Did he jump or was he pushed?

                 

     We had a small crowd for opening night, but they were enough to answer the question: “How is the audience going to perceive this play?” After weeks of wrestling with what Euripides meant to convey and working out how best to convey it, we have feedback. Three comments in particular stand out. There was the hushed, “Whoa!” in the blackout before the intermission, the surprised remark that when Dionysus is on stage there is "a kind of healing energy" that comes from him, and (my favorite) the enthused remarks of two visitors from the UK who marveled at the quality of the performance and said, “Incredible! We will always remember this.” That’s pretty much all an actor and director could hope for - an affirmation that the choices made really do work.

     Especially since those choices were so fraught with dramaturgical peril. In the last weeks of rehearsal the decision was made to radically reshape the characterization of the god. Risky business late in the game. Tom Stoppard’s lines from Shakespeare in Love started repeating in my head: “ ..allow me to explain about the theatre business. The natural condition is one of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster.” "So what do we do?” "Nothing. Strangely enough, it all turns out well.” “How?” "I don't know. It's a mystery.” 

     At that point in the process, counter-intuitive trust was pretty much all we had as we debated options and nothing seemed to satisfy. One thing had become clear - the meaning of the play might well hinge on a single moment in Act 1, Scene 4. Pentheus has been railing against the priest of Dionysus, when he suddenly stops resisting and asks to be led to the maenads. There is no stage direction, no hint from the poet of what happens to cause this change. Just a line attributed to Dionysus which consists of only the Greek letter Alpha. What was that? Does Pentheus become hypnotized? Does Dionysus cast a spell? How is the 180 shift accomplished? 

     Anna Farkas (our director and the actor playing Dionysus) had begun assuming Pentheus and Dionysus behaved as adversaries in their early scenes. The initial characterization, with Anna playing him a bit sly, knowing, and almost impishly spiteful, made for some snappy lines readings but it got inauthentic feeling pretty fast. Why would the king willingly capitulate to his enemy? We tried the shift moment as a spell. A cast member, watching these exchanges and thinking about the Messenger speeches summed up the impact: "Dionysus is a murderer!”

     Fail! Even though the god speaks lines that sound vengeful, Euripides clearly didn’t create him as a villain.  This god is a far more nuanced and provocative character - not merely a supernatural Iago. He wants revenge for his mother, but is “most gentle to men,” he sends the Theban women mad, but “it is the woman’s nature that decides her actions”. He is there to punish impiety to the gods, but tells Pentheus, “Sir, it is still possible to end this”. We couldn’t see how it added up, but decided to let the contradictory elements emerge - even without deeper understanding. At this point everyone was trying to suss out the god's motivation - the “who am I, where do I come from, and where am I going” that actors ask about their characters. “What does Dionysus want,” was a question we still had no answer for.

     It all came together the other night when our visiting Greek Assistant paused the action at the penultimate Alpha and asked: “What if it isn’t imposition?”

That was an electric shock of a thought. “You mean, what if Dionysus doesn’t make the change happen? What if it’s Pentheus? What if the king’s resistance just collapses in on itself at that point?” Suddenly the narrative snapped into focus - the contradictions made sense. Dionysus isn’t a murderer, he needs worship, but he really is more like a gentle, curious presence in the first scenes with Pentheus. And the requirement that men acknowledge him is driven by human nature, not divine whim. “Whoa!” indeed.

     We tried it. this time, Dionysus simply stares into the king’s eyes as Pentheus collapses from within. Greg Hudson's expression is not of one mesmerized, but suddenly aware of his own desires - a bit dazed because the words coming out of his mouth are so unlike his usual pronouncements. And as the god asks him questions, the conversion is completed. Done in this manner the effect of the moment was hair-raising. Pentheus trips his own trigger. He’s not hypnotized or put under an enforced spell. He falls into the abyss of his own hubris. The logic of events - the fact that arrogance and rigidity lead inevitably to a fall - takes over before our eyes. And the priest of Dionysus sounds the elemental letter as an “Ah,” of apprehension, recognizing that the unexpressed longings in Pentheus’ own heart and mind have come to the surface. This is why people keep coming back to Greek drama. It’s theater at its most elemental - practically a religious experience where we witness unspoken and unlooked for truths.

     In the final few days, tweaks were made to the text created to fill in the lost part of the play to strengthen the effect. Dionysus reply to Agave’s accusation: "He was my child, bloody and torn when you denied me recognition of him. Was this just? You claim divinity - but what is divine?” is neither gentle nor vengeful. It is a declaration of The Way Things Are. This is the nature of human life that we have no control over and yet must come to terms with. During dress rehearsals we tried the last scene with the god in a mask. It was certainly a striking effect, but it didn’t add to revelation. At the last minute, Anna decided to bring the play full circle - it began with a match struck in the darkness. Now it would end the same way. The god who has taken the form of man becomes the story-teller. "Daemons take many forms and the gods perform unlooked for ends. What was anticipated has not come to be, and in the unexpected, the God has found a way. This is the end of our story".

"             

Who ARE these women?

Pentheus is the protagonist, Dionysus, the deus who is not ex machina, but the play is called The Bacchae. (translation: The Women who follow Bacchus). After nearly 6 weeks of rehearsing, we were still asking, “Why?”  And now we’re getting answers!

Along the way, that question prompted lots of other interesting questions: "Is this like that play all about a guy named Brutus but the play is called Julius Caesar?" "Is this play actually about the women?" "Was Euripides sympathetic to the women?” “Are these women admirable or wild and scary?”“What does that tell us about Euripides - did he like his women wild and scary?” "What would an ancient audience of made of the title and the women?"

Well, we do know that the ancient Greeks didn’t give the play any awards. Perhaps it received a chilly reception because women in Hellas were thought of as the dark flip side to masculine reason and rationality. The masculine was the rational and virtuous, the feminine was vulnerable, susceptible to irrational passions, and weak. That wasn’t the convention Euripides delivered. And nobody likes having their conventions upended when they go out for a nice morning at the theater.

We don’t know very much about him, but we can definitely say that Euripides wasn’t a conventional poet. Of the nineteen plays we know are his, twelve focus on women who defied the ancient stereotype. His Medea states, "I would rather stand three times with a shield in battle than give birth once." In all of his plays he took Greek society to task for the value system that had led to the Great Peloponnesian War, including their religious customs. Euripides had an axe to grind and it turns out, we’re still discomforted by his iconoclasm.

In The Bacchae Agave and her sisters are driven mad because of their hypocrisy and lack of piety, but the foreign women following the god don’t seem mad or weak. The conventional women are dangerous and susceptible to madness because of their resistance to anything new.
     The followers of Dionysus sound a little bloodthirsty at times: "shout for joy at the misfortune of Pentheus, the death of the dragon’s offspring!” But is it surprising that these free women would want to resist a return to subjugations with every ounce of their being? In an Athenian male, such an impulse would have been applauded. To this day, the sight of a woman strongly defending her rights prompts pushback - men have “strength of character,” women are “stubborn,” men are blunt and forthright, women who speak plainly with passion are “shrill” or  “pushy” - some things never change.

Meanwhile, the men in the play, Pentheus and Kadmos, while upholding rationality and conventionality, aren’t exactly models of manly Greek excellence. In fact, Euripides makes them illustrations of what is worst in humanity: rigidity, pride, greed, hubris. Their offenses may not seem terrible, but what drives them is what drives men to war and all its horrors.

The Chorus has been working to uncover their character’s natures and motivation. We discussed the mythology behind the play, and listened to Anna (our resident Greek geek) and Zachary Thomas (visiting Greek assistant from St. John’s College) dissect the original text for meaning.

     We took about an hour talking over the original message of the play. We read bits of Dr. Catherine Svehla’s  Euripides’ Women: The Role of the Feminine Other”. "The greater permeability of a woman’s mind kept her closely linked to uncontrollable chthonic forces." “madness is the emblem of the feminine”. Unsurprisingly, our women had some choice things to say about those ancient assumptions. And that led to a more lively sense of what they wanted to convey.  And when the maenads hit the floor again, they seemed to have found their motivation and characters. 

It is the followers of Dionysus who ask the big questions in the play: What is happiness? What is wisdom then? "What is right, that is always what is wanted, what is loved” And they have the most meaningful answers: "Divine power does not answer prayer immediately - it is slow but inexorable," "That person is blessed with a good daemon that, reaching a safe harbor, escapes from the winter frost of a sea storm. Or, faced with hardships, overcomes them. “  "For my own part - I call a person blessed when they live their life without expectation. Finding happiness day by day.” 

The play is more sophisticated that it appeared at first. Euripides is having a meta conversation about origin stories and the narratives we tell ourselves and others to define reality (I think there may be a future post from the director on this subject). And, in a twist that would have been provocative in 450 B.C., he uses women as the religious purveyors of his observations. 

We go into tech week at the Bartell on Monday. Come see us if you can. The play is full of beautiful, chilling, profound passages, all delivered with devotion and attention to detail. It’s been quite a journey - the actors have worked incredibly hard to create a faithful depiction of the age-old truths in this terrible and wonderful tale.

Ancient Greek fear and loathing

We’re rehearsing Act 2. Scene 2. That’s the bit where the Messenger staggers on stage, meets The Bacchae and tells the death of Pentheus in poetic and horrific detail. Euripides paints us a word picture, because the ancient producers of tragedies couldn’t or wouldn’t have staged this kind of violence. The audience gets the CGI detail and implied PTSD second hand. 

Today, the goal in stage and screen violence is artistic verisimilitude - “here’s what a battle scene really looks like,” “this is what a gunshot wound looks like as it’s being made" - watch out for those 3D blood spatters. Think, for example, of the recent staging of Coriolanus at the Donmar Warehouse in London. 

       The onstage disemboweling at the end of the play was truly impressive stage craft (and made quite a mess for the crew to clean up every night).

        Way back in 1968, I saw Patrick Stewart as Cornwall, and Ben Kingsley as Oswald in Trevor Nunn’s King Lear at Stratford. Unfortunately, all that I remember from the show was the controversially realistic blinding scene (and spending the remainder of the play peering between my fingers). It’s an open question whether the technical achievement of realistic violence aids or thwarts dramatic catharsis. 

We’ll have plenty of red-colored corn syrup blood for The Bacchae recognition scene - when Agave comes in with Pentheus severed head (though probably not enhanced remainders from Jacobsen’s butcher for the rest of his dismembered body). But the bulk of the considerable violence in this play happens off stage and and we experience it through speeches. 

We’re assuming The Bacchae wasn’t Euripides’ version of a modern slasher flick and that the violence serves a more profound vision. The original meaning of the play has obscured by the mists of time, but it’s becoming clearer that the violence of this play (and many other Greek tragedies) is essentially psychological. It reminds us of our precarious position. In earlier Greek drama, this is meant to evolve awe and respect of the gods. Euripides, however, leaves us deeply uneasy about the powers that be. 

Whatever is in control (if, indeed anything really is) in this play, does not make itself easily understood. It’s not a flaw in the plot, it’s the theme of the play. This production is going with the play’s famous tag-line as it’s dramatic raison d’être: “Daemons take many forms and the gods perform unlooked for ends: what was anticipated has not come to be and in the unexpected, the god has found a way”. 

Underlying and interwoven into all the speeches in the play is the dilemma of what to do with the unknowable. Like Pentheus, we can pretend it doesn’t exist. Or, we could try to manipulate it, like Kadmos. Or honor it, according to Teiresias’ advice. But in the end, whether it wears a benevolent face (“Happy are they that have a pure spirit - and, life-sanctified, should-initiated - join the mysteries of the god”) or a horrific one (“Dance Bacchae! And shout for joy at the misfortune of Pentheus, the death of the dragon’s offspring!”) we must admit our condition and find a way to cope with it.

  This week’s big question has been how to best dramatize the disturbing text in Scene 2.2. As the Messenger, Michael Feakins has been experimenting with blocking and interactions with the Chorus to illustrate this. We knew the women were fearsome, but it took awhile to realize what made them so. It’s not that they threaten the Messenger, rather, as Dionysus' followers they are troublingly unknowable. What will they do? Teiresias says early in the play that when it comes to honoring Dionysus, it is the nature of the woman that determines her behavior. Are these women safe? The Theban maenads, sent mad by the god, were tragically unsafe. It is the very not-knowing, and imagining what might happen that creates the terror and tension in this scene. 

The catharsis, as it turns out,  is not vicariously experiencing Pentheus’ gruesome end, it is surviving the telling of it with the Messenger.

It's complicated

    The thing about this play, is that while there are moments of beauty; lyrical descriptions, statements of profound wisdom, and just plain gorgeous imagery, it is also deeply disturbing. Because along with the beauty is madness and some wrenching violence. I mean stomach turning stuff, when your body joins your head in protesting: “This is the story? Really?” 

    The actors playing the Bacchae women and Agave had a long talk about this one especially hot night in one of the Sunday School rooms at First Baptist where we’ve been rehearsing. It was a little bit like Sunday School actually - Sunday School in a sauna with everyone asking the big questions, taking nothing for granted and demanding answers that make sense. I think the world of these young women!

     But “sense” is exactly what Euripides is not making with this play. In fact, it can be read as a  guided tour into the darker mysteries where rationality has no place. Maybe that was the author’s point, and what we’re hearing in the tale of Dionysus’ vengeance and punishment of Agave and her son, is Euripides’ own chastisement of Athenian society with its premium on Apollonian reason and sunshiny logic.   

          

     Or not. 

     The burning question for the cast is whether they can make sense of Dionysus or appreciate his motives. One thing is certain, the response to the play hinges on how you understand justice. In Euripides’ mythos there is Pentheus’ justice and the god’s and they are very different things. And the Greek word he uses actually isn’t so much “justice" as “custom" - what you expect is right.

     Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Chorus members seem to have no real problem with Dionysus. To a great degree actors experience a play through their characters, and because they’ve been doing grape-vines and allemandes around him (or his boots) for the past month while making cool mystical pronouncements and dramatically seething about the hubris of Pentheus, they are not dissatisfied with their god. He’s their enchantingly good looking traveling companion, their protector and inspiration - what’s not to like?

 

     For those who serve Pentheus, it’s more complicated. Though the guards and the Messengers all pointedly notice Dionysus' grace and power, and even contradict the king’s hubristic authority, the actors can’t help but feel for the king they serve. 

     Poor rigid, wrong-headed king - he’s doomed by the hypocrisy and injustice he took in at Agave's knee, and the propriety he tries to hide behind. His faults are familiar though that you find yourself wanting to give him a way out. And Greg Hudson plays the flawed Pentheus with such humanity that you can’t help but identify with him. 

                 

     So, the discussion continues: Can you be angry at the god (especially if it’s not in the text)? Isn’t Pentheus' fate more like a rubber-band snapping after being stretched too far? (Director’s analogy there) Are we justified in objecting when Pentheus comes to a bad end? We’re horrified at the pathos and gore but we still have to grapple with the poet’s insistence that the god is gentle and gracious. 

     And so, round we go. 

     A Pentheus/Dionysus special rehearsal brought some illumination. Greg and Anna worked Scenes 1.2 and 1.4 repeatedly.  I found my sympathies taking turns:

"Wow - that king is some kind of stuck up politician."

"But, you know, that “priest” of Dionysus is insufferably insolent.."  

     First I thought that maybe the poet wants us to feel the disconnect - to recognize that insincerity is a slippery slope but that we  object to the powers-that-be greasing the skids. Then, later the conversation turned to Andre Gregory’s 1969 production at Yale. Set in a structure that looked like the skeleton of an airplane fuselage, the stage was meant to represent both his palace and the inside of Pentheus' head. 

     To a great degree, our perception of what’s going on comes from Pentheus. He is the one that finds Dionysus insufferable and who won’t allow for any custom but his own. From within that most un-open mind, the god appears horrific. We’ll go back tonight and try letting Euripides have his say: playing the warnings and admonitions as the god’s attempts at education; actually gentle and gracious...

    The end of the Chorus discussion on Friday came down from the metaphysical heights to planning the stage mechanics of the recognition scene: how much stage blood to bathe Agave in. Pentheus' head in a bag or on a spike? Do we do a plaster cast of Greg’s face? Do we put blood in Agave’s hair? Yes! How about Pentheus bloody handprint on her cheek? Yes again! 

     But you must not think that we are bloodthirsty - just a tad caught up in the revels!