Caterina Barone associate professor University of Padua Italy
Greek tragedy and political debate: Peter Sellars and his provocations
Introduction
Greek Tragedy is a foundational element of western culture, and a powerful means of cultural penetration, even in societies far removed from ours: it offers unlimited angles for interpretation and it lends itself even to an instrumental use of its contents.
From this perspective, within the vast panorama of the diaspora of Greek tragedy beyond the Mediterranean, I find the following phenomenon particularly deserving of attention: the reception and the usage of the material in the United States of America, starting from the 1980’s, as a form of cultural therapy in the treatment of war trauma in soldiers (starting with those returning from Vietnam).
The impulse for this kind of approach came from the work of psychiatrist Jonathan Shay. Shay, studying Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), was the first who resorted to therapeutic reading of the Iliad, and later of the Odyssey, linking the battle-stories of patients monitored at the United States Department of Veterans Affairs with the war experiences described in Homeric poems.
The Philoctetes Project, which involves the reutilisation of certain Greek tragedies oriented towards pacifism (such as The Trojan Women by Euripides, or The Persians by Aeschylus) was developed along similar lines. The project was the brainchild of theatrical director Brian Doerries, and it subsequently led to the creation of the national program Ancient Greeks/Modern Lives, devised by Peter Meineck, professor of Classics in the Modern World, and managed by the Aquila Theatre in New York.
In parallel with the therapeutic usage of Greek tragedies (staged mainly in military bases, before an audience of soldiers, veterans, and their families) one can observe the rise of their function in denouncing war politically (Lauriola). This is done in a more specifically theatre-based manner, in relation to US interventions in conflicts in the Middle East, from the Gulf War in Iraq (1991), to Afghanistan (2001) and then again Iraq (2003).
One of the directors who has been most involved in this kind of protest is Peter Sellars. In the span of 16 years, Sellars has produced his own personal trilogy, working, in succession, first with Sophocles’s Ajax (1986), then Aeschylus’s The Persians (1993), and finally widening his critical stance also to the welcoming of refugees, an issue treated in Euripides’s The Heracleidae (2002).
Method
Peter Sellars, as he himself often states, conceives his stagings starting from the tenet that theatre must be «a mirror to our society» and that art must be a social and moral action. His broad usage of the classics has therefore the aim of putting contemporary issues on the table for discussion (Willis Hoffman). Limiting our inquiry to Sellars’s work with Greek tragedy, the intention of the present study is twofold: to analyse to which extent the semantic richness of the original survives in a radical and antihistorical “contemporisation” of the mythic material, and to ascertain whether the contingency of contemporariness deprives ancient theatre of meaning by undermining its primeval and sacral force.
Discussion
Sellars has no iconoclastic intent in his approach. Employing Greek tragedies to make a distinctly political statement allows him to deal with uncomfortable topics, attracting the audience and at the same time raising their awareness and participation (Lichtenfelds). Doing theatre, for him, means exercising a form of democracy, as we are indeed also taught by 5th century Athenian theatre itself.
The first tragedy Sellars worked with is Sophocles’s Ajax, during the 1986-87 theatrical season. It was Ronald Reagan with his foreign policy who convinced Sellars that it was morally imperative to make his voice heard against war, raising awareness in as many people as possible. He was motivated by the bombing carried out by the US air force in an attempt to eliminate Muammar Gheddafi in Libya. Several civilians died under those bombs, as well as one of the Libyan leader’s daughters.
In Sellars’s reinterpretation of Ajax, adapted by Robert Auletta and set in the Pentagon, the Greek hero, driven mad by the loss of his τιµή, takes the shape of a US general who regrets his actions during a South American war of “liberation”, similar to the Vietnam War. He is determined, even at the cost of his own life, to reject the abuses of power of politicians, in a regime where propaganda and censorship tie a perverse and inextricable knot.
The role of the protagonist is entrusted to Howie Seago, an expressive deaf actor: his speeches are held in sign language and verbalised by other actors. Athena appears as a judge in a court martial: she condemns the military man’s insubordination and she resorts to the investigative actions of Odysseus, while Menelaus and Agamemnon play the role of accusers.
To broaden the scope of his protest, and to give a realistic portrayal of American society, Sellars chose a multi-ethnic cast: Tecmessa, Ajax’s slave and concubine, is Vietnamese; of the five actors dressed in military uniforms and forming the Chorus, three are black, one is Asian, and one is white. They also play the roles of Odysseus, Agamemnon, Menelaus, Teucer and the Messenger. Music is inspired by African-American spirituals and work songs.
The staging of The Persians (1993) once again has a military setting, this time however in reference to the Gulf War of 1990-91, under George Bush senior: here the director denounces the imperialistic aspirations and the insincerity of the American government. In this case Sellars was spurred by his inner suffering in hearing of the conflict on CNN, and by his awareness of the fact that not everything was being shown, because of censorship.
Sellars’s intent is to point to an analogy between the devastation wreaked by the invading Persian army lead by Xerxes, guilty of hybris, against the ancient Greeks, and the devastation of Iraq carried out by the US army.
In order to physically involve the audience, Sellars uses strategically placed loudspeakers broadcasting sounds of war and the noise of New York traffic, creating an intentional auditory contrast with the music played on the oud by Nubian artist Hamza El Din. Martinus Miroto, a dancer from the island of Java, with his intense movements, injects the show with an archaic spirituality, reminiscent of magical rites of possession. Dressed in a military uniform, his face covered by a mask, Miroto hosts in his body the spirit of the dead Iraqi soldiers.
But the show has been deemed by some critics as too didactic and partisan in offering a sympathetic portrayal of the enemy. It has also been deemed artistically unresolved, in aspects including the tragic figure of Xerses, rendered by John Ortiz as «a cross between Saddam Hussein and LA gang leader» (Drake).
Similar limitations can be observed in Heracleidae, chosen by Sellars in order to link the vicissitudes faced by the children of Heracles, persecuted by king Eurystheus, with those faced by current refugees, forced by wars and vexations to leave their country in search of a land where they can live. The degree of realism in this staging is driven to the point that it includes even the presence of actual refugees on the stage, while the articulation of theatrical moments is devised by Sellars so as to create a sort of «public forum on matters of social importance».
The show went on a long tour of America and Europe, taking different shapes depending on the location where it was performed. In Rome, where I had the chance to see the play in 2002, it was divided in three parts. First, a meeting with two refugees, interviewed by persons actively engaged in this field: journalists, writers, NGO workers. Then a break, a convivial moment of sorts, devoted to the exchange of opinions, while tea is served to the audience and the young non-Europeans climb down from the stage to shake hands with spectators. Thereafter, the staging of the tragedy proper begins.
The actors wear modern and heterogeneous clothes: the old Iolaus, on a wheelchair, wears a sober suit; Alcmena wears a chador; Demophon, transformed by Sellars into a female president, sports a grey suit and a pearl necklace; Macaria wears a long white coat reaching over his trousers; the servant is a black soldier wearing camouflage. The original choruses have been eliminated, and substituted with folk- chants from Kazakhstan, sung live and accompanied on the lute by female musician Ulzhan Baibussynova, who wears the folk-dress of her country. The function of the Greek chorus is instead entrusted to a single actor, who delivers a critical commentary of sorts.
When Eurystheus is introduced, he stands escorted before the audience who will judge him, and he wears the orange suit of Guantanamo prisoners. He is blindfolded and his feet are shackled, as he assumes his position in front of a Plexiglas stand, as if he were a witness in front of a committee of enquiry. He speaks in a microphone, like “presidentess” Demophon and other characters. The microphone is repeatedly employed: in Sellars’s theatrical vision it has the same function as the mask: «It is, so to say, the mask of our society».
The finale of the tragedy features an unexpected reversal of roles: one of the persecuted, Alcmena, Heracles’s mother, cruelly demands the death of Eurystheus, the persecutor, and she demands that his body be thrown to the dogs, thus subverting the norms of justice and pietas she had earlier invoked for herself and her grandchildren. The Athenians, in their turn, state that it is not fair to kill an enemy who has been caught alive in battle, but they nevertheless do not prevent Eurystheus’s execution: violence prevails, and will prevail in the future too, as indicated by the prophecy of a coming war between Athens and Argo.
Sellars’s staging, however, does not properly highlight the issues raised in the finale. The limitation in his reading is that he stress one single theme, that of refugees, and he does not widen the critical horizon to encompass the general antithesis between might and right, violence and ethics. This is the unifying element in the variety of motifs and characters in the Euripides’ tragedy, and these therefore do not always result as well connected and poetically resolved in Sellars’s work.
Conclusions
A critical analysis of Sellars’s trilogy highlights a gradual distancing of the director from an interpretation capable of extracting the universal meaning of the original, an interpretation that goes beyond space and time to illuminate the present, without violently trampling the idea-space of the text. It is not possible to ignore the fact that, while on a theoretical-exegetical plane the director’s ideas suggest interpretations that prove acute and stimulating for our sensibilities, the theatrical realisation nevertheless is marred by blemishes and highs and lows in tone: the urgency of reality does not find due poetic and dramaturgical transfiguration.
Bibliography
S. Drake, Peter Sellars' 'Persians': Muddled East vs. West: Gulf War is the focus in this adaptation of a Greek classic, but it's a misfired exercise in misplaced activism, Los Angeles Times, 2 ottobre 1993
K. Hartigan, Greek Tragedy on the American Stage: Ancient Drama in the Commercial Theater, 1882-1994, Westport CT 1995
A. Willis Hoffman, In Conversation with Peter Sellars: What Does Greek Tragedy Mean to You?, in The Oxford Handbook of Greek Drama in the Americas, ed. K. Bosher, F. Macintosh, J. McConnell, P. Rankine, Oxford 2015, pp. 773-789
R. Lauriola, Tragedie greche e guerre moderne Per un diverso riuso del teatro greco negli Stati Uniti... e non solo, «Maia» 65 (2/2013), pp. 373-389.
P. Lichtenfelds, Peter Sellars’s Changing Conceptions of the Audience in Productions of Three Greek Plays in P. Lichtenfelds and John Rouse eds. Performance, Politics and Activism, Palgrave Macmillan 2013, pp. 220-236
J. Shay, Learning about combat stress from Homer's Iliad. «Journal of Traumatic Stress», 4(4), 1991, 561-579; Achilles in Vietnam. Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character, New York 1994; Odysseus in America. Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming, New York-London-Toronto-Sydney-Singapore 2002,