How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken

by Daniel Mendelsohn

  Not much, except to do what Warner (who insists the play is “not about revenge”) does, which is to fill the play with desperate, crude, almost vaudevillian efforts to manufacture excitement, now that all the intellectual and political excitement—to say nothing of the revenge motive—have been stripped away. This Medea makes faces, mugs for the audience, cracks jokes, does impressions. And it goes without saying that, when the violence does come, there’s a lot of blood and flashing lights and deafening synthesized crashing and clattering. But for all the histrionics and special effects, you feel the hollowness at the core, and the staging soon sinks back into the place where it started: banal, everyday domesticity, a failed marriage. The Warner/Shaw Medea ends with the murderous mother sitting in that swimming pool, smirking and splashing the weeping Jason.

  Ironically, Deborah Warner seems to understand tragedy’s original political intent. In a interview she gave to the Times last September, after the first anniversary of the September 11 attacks and as her country, and ours, prepared for war on Iraq, Warner made a case for the renewed relevance of Greek tragedy:

  We desperately need Greek plays. We need them when democracies are wobbly. I am living in a very wobbly democracy right now, whose Parliament has only just been recalled, and Commons may or may not have a vote about whether we go to war. Greece was a very new democratic nation, and a barbaric world was not very far behind them. They offered these plays as places of real debate. We can’t really say the theater is a true place of debate anymore, but these plays remind us of what it could be.

  She’s absolutely right; all the more unfortunate, then, that none of this political awareness informs her production. The end of Warner’s Medea feels very much like the aftermath of a marital disaster. Euripides’ Medea, by contrast, ends with a monstrous ethical lesson: Jason is forced, as his wife had once been forced, to taste exile, loss of family; forced, like her, to live stranded with neither a past nor a future; is made to understand, at last, what it feels like to be the other person, to understand that the things to which his glib words referred are real, have value, can inflict pain. At the end of Euripides’ Medea, the woman who teaches men these terrible lessons flies off in a divine chariot, taking her awful skills and murderous pedagogical methods to—Athens.

  Indeed, while it’s hard to see what Warner’s “happy housewife of Corinth” can tell us about the war she referred to in her comments to the Times—i.e., Iraq—Euripides’ Medea, by contrast, ends by literally bringing home a shattering warning against political and rhetorical complacency: a lesson that, as we know, went unheeded in Athens. It’s worth noting that his Medea was composed during the year before the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War, when the Athenians were eagerly preparing for conflict—a conflict, as it turned out, that would thoroughly reacquaint the Athenians with the meaning of the word “consequences.” Which is the play we need more desperately?

  It’s unlikely that Medea—Euripides’ Medea, that is, not the play that Deborah Warner staged—will have trouble surviving the grotesque, giggling, wrongheaded treatment it received on Broadway. If so, it wouldn’t be the first time that the playwright bounced back after some rough treatment. Soon after Aristophanes lampooned him (intentionally) in his Thesmophoriazousae, Euripides left town for good. His destination was about as far from Athens, culturally and ideologically, as you could get: the royal court of Pella, capital of the backwoods kingdom of Macedon, a country that would take another century to achieve world-historical status. (It’s where Alexander the Great was born.) He left, so the story goes, because he was disgusted by his city’s descent into demagoguery, intellectual dishonesty, political disorder, and defeat. But perhaps he was also smarting because of Thesmophoriazousae; perhaps he was tired of being misunderstood.

  And yet perhaps, too, there was time for one more effort; perhaps he might have the last laugh. Perhaps, from a burlesque, a deliberate misinterpretation, a pandering by a comedian to the common taste in order to achieve a glib success, something worthwhile might result. Let us imagine this aged poet as he leaves Athens and embarks on his difficult northward journey, turning an idea over in his mind—an idea that comes to him, as it happens, from Thesmophoriazousae itself. An all-female festival; a man eager to see what the women get up to, when the men aren’t watching. A grotesque foray into drag that convinces no one; a masquerade that ends in apprehension, and terrible peril. Not a bad idea for a play—not a comedy, this time around, but something terrible, something that will bring his citizen audience close to the core of what great theater is about: plotting, disguise, recognition, revelation, violence, awful knowledge. He arrives in Macedon and gets to work. Three years later, the play is finished: Bacchae. By the time it is produced back home in Athens, winning its author one of his rare first prizes, Euripides is dead. But from the mockers, those who willfully mistake his meanings, he has stolen a victory. This show, it is safe to say, will go on.

  —The New York Review of Books, February 13, 2003

  For the Birds

  During the harsh Balkan winter of 407–406 B.C., the Athenian playwright Euripides died in his self-imposed exile in Macedonia. He was a bit shy of eighty, and had been presenting tragedies at the Theater of Dionysus in Athens for just under half a century. In view of the ways in which he had so daringly exploded tragic convention during that time—pushing the genre in the direction of romance, showing an ever-increasing preference for happy endings, introducing “low” and even quasi-comic elements (plebeian characters, outright parody)—it was perhaps only appropriate that the tidings of the tragedian’s demise, when they were received back home in Athens, should have inspired both a moving tragic spectacle and a great comic invention.

  The evidence for the tragic spectacle is to be found in one of the highly unreliable (but often just as highly delectable) ancient biographies, or Vitae, of the great poets—in this case the Vita Euripidis, or “Life of Euripides.” Here we are told that just a few weeks after the news from Macedonia reached Athens, another famous poet—Sophocles, who at that point was nearing ninety and himself had only a few months to live—honored his longtime rival by donning a black cloak and having his chorus and actors appear without the traditional festive wreaths when they took part in the civic ceremony known as the proagon, the parade that preceded the annual dramatic competition. There is no reason to doubt that, as the Vita goes on to say, “the people wept” in response to this irresistible (and, you can’t help suspecting, rather self-serving) bit of theater from the aged master. But it is hard to swallow the anecdote that immediately follows, which gives the cause of the great man’s death. Euripides, the author of the Vita solemnly reports, died after being torn apart and devoured by a pack of wild dogs.

  Two pieces of evidence are traditionally cited to refute this alarming story. The first is that the bizarre modus moriendi is suspiciously similar to one we find in one of Euripides’ own plays—his last tragedy, Bacchae, which ends with the young Theban king Pentheus being torn to pieces by frenzied maenads. The second, which is of greater interest to us here, is laconically summarized in the Oxford Classical Dictionary as follows: “unlikely in view of Aristophanes’ silence.” Which is to say, if Euripides had perished in the headline-grabbing fashion described in the Vita, it would surely have been mentioned in what was, as it happens, the other noteworthy contemporary response to Euripides’ death, the comic one: Aristophanes’ Frogs.

  Whatever form it actually took, the death of Euripides was unlikely to have gone unmarked by the popular comic playwright, who was then perhaps in his early forties. From the beginning of his career, Aristophanes had made Euripides the particular object of his parodic mirth. No other real-life figure—not even the poisonous demagogue Cleon, who took the irreverent Aristophanes to court for (an ancient commentator notes) “wronging the city” by mocking its politicians—turns up as often as a character in Aristophanes’ plays. There he is, his comic persona already firmly in place, in The Acharnians of 425, just two years
after Aristophanes’ first comedy was staged: Euripides the misanthrope and misogynist, a faddish devotee of the intellectual avant-garde, a modernist who puts beggars and cripples onstage and outfits his kings in rags.

  There he is again in Women at the Thesmophoria (411), a brilliant fantasy in which the women of Athens, fed up with being portrayed by Euripides as adulteresses, sex fiends, and murderesses, come together under cover of the all-female Demetrian rite called the Thesmophoria to plot the kidnapping and murder of the playwright. And there he was yet again—or so we are told by an ancient commentator on the Wasps—in two comedies, now lost, suggestively entitled Dramas and Proagon. The association between the comedian and the tragedian was so familiar to Athenian audiences that another comic playwright, Aristophanes’ older contemporary Cratinus, coined a verb to commemorate it: euripidaristophanizein, “to Euripidaristophanize.”

  Euripides would appear as a comic character one final and unforgettable time, in Frogs, which was produced at the Lenaea Festival, a civic and theatrical event at which comedy predominated, in the early spring of 405—just a few weeks, as it happened, before the first, posthumous performance of Bacchae, at the city Dionysia. The play is yet another ingenious fantasy involving the abduction of Euripides, although this time the kidnapping may be said to be more of a rescue mission than an ambush. The donnée of the comedy is that the theater god Dionysus, sorely missing his favorite playwright, decides to sneak down to Hades in order to restore the recently dead poet to the upper world. (In order to get there in one piece, the rather fey god of theater and wine goes disguised as the macho Herakles—a clever inversion of the drag scene from Women at the Thesmophoria, and a source of a good deal of comic business.) But as so often in Aristophanes, the burning private yearning of a single, rather monomaniacal character ends up involving the body politic itself. For when he finally reaches Hades, Dionysus finds himself embroiled in a “great fight among the corpses” (in Richmond Lattimore’s felicitous translation): a “high argument,” one that has been raging between the rather august Aeschylus, dead for fifty years, and the newcomer Euripides, about “which one really was better than the other.”

  It is only now that the mission of the god shifts: he agrees to judge the theatrical contest, and in so doing he assumes a public role that would have been familiar to Athenian audiences, for whom theater, like nearly everything else, was a competitive event. It is during this contest that the comedy’s most memorable literary-critical claim emerges: that the dramatic poet’s duty is, in fact, a public one—to “inject some virtue into the body politic.” Given Aristophanes’ generally old-line tastes, it’s inevitable, once this claim is made, that it will be Aeschylus—here presented as manly, patriotic, rather bombastic—and not the prickly, overintellectual, avant-gardiste, doubt-mongering Euripides whom Dionysus will bring back to Athens in order to set the grim, war-torn polity on a straight course once again. Clearly this choice struck a responsive chord: the Athenians liked the play so much that they not only awarded it a first prize, but—a rare distinction—granted it a second performance.

  In view of the fact that most of his theatrical career overlapped with the drawn-out and ultimately disastrous Peloponnesian War, and, further, that there was no shortage of corrupt, inept, and harmful politicians to make fun of, the popular comedian’s marked preoccupation with a poet of high tragedy may strike us, today, as odd. (It’s as if Jon Stewart were to hold forth every week about Arthur Miller.) And yet the way in which the contest between the dead poets in Frogs enmeshes artistic concerns and political issues reminds us that for the Athenian theatergoer attending the play’s first performance, theater (occurring only during the course of the annual state-sponsored patriotic festivals) and politics (played out, as often as not, by prominent “actors” on the public “stage,” artfully trained to perform before audiences of citizens sitting in assemblies much as they sat in the theater) were far closer to one another than we can even begin to imagine today. Indeed, although there has been a great deal of scholarly comment during the past generation on the way in which Greek tragedy—which is to say, Athenian tragedy—was a vehicle for working out issues central to the ideology and identity of the democratic state, it was of course also the case that comedy, too, was deeply political.

  Even if you don’t go as far as some modern critics have in their attempts to set comedy on an equal footing with tragedy (claiming, for instance, that comic poets “were the constituent intellectuals of the dêmos [the citizen body] during the period of full popular sovereignty…and in their institutionalized competitions they influenced the formulation of its ideology and the public standing of individuals”), it is easy to see, from the remains of Athenian comedy, that it was able to comment on the preoccupations of the city—corruption in political office, the excesses of the radical democracy, the effect of the war on families back home—with a kind of caustic gusto and explicitness that tragedy, sealed as it was in the world of mythic allegory, could not. Here a vignette from another of those ancient Vitae—this time the “Life” of Aristophanes himself—is deeply suggestive, however apocryphal it may be. We’re told that when Plato’s not very apt pupil, Dionysius, the tyrant of Syracuse, declared that he wanted to study the politeia of Athens (a word that can mean not only “constitution” but also “the life of the citizen,” the whole democratic way of life), Plato replied by sending him a text of Aristophanes.

  It was precisely because it so strongly reflected the concerns of the state and its citizens that comedy was so preoccupied with tragedy. We must remember that for the Greeks, tragedy wasn’t “high” and comedy wasn’t “low”—at least not as we think of these categories today; we must remember that for the Greeks, Greek tragedy was, like Greek comedy, a form of mass entertainment. All citizens of Athens were expected to attend the tragic festivals; the nominal two-obol fee was subsidized by the state in the case of indigent citizens. It is impossible to understand Greek comedy’s relationship to Greek tragedy—to understand, in other words, Aristophanes’ obsession with Euripides—without acknowledging the extent to which tragedy was a form of what we today would call “popular” entertainment. In an essay about Frogs, Sir Kenneth Dover emphasized that since tragedies

  were written for mass audiences, tragedy as a whole could be used as material for humour in the same way as agriculture and sex and war could be used; it was part of the life of the community, not like chamber music or Shakespeare—the cultural interest of a minority.

  It seems worth recalling these considerations about Aristophanes, comedy, politics, and mass culture just now because politics has, in large part, been the selling point of the recent and much-ballyhooed Lincoln Center Theater production of Frogs, which opened in June and closed in October. Interest in the production was, of course, already great for a number of other reasons. It was presented, for instance, in the musical adaptation by Burt Shevelove and Stephen Sondheim that premièred in 1974 in the Yale University swimming pool, one that updated the literary milieu, making the playwright antagonists Bernard Shaw and William Shakespeare—a weekend-long run that has acquired a certain glamour in hindsight because in the company were a number of Yale Drama School students who went on to fame and fortune: Meryl Streep, Sigourney Weaver, Christopher Durang. The new production, moreover, starred Nathan Lane, who had a career-making triumph a few years ago in a revival of another Shevelove-Sondheim “classical” musical, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (an adaptation of several plays by the Roman comedian Plautus), and whose enormous success in the Broadway run of The Producers has made him a powerful star. It was, in addition, directed and choreographed by Susan Stroman, whose work on Contact and The Producers has made her something of a celebrity in her own right; and it featured new songs by Sondheim, commissioned especially for this revival.

  But if it was felt that the troika responsible for such previous successes could not help but score a hit with Frogs, it was also felt by the show’s creators that because of the w
ar in Iraq, Aristophanes’ ostensibly antiwar text suddenly had far greater relevance than it had had in a long while. A front-page article in the New York Times Arts & Leisure section that appeared just before the play’s opening noted that Lane, who was responsible for extensively revising Shevelove’s revision of Aristophanes (the program describes the play as “a comedy written in 405 B.C…. by Aristophanes, freely adapted by Burt Shevelove, even more freely adapted by Nathan Lane”), was especially eager to bring out the political strains he saw embedded in the Greek original:

  Mr. Lane also talked with Ms. Stroman about the political resonance of the source material, which concerned a great democracy fighting an unwise war, leaders too puny to inspire a complacent populace, a longing to reclaim the greater voices of the past. Mr. Shevelove, following Aristophanes, for the most part had used the story to lament the terrible state of the theater; Mr. Lane wanted to focus on the terrible state of the state.

  Ms. Stroman found the idea moving; “Remember, this was not yet a year after Sept. 11,” she said.

  And yet despite fervent efforts to make the revival relevant—the show is filled with in-jokes about the contemporary theater, and the final tableau is set against a glittering evocation of the New York skyline, in case you were likely to miss the post–9/11 point—this Frogs, however eye-popping its packaging, failed most egregiously in its attempts to be meaningful about the two principal themes of Aristophanes’ play: theater and politics. In an irony its creators cannot have intended, it showed, if anything, how little the theater today is “part of the life of the community,” as Dover put it; and, worse, it showed how clueless about the politics of Frogs the makers of this particular revival are.