By his shining and his power she knew him...

[starlady]

First, in the Unsettlingly Apropos Dept., wildfires menace Athens, stirring memories of the fires in the Peloponnese two years ago and threatening the survival of Greece's center-right government.

I went with my friend C to see the Public Theater's production of Euripides' The Bacchae in Central Park last night. We got tickets (which are free) through the virtual queue and had a grand old time, despite the miserable stickiness of the weather and the thunderclouds which menaced the production, but did not make good on their threat. The theater itself is pretty cool--it overlooks the castle in roughly the middle of Central Park, and the set was an oval shape, with risers rising to an irregular, curving point, evoking the mountains behind Thebes.

Euripides gets a lot of press as the most "modern" of the three Athenian dramatists, whatever that means; I like him fine, but my eternal favorite will always be The Oresteia. Still, this was an excellent production of a intriguing, almost elemental play, and even better, it had music by Philip Glass, the ex-husband of the director, Joanne Akalaitis. The basic plot of the play is that Dionysos, the young god, is bringing his mysteries to Greece from Asia Minor (as all young gods do) and comes to Thebes, "of all our cities the first," the home of his late mother, Semele, whose sisters are slandering her name and her son's godhood. Thebes is ruled by Dionysos' cousin Pentheus, though their grandfather Cadmus is still alive and kicking (he has some great lines with Tiresias, who is sort of the all-purpose soothsayer of classical mythology--he really gets around). Dionysos drives Cadmus' daughters and the women of Thebes mad, up into the hills to celebrate his rites and then enters Thebes himself in the guise of the Stranger, all of which Pentheus cannot stand--and so the stage is set for a confrontation. Gods, after all, cannot be ignored: "the time will come when you see him even at Delphi, the center of the world..."

There was a noticeable dash of the Joker in Dionysos, which I will agree is fitting to an extent; he's not quite chaos for chaos' sake, but he is a force of chaos. Like all the gods, he's pretty selfish, but the pride that is completely fitting in the immortal cousin is completely unfitting in the mortal one: Pentheus, in his sanity, is the one character in the play who is truly mad, which only makes his eventual transformation/seduction by Dionysos/the Stranger (or by the madness of Dionysos) all the more striking; he goes to his death at his mad mother's hands dressed as a woman. Some people behind us were complaining about the play being staged in modern dress (was Dionysos wearing girl's jeans?), but I've seen productions in period clothing and masks of other Greek plays, and I don't think modern actors have the whole body-acting chops to really pull of either, though some of the cast members, particularly the woman who played Agave, Pentheus' mother, did seem to be very good at acting beyond the face--so I was just as glad to see Pentheus in heels and Dionysos in jeans. Of course the music was excellent, and the Chorus was fantastically well-costumed and -choreographed; as always the Chorus' role is interesting: as the Maenads, Dionysos' troupe of women, they are foreigners in Greece, women in a city of men, sometimes in Thebes and sometimes on Cythaeron.

The entire concept of the Dionysian rites has a lot of really striking pre-Christian undertones, much like the Eleusinian mysteries of roughly the same time period as the play do; particularly in that Dionysos died mortal and was reborn immortal, and that, as the god who gave wine to men, he is both in the wine that's offered as a libation and the god to whom the libation is poured; men imbibe him when they drink wine. The play also encodes, fairly obviously, a story of human sacrifice, and in general the play, and its staging, did a really good job of making legible the curious double, or reflected, nature, of the Greek gods: when Pentheus goes mad, he is both overcome by madness (which is Dionysos'), and being seduced by Dionysos, who stands as the Stranger physically before him. Does Aphrodite bring love upon people or is she the love that comes upon people? The answer is never yes or no; it's always both at the same time. And finally, that it's the women to whom Dionysos comes first is clearly significant on a number of social and historical axes--how is Pentheus, really, to see what he ought to have seen? The audience is complicit in the knowledge of Dionysos' godhood from the beginning (the Stranger never identifies himself as the god to anyone in the play), so we already can't answer, but Eurpides manages to make the audience complicit in both the knowledge and the ignorance of that fact, just as the audience and Cadmus already know that Agave is clutching Pentheus' head to her breast, but we feel the tension of the looming recognition acutely anyway.

Comments

[olewyvern.livejournal.com]

I am hugely jealous, of course. Sophocles is my man, but the Oresteia and the Bacchae are both pure masterpieces.

Also, I have learned that the Bacchae is home to "the most overwhelming use of γε" (I love that such a concept even exists); it's when Agave brings Pentheus' head back and says something like "it's a lion's head - or at least that's what they tell me."

[starlady38.livejournal.com]

Yeah.

That whole scene in particular is just excruciating, and excellent.