Once Upon A Time In Ancient Greece

Friends have raved about two productions at Emerson, an adaptation of the Iliad which began its life in a theater in Princeton New Jersey with Stephen Spinella, no longer the wispy, Waspy youth he portrayed in Angels in America, but a solid, middle aged Achilles, and a variation on Euripides' Trojan Women with a few bells and whistles brought in from other works, both of which--I was about to say, sadly enough--I did not get the chance to see.  I am not sad at all actually; I have resisted seeing An Iliad (as indeed it is called), mainly because I don't ever want to see or hear another masterpiece of Greek antiquity, particularly not a dramatic rendition of a 16,000 line dactylic hexametric poem.  I very rarely find ancient Athenian tragic drama the least bit dramatic or compelling when done as the text suggests, and the "enhancements" as some might call it, only offend me.  T'was not always thus, of course, and I have even played Menelaos in a student/faculty outdoor production of Trojan Women at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts, to me memorable for the moments at the very beginning when I was secreted in the bushes--our "offstage"--with the student playing Hecuba and struggled to control myself as she--for my benefit alone, there in the bushes--improvised her opening speech "Lift up, o stricken head . . . " in a combination of Yiddish and just off the boat immigrant Jewish English, the language of her father.  My friends tell me that Emerson did The Trojan Women as an anti-war tract, and that is generally what the world imagines was Euripides' idea when he created the play.  I don't think so.  First off, the fact of war is such a given in ancient society, and for a people whose view of life derives from an inherent tragic sensibility, the endless woe on display or forecast in Euripides' play is merely the inevitable background before which the characters do their thing. War is a horror, life is a horror, the language of the play does not take a position. What is extraordinary here, as in so many of Euripides' plays, is the sensational dramatization of the plight of women, the playthings of males, the victims of direct prosecution or the mistaken targets of careless by-blows. Cassandra soon to be raped, Andromache soon to be forced into bed with the son of her husband's killer, Hecuba queen and now led off in slavery to a man she despises and who despises her, that's what this play is all about--written by a male, for a male audience. It's about what it means to be a woman in fifth century BCE Athens.  I cannot resist mentioning a total irrelevancy that stays in my head along with the humorous moment in Norton whenever I think of The Trojan Women, and that is a Harvard-Radcliffe student production a million years ago when a very young, but totally accomplished Stockard Channing played Cassandra and made that long monologue speech something to remember.  The play's grim vision of things is not intolerable because of the distancing achieved by the elaborate formulaic tragic language and by the rigid structure of scenes and dramatic progress; furthermore, violence never takes place enacted for the audience.  Likewise, the Ilad is not an anti-war piece; the males portrayed in it gain glory, stature, identity, and of course more often than not suffering and death from wars and battles; it's what defines them.  I imagine that the early audiences for this poem sat in recital instantly alert and interested in the mayhem told about, their capacity for identification and hence suffering filtered through the scrim of that incredible rhythmic language which offers everything no matter how awful in a sensuous hypnotic beat that intoxicates.  But make no mistake: when Hektor and Andromache discuss the horrible future that awaits them both, at the moment that they are dandling their little darling son on their knees, Hektor cannot resist ending his litany of woe with a prayer to the gods that the little tyke will grow up to be as much a relentless killer as the father.  Vito Corleone, Tony Soprano, Hektor, go for it, kill, kill, kill.  Contemporary film and television rubs the viewer's face in the psychic muck of the violence and sadism on offer in the story line.  The idea has recently been addressed yet again in a book coming out from Brett Martin (Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution) who takes as his starting point the moment when Tony Soprano strangles an informer he chances upon in rural Maine.  I was fascinated by The Sopranos, all five years, but stopped watching violence after that.  Too close, too many bad dreams, too urgent an invitation for my complicity because visuals are so insistent.