The Oxford Handbook of GREEK DRAMA in the AMERICAS

The Oxford Handbook of GREEK DRAMA IN THE AMERICAS Edited by KATHRYN BOSHER, FIONA MACINTOSH, JUSTINE MCCONNELL, AND PATRICE RANKINE 1 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Oxford University Press 2015 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First Edition published in 2015 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. 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Chapter 1 Introduction Fiona Macintosh, Justine McConnell, and Patrice Rankine The 1954 Oedipus Rex in Stratford, Ontario was in many respects a watershed production in the history of modern performances of ancient plays. Tyrone Guthrie’s direction marked the end of the star system that had dominated the professional theater and productions of Greek drama, in particular, since the nineteenth century. Although the part of Oedipus was played by James Mason in 1954 and by Douglas Campbell from 1955 onward, the vast expressionist masks by Tanya Moiseiwitsch guaranteed that the stars here were completely eclipsed (Fig. 1.1).1 This highly ritualistic production sought archetypes rather than psychological realism; and when it was filmed in April 1956, the producer, Leonid Kipnis (a.k.a. Lola) succeeded in liberating Greek tragedy from the exclusive preserve of the western world. As the first commercially available film version of an ancient play, the Canadian production could be said with hindsight to have played a key role in the globalization of Greek tragedy that has become its hallmark since the 1960s (Hall, Macintosh, and Wrigley 2004). This landmark Canadian production, with its migrant director, is representative of many of the productions discussed in this volume. Irish by birth, educated at Oxford, Guthrie had worked uncomfortably alongside the quintessentially English star actor Laurence Olivier at the Old Vic in London in the early 1940s. It was this experience that led him ultimately to North America, and which shaped in important ways the 1954 Oedipus Rex. Like many other productions of ancient plays in the Americas, it wasn’t simply informed by a monocultural lens. Although it was cast very much in contradistinction to Olivier’s own seminal Oedipus of 1945, it was Guthrie’s staging of Oedipus Rex in Hebrew with the Habimah Theatre Company in Tel Aviv that year and his direction of the play in Swedish in 1947 with the Swedish Theatre in Helsinki that were equally formative (Macintosh 2009: 163–8). Indeed, the experience of working with Sophocles’ play in languages not his own convinced him of the need to find the non-naturalistic performance vocabulary, which eventually led to the production’s ready translation onto screens around the world (Guthrie 1960: 233–46). 4 Macintosh, McConnell, and Rankine Fig. 1.1 Douglas Campbell in the Stratford, Ontario Festival’s production of Oedipus Rex, directed by Tyrone Guthrie (Photo: McKague, Toronto). Thanks to Guthrie’s role as first Artistic Director of the Stratford Shakespearian Festival and his inclusion of this ancient play within its second year in Ontario, Greek drama went on to enjoy a prominent position within the repertoire of North American theater. Furthermore, it was Guthrie who lent his name in 1963 to the theater in Minneapolis, which was an attempt to take the Classics beyond metropolitan New York; and the Guthrie Theatre has continued, under the artistic direction of Garland Wright in the early 1990s and from 1995 under Joe Dowling’s leadership, to include pioneering productions of Greek plays within its repertoire (Foley 2012: 162–70, 183, 190, 234). The mapping of Greek drama in the Americas involves tracking networks of com- munication across continents and across oceans. With the expansion of the railroad from the mid-nineteenth century onward, entire companies were transported across the continent rather than simply the star, who had hitherto performed with a different stock company in each city (Engle and Miller 2003). Theater has always afforded an important window on a culture and the early attempts to stage Greek plays in the United States in the nineteenth century testify to the agonistic relations between America and Europe at this time, with high-class patronage and overly respectful imi- tation of European productions leading to occasional bafflement and often explicit hostility (see Macintosh, Bosher and Cox, and Davis, this volume). Yet it could be Introduction 5 equally argued that these nineteenth-century appropriations of the classical mate- rial, albeit mediated via European touring companies, benefited hugely from the New World context and input. When the American actress Charlotte Cushman accompa- nied Charles Macready to Europe in the part of Talfourd’s Ion in 1845–6, she brought to the role a renewed vigor and authority that mesmerized London audiences (Fig. 1.2) (Hall and Macintosh 2005: 311–12). Theater histories have generally focused on the “newness,” the “rawness” of the performance culture of the “New” Worlds of the Americas. Any native engagements with the ancient dramatic corpus have consequently been given short shrift on the grounds that they betray, at best, conservative, Eurocentric leanings, or, at worst, evidence of colonial cultural hegemony. However, as theater practitioners have routinely discov- ered from at least the Modernist period onward, the most innovative work very often comes from a serious engagement with the works of the past, especially the theater of ancient Greece. Indeed while the Italian actress Adelaide Ristori failed to attract the crowds in 1874 on her visit to Mexico as Medea in Legouvé’s famous version, the cel- ebrated Spanish actor José Valero had won huge acclaim and prompted serious discus- sion about the future of Mexican theater some six years earlier, when he visited with Fig. 1.2 Charlotte Cushman as Ion (1846). Reproduced from ILN 8.199 (1846), by courtesy of the Bodleian Library. 6 Macintosh, McConnell, and Rankine Francisco Martinez de la Rosa’s Edipo (see Barrenchea, this volume). This volume seeks to define the complex and often surprising contours of the reception of ancient Greek drama in the Americas, and to articulate how these different engagements—at local, national, or trans-continental levels as well as across borders—have been distinct from each other and from those of Europe and Asia. A comparative perspective is helpful, and in the nineteenth century essential (see Macintosh, this volume), so that both the distinctions and the interconnections across time and place can be charted. This volume does not attempt to be anything other than a “handbook” to what is in many ways terra nova. Taking its cues from Theater and Performance Studies, and especially from Shakespearian performance histories, classical performance reception began to take root in British Classics in the 1990s and with a few notable, earlier exceptions within the United States, in North America in the new millennium.2 Now the spotlight has shifted very sharply upon Latin America and its engagement with Greek drama at a time when Classical Studies in that region is undergoing a substantial renewal of resources and demonstrating an attendant intellectual energy. Classical Reception can never be tied by geographical nor linguistic boundaries and in the case of the Americas long colonial histories have often imposed these boundaries arbitrarily. Much like the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics at New York University, which seeks to uncover the ways in which the performance arts in the Americas have been inextricably linked to histories of colonialism, this volume seeks in many ways to look at the shared histories and practices in the Americas that defy national boundaries.3 If Guthrie’s production was the first commercial film of a Greek play with worldwide circulation, it is now possible with the existence of numerous research archives—such as the Hemispheric Institute Digital Video Library (HIDVL) and the international Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama (APGRD) in Oxford—as well as through YouTube, to watch video recordings of many recent productions of ancient plays in the Americas. Of course, there are both pitfalls and challenges to using video recordings of live

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