by Mary Norris
In class, Professor Slatkin gave a different scholarly article to each student of Greek tragedy and asked us to write a response. Mine was about Antigone’s motive: Why did she do it? I was aghast to discover that there was an entire body of literature devoted to this question. To me it was perfectly obvious why Antigone did it: she loved her brother. She did what came naturally to her, and to be faulted for that can elicit no repentance because there was nothing to repent: she couldn’t have done it differently. She was blameless. The only other thing I had read in classical Greek at that point was Plato’s Apology, and I saw parallels between Antigone and Socrates: both were martyred by the state for being married to the truth.
THE PURSUIT OF GREEK TRAGEDY can actually have a happy ending. Or at least it can end in relief. It was around that time, while taking Elementary Greek, that I saw a notice on campus announcing auditions for a production of Euripides’ Electra in ancient Greek. Having never studied a dead language before, I missed the social aspects of language learning—eating ethnic food, writing skits, improvising dialogues—and this might be as close as I could get to conversational ancient Greek. So I tried out. A fair-haired graduate student listened to me read a passage from the Homeric Hymn to Demeter and said, “I’d love to have you in the chorus.”
Performance of Greek drama in the original language (or some semblance of it) is a long-standing academic tradition. In 1881, students at Harvard University staged Oedipus Tyrannus in the original Greek, a production that was seen by six thousand people. The Barnard Columbia Greek Drama Group—now the Barnard Columbia Ancient Drama Group—was founded in the 1976–77 academic year, with a production of Euripides’ Medea. A student named Matthew Alan Kramer, who was in the play, was killed in an accident that summer, and his family set up a memorial fund “for the promotion of these plays, which he loved.” I had seen their production of The Cyclops, a satyr play by Euripides, before my first trip to Greece. It opened with the title character lumbering onstage and sitting down at a harpsichord to play a winsome piece by Rameau titled “Les Cyclopes.” I was enchanted.
For the first read-through of Electra, in English, we met at the director’s apartment, on one of the long blocks of apartment buildings and fraternity houses just south of Columbia. Each of us brought a different translation. I got the impression that this was not one of Euripides’ greatest hits. Electra and Orestes sounded like brats hatching a juvenile plot to kill Mom. Our Electra, a graduate student named Lavinia, had a regal bearing and an impressive academic pedigree: her mother was a Dante scholar, and her father a mathematician. The student playing Orestes, who bore a slight resemblance to Gregory Peck, had played the part before, in the Eumenides, with Lavinia as Athena. The undergraduate who competed with Lavinia for the role of Electra had been cast as Clytemnestra and would get killed by her.
The chorus was made up of milk-fed Mycenaean girls who drop by to invite Electra to a procession at the temple of Hera. There were four of us: a classics major named Hilary, who, though somewhat stiff onstage, had read a lot of Greek and was asked to lead the chorus; a cherubic blonde who had devised her own major in Byzantine studies; a Greek-American who, despite her heritage, was unfamiliar with the House of Atreus and was horrified to learn what Electra and Orestes were up to; and me.
The director distributed sheet music and audiocassettes of the odes to help us learn the Greek. The chorus would rehearse separately from the rest of the cast, with a choreographer. No decision had been made about the musical accompaniment, but I gave the producer the number of my brother (as he was at the time), who played the harp.
The first hurdle for the chorus was memorizing the lines. We were using a scheme of restored pronunciation, which I was scornful of. I held the ignorant opinion that it would make more sense to follow the pronunciation of contemporary Greeks than that of scholars and linguists from Cambridge or Yale, though I liked the restored pronunciation of oi, as in “Oi moi,” a typical exclamation in tragedy, meaning something like “Woe is me” or the Yiddish “Oy vey.” Many vowels and vowel combinations from ancient Greek have been streamlined in the modern language and are all pronounced the same. Or, as James Merrill puts it, rather negatively, in his early novel The (Diblos) Notebook, “The modern Greek language can be said to have suffered a stroke. Vowels, the full oi’s & ei’s of classical days, have been eclipsed to a waning, whining ee.”
You don’t so much read ancient Greek as construe it, teasing out the different strands and seeing which parts of a sentence go together. English sentences tend to follow a predictable subject-verb-object pattern. In a Greek sentence, an adjective at the end can modify a noun at the beginning, and the words can pile up in between like a pyramid with the crucial verb at the top. We had five convoluted choral odes and a lament to master, and I spent hours thumbing through the Greek lexicon and comparing translations. The official translation for the production was Emily Townsend Vermeule’s, but I noticed that the director carried around a prose translation by Moses Hadas, who had taught at Columbia. It seemed that classicists preferred literal translations. A translator who tried to replicate the Greek meter produced unidiomatic—not to say tortured—English. Greek just does things differently from English. Enough exposure to Greek will do two things: it will make a snob out of you, because you see that no translation approaches the beauty and subtlety of the original, and it will provoke you to prove yourself wrong by attempting your own translation, which will not be universally admired.
The choreography for the odes had to be simple, because we were not dancers, and it had to communicate the meaning as literally as possible, because not everyone in the audience would be a Greekist. We were like backup singers, waving our arms around, acting out sphinxes and rowing invisible boats and bringing the axe down on Agamemnon’s neck in a retelling of his murder in the bath. The director implored us to get the lines down cold, so that if there was any kind of distraction during the performance—if the set collapsed or an ambulance wailed up Amsterdam Avenue—we could sail over it unperturbed.
One night my brother showed up at rehearsal with his harp. The producer had called him, and he had met with the director. “He is exactly the kind of guy who is not cut out for this job,” my brother said, laughing. The director was visibly nervous: it emerged that his academic survival depended on his passing exams that spring, and instead of studying he was putting on a show. At the first musical rehearsal, he conducted with a Bic pen, making abrupt, exaggerated gestures, and watched helplessly as someone grabbed a page from his score, which had been taped together into one long document, and unspooled it across the floor. Outside of rehearsal, I helped my brother with the Greek, transliterating the words and defining them, so that even if he couldn’t construe a line, he knew what the words sounded like and which ones were important. He did every pragmatic thing he could to make sure that nothing he had control over would go wrong during the performance. He had his score reduced and glued it to cardboard so that it wouldn’t slip off the music stand. He made a tuning chart for the harp. He bought new black clothes, like a costume, to shore up his confidence.
We started rehearsing with the principals to learn our cues. Electra had an opening aria, which Lavinia sang in a reedy, affecting voice, and she and Orestes had a duet at the end, with the chorus joining in for the ritual lament, or kommos. “I want this to be really terrible,” the director said, meaning shocking and bloodthirsty, like a chainsaw massacre. After all, Clytemnestra was an axe murderer.
My brother and I usually left rehearsal together, stopping at a bar on the way home, where he would badger me to keep rehearsing when I just wanted to drink. One day he went off to practice with Lavinia instead, and I headed down Broadway alone. I was inwardly repeating the ode for a scene in which the chorus celebrates the return of Orestes, when Orestes himself rounded the corner with the director. I opened my mouth and Greek fell out: “’Έμολες ’έμολες, . . .” They understood me perfectly—“You’ve come, you’ve come, O l
ong-awaited day. You shine, you show forth, you appear in the city a torch!”—and invited me to join them for pizza.
Euripides was turning my life inside out: I was living in the text, going over my lines every spare moment, in the tub and on the subway and in bed at night. I neglected to pay my bills or water my plants or do the dishes. I reported, as usual, to my job on the copydesk, but I sometimes had the sensation that I was an alien from Argos plunked down in the hallway of a seedy midtown office. Our system of rolling up proofs and inserting them into a Plexiglas-and-leather canister and shooting it up a pneumatic tube to the production department, two floors above, for transmission by fax to the printer, in Chicago, seemed suddenly quaint, even to me. How much longer could this go on?
One night I dreamed that I was handling shards, pieces of ancient pottery with writing on them. The dream came back to me as I passed a church on the way to rehearsal, and I realized that ancient Greek is like the Bible (from βίβλоς): records of the past that preserve the things that humans most need to know.
FINALLY IT WAS opening night at the Teatro Piccolo, in Columbia’s Casa Italiana, a building furnished with massive fake antiques that were rumored to have been sent over by Mussolini in lieu of a cash donation. Over the stage was a quote from Virgil. The floor was strewn with hay, as for a children’s Nativity pageant. The chorus, wearing peploi—ankle-length tubes of crinkly fabric, in red, yellow, blue, and orange, pinned at the shoulders—sat in the back row, waiting for our entrance. When the harpist cued us with four repeated bars, we squeezed one another’s hands, willing our synapses to connect and feed us the lines, and surged up the aisle.
Because I was the only one who remembered the words, I had an impromptu solo during the reenactment of Agamemnon’s death cry: “Will you murder me?” Clytemnestra screamed, there was a tumult backstage, and Electra and Orestes entered red-handed. The bodies were hauled onstage, and the effect was as chilling and incongruous in the childlike Nativity-play setting as the director could have wished. The play ended with Castor and Polydeuces, twin brothers of Clytemnestra and Helen, appearing, not from above (there was no money in the budget for a crane) but from the wings, to denounce the matricide. Castor was played by a Greek Cypriot, Demetrios Ioannides, who rolled out his lines with the godlike authority of someone speaking his mother tongue.
The audience was disappointingly small for an event that had reached epic proportions in my brain. “Euripides’ Electra,” the flyers proclaimed: “Fun for the Whole Family!” We performed four times, Thursday to Saturday, with a matinee on Friday; no performance was perfect. My brother and I alternated in being elated or dejected after each show. I complained that I felt no magic. “That’s too bad, but nobody cares how you feel,” my brother said. “It doesn’t have to be magic for you but could still be magic for the audience.”
On the last night, Ed Stringham brought some people from the office—I was his protégée, after all—so there was a New Yorker contingent in the audience. Who knew how much lon ger the magazine would support an employee’s avocation as a Greek chorus girl? I had persuaded the people in Goings On About Town to run a little blurb for us. Both my Greek teachers, Dorothy Gregory and Laura Slatkin, were there, along with a contingent of classics scholars, who, the director had said, would be able to construe the odes as we were singing them. I was nervous. That night, we the chorus stumbled at our entrance, two of us counting wrong and the other two stubbornly setting it right. But it was OK. As when a brand-new Plymouth Fury incurs a fender bender on its first outing, the pressure of perfection was off. We were freer after that, more forgiving. Between the odes, I concentrated on listening to the dialogue. Even if I couldn’t understand what Electra and Orestes and Clytemnestra were saying, I could listen to the sound of the Greek. At every performance, I understood more—isolated words, genitive endings, a vocative inflection (Clytemnestra’s “ παȋ”—“O child”). Toward the end, just before Clytemnestra walked into the trap set by her darlings, Orestes and Electra came downstage and argued, and I distinctly heard Orestes whine to his sister, “But I don’t want to kill Mom.” I also heard Electra’s answer, and what she said didn’t make sense, but it didn’t make sense in Greek. It was not supposed to make sense. She was telling him why he had to kill his mother, compelling him to go through with it, defying a law that was older and holier than her need for retribution: Thou shalt not kill—especially thy mother.
Still, I had some sympathy for Electra. The way I saw it, she had no choice. She hated her mother and could not rest until Clytemnestra was dead. But once she had killed her, everything would be worse instead of better. It was as if you had something in your eye that drove you crazy, and instead of trying to distract yourself from it or somehow live with it, you gouged it out, only to realize that having something in your eye was nowhere near as bad as not having the eye at all.
I told Professor Slatkin about my epiphany after our next class, and she said it was a good example of anagnorisis: a term from Aristotle that means a turning point in the action of a play when a character recognizes some truth about himself. Orestes rejects Electra’s scheme—he knows it’s wrong—but she bullies him into it anyway. In a very small way, I saw our family in this scene: my attempts as a child to bend my brother to my will, to enlist his sympathy against our mother. Fortunately, he resisted. And no blood was shed in the House of Norris.
MY CAREER AS A TRAGEDIENNE peaked the following year, when I was plucked from the chorus of Electra and given the lead in The Trojan Women. It was Euripides again, and the part was Hecuba, the Queen of Troy. I had been hoping to play Cassandra—a walk-on as a madwoman would have suited me perfectly—but, as a thirty-three-year-old “postgraduate special student,” I was cast in the role of the hag while the part of the ingénue went to a slinky undergraduate. The shrewd student-director told me that if I didn’t play Hecuba the role would go to Hilary, of last year’s chorus. I couldn’t let that happen.
Hecuba carries the play. It opens with her lying on the ground after the defeat of Troy. She has lost her son Hector and her husband, King Priam. This is the end, the tragic aftermath of the Trojan War as seen by the women of Troy. Again, the plot is linear: Cassandra and Andromache, Hector’s wife, sweep in and out; Helen, Hecuba’s archenemy, makes an appearance, reunited with her husband, Menelaus; the body of young Astyanax, Hector’s heir, who was flung from the towers of Troy by the Greeks lest he survive to reclaim the kingdom, is handed over to his grandmother. Talthybius, Agamemnon’s herald, played by my Greek Cypriot friend Demetrios, grows in sympathy for Hecuba. The play is an exercise in comparative and superlative: Hecuba starts out sad and gets sadder and sadder and sadder until she is the saddest woman who ever lived.
The role was a feat of memorization. Each scene came with a long speech—forty or more lines of Greek. I started with the last speech, the one over the body of Astyanax, because I knew that if I learned the speeches in order the last one would suffer, and it was both the climax and the low point of Hecuba’s misfortunes. I had been able to identify with Electra, because I was a daughter and a sister, but what was Hecuba to me? She was a wife and mother, and a queen. One of my father’s nicknames for my mother was Queen.
I did not have to look far for a model of grief over a lost child. I could still hear my mother’s stories: how, after Patrick’s funeral, bewildered, I had toddled over to my father’s knee, perhaps to say, “I’m still here—what about me?” and he had said, “You’re a good kid, Mary.” And I had my own searing memory of my baby brother greeting me at the door one day, worried, to say, “Mom got out Patrick’s funeral things and cried.” He and I had been trying all our lives to account for the ways we were shaped by our brother’s death.
I devoted a day to construing the speech over Astyanax and storing it in my memory, adding a line at a time, until by evening I had a huge undigested wad of Greek in my system. I felt like a snake that had swallowed a piglet. I photocopied all the speeches and glued them to index card
s, so that Hecuba was always in my pocket. When I swam laps at the pool, I added a line per lap. The last chunk I memorized was the furious speech to Helen, which scared the cat off my lap: she couldn’t understand why I was so angry. Euripides used to be relegated to third place, behind Aeschylus and Sophocles, in the hierarchy of the Greek tragic playwrights, but he knew what he was doing. As long as I didn’t panic, all I had to do if I forgot a line was think of what would logically come next, and there it was.
I worried about how to pace the sadness so that there would still be somewhere to go by the time I got to Astyanax. Katharine Hepburn had played Hecuba in a 1971 movie version of The Trojan Women. I was a fan of Hepburn, making a point of going to revivals of her films at the Thalia, but I had missed The Trojan Women, and I didn’t dare watch it now, when I had to play the role myself, in a dead language, without her cheekbones. I decided to write her a letter. I knew she lived in Turtle Bay, in the East Forties, where E. B. White once lived, but a young editor who had recently come to The New Yorker from Knopf, which was publishing Hepburn’s memoir about the making of The African Queen, told me that Hepburn would be alarmed to think that a stranger knew where she lived, and that it would be better to approach her obliquely, through her publisher. “Dear Katharine Hepburn,” I wrote, and told her my problem—that I had to play Hecuba in Greek—and made a lofty reference to Bartók and a Hungarian folk song that was piercingly sad and beautiful, something about a tree. I asked Ms. Hepburn how she had varied her performance. I had had a little experience in musical comedy, but was it possible, in tragedy, to play it for laughs?
