Theater, whose sometimes controversial projects include ” ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore” at the Goodman Theatre in 1990, is the director.
Nicholas Rudall, Court’s founding director and an accomplished Greek scholar, has written a new translation. The design team boasts international credits: Paul Steinberg on sets, Doey Luthi on costumes and, on lights, Jennifer Tipton, one of the most acclaimed designers in the business.
But all that talent faces a tough challenge: “I think I didn’t really get the Greeks or understand them myself until four years ago,” says Akalaitis, who is directing her first Greek play with this production.
“I think when I studied them in school, it wasn’t about the drama, it wasn’t a practical study, partly because at the time there were all those productions with masks and what I call blankets.”
While at the Public, Akalaitis participated in a special project, a kind of 20th Century salon, she calls it, bringing together a group of disparate artists, including Eric Bogosian, who read the plays aloud and discussed their meaning. The experience opened doors for her, she says.
What does she get now she didn’t before? “Emotion,” she says. “I get the emotion now.”
As challenging as Greek theater may be, the rewards, when reached on that visceral level, are all the more fulfilling, Rudall argues. “It is an extraordinary feeling,” he says, “to connect to something that’s 2,500 years old. It’s in some sense the theatrical equivalent of strolling about the pyramids. There is something terribly moving about that connection, about the feeling of a human continuum.”
But it is a feeling hard to arouse: “For us, it’s also such an alien form,” Rudall adds. “If you take just the chorus, which is sometimes 30 percent of the text, you have to try and re-create what the Greeks did, and you can’t. They rehearsed for six months. They were all males, and they danced in a peculiar way. And they sang and they chanted.
“And while Euripides is considered the more realistic of the great Greek playwrights, he writes speeches that are a page and half long. You cannot take on these plays hoping to make them completely modern. They won’t get there.”
Akalaitis can be relied on to try. A native Chicagoan and University of Chicago alum, she was a founder of the famed experimental troupe Mabou Mines and gained a strong reputation during the ’80s, when she directed at all the leading not-for-profit theaters in the country. Her Boston staging of “Endgame” won both acclaim and the ire of playwright Samuel Beckett, who objected from afar to her resetting his work in a subway. Her Goodman staging of ” ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore” reset the Jacobean tragedy in Mussolini’s Italy.
“Are you asking is this a post-modern, deconstructionist take on Greek tragedy?” she says when asked what she’s up to now. “No. I wanted to learn something, which I always want when I do a play, and for me, this form is awfully difficult. As a director, I happen to be busy on stage and want to have a lot happening. But with so many long speeches, I decided to resist my own inbred impatience and do the play. Just do the play. Though I have to admit, there’s a lot going on in the second play at this point.”
She is coy about her choices, though she reveals a lot about her daring in the ideas she discarded: “I had all these ideas about not even doing the second play, but just handing out the script. For a time I envisioned the costumes in the second play as bathing suits and caps and shaved heads. I don’t want to reveal what we settled on because it’s so startling.”
She has worked up an elaborate intermission video show that, along with charts of the tree of the House of Atreus on display in the lobby, may help to fill in the drama’s elaborate family and mythological background–one of the stumbling points for modern audiences, who aren’t as versed in gods, goddesses and Greek lore as the original audiences.
“Each member of the company was asked to create the history of all of the characters they play,” she says. “We shot video of them all over Chicago, telling that story, in what amounts to a public TV documentary on the House of Atreus.”
Audiences won’t really escape the world of the play even in the intermission between the two 90-minute parts. “If they run to their cars, we may even find a way to sneak up on them there,” she jokes.
The Trojan War hangs over both plays as a backdrop. In the first, Agamemnon, picked to lead the Greek army to rescue his brother Meneloas’ wife, Helen, from Troy, is stranded in a calm, awaiting favorable sailing winds. He is told he must sacrifice his daughter, Iphigenia, to appease the gods and restore the winds. Iphigenia, Agamemnon, Menelaus and the girl’s mother, Clytemnestra, all engage in the gut-wrenching debate over her life.
In the second drama, she has been spared, an animal substituted last-minute by the gods, and she lives as a priestess in Tauris, where she oversees the sacrificing of other Greeks who find their way there. Her brother, Orestes, unaware of her survival, arrives, and is nearly sacrificed himself in a kind of replay of the events in the earlier story.
Neither drama is a tragedy, strictly speaking. Though “Aulis” is steeped in tragic conflict, there is the last-minute surprise rescue, and “Tauris” is very much an adventure story, complete with a hair-raising finale that is the Greek equivalent of a car chase.
But the underlying pull is inescapably primal.
“If you confront the plays honestly, you see that they are about sacrifice,” says Rudall, who began studying Greek in grade school in Great Britain and eventually earned a doctorate at Cornell University. “It is strangely the same story as that of Abraham and Isaac, of that time in the culture when civilization moves from human sacrifice to the sacrificing of an animal.
“There is a deep sense in humanity that the gods require us to give up the greatest gift of all in exchange for our continued survival.”
