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. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2014950700 ISBN 978–0–19–966130–5 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work. Chapter 1
Introduction
Fiona Macintosh, Justine McConnell, and Patrice Rankine
The 1954 Oedipus Rex in Stratford, Ontario was in many respects a watershed produc- tion in the history of modern performances of ancient plays. Tyrone Guthrie’s direc- tion 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 differ- ent 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 per- formance 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 recep- tion began to take root in British Classics in the 1990s and with a few notable, ear- lier 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 performances as scholarly records (Bratton and Peterson 2013). However, when this material is used with some circumspection and together with other contextual evidence, it enables the hitherto inaccessible material to be made available (and hopefully to be preserved) and for interconnections to be forged and gleaned from the messy records that constitute the raw material of theater history (Postlewait 2009). The chaos of the interwar period in Europe intensified the collecting impulse and led to the realization that records, not least those relating to theater history that had often only resided in private hands and/or within the bodily memory of individual per- formers, needed to be held centrally in order to be protected for posterity (Macintosh 2013). Similar archiving impulses amongst African Americans were fueled in the wake of the Civil War, when the ravages and displacements attendant on the war prompted new searches for identity through the collation of material relating to living perfor- mance traditions (see both Curtis and Manning, this volume). The most recent archival turn, resulting from the new digital technologies, has meant that it is not just the perfor- mance that is important but the recording of it as well; and with relatively low cost, both Introduction 7 professional and amateur productions can now for the first time enjoy online presence. Although the proliferation of data has not come without its own set of anxieties—espe- cially surrounding the reality of censorship at the touch of a key—it has brought with it the possibility of viewing theater history differently, enabling “new relational patterns and genealogies” (Bratton and Peterson 2013: 304) that are specially illuminating for any study of performance history of ancient Greek drama in the Americas. The contributors to this volume come from a number of academic disciplines— Classics, Latin American Studies, Theatre and Performance Studies, Comparative Literature—and many are poets/playwrights or theater practitioners. The language they employ often reflects the range of their professional experiences and not surprisingly we find that certain words and phrases bear slightly different semantic resonances for different authors. The term “classical,” for example, is often applied to theater “classics” such as Shakespeare, Calderón, Racine, Goethe, and Schiller as readily as it is to Greek “classical” theater of fifth-centurybce Athens. We have deliberately allowed the indi- vidual authors their own “vocabularies” since “classical” in both these cases draws its essential meaning from the word “classic,” which, in Calvino’s terms, is a text (ancient or modern) which merits reading and/or rewriting in each generation (Calvino 1999). That is not to say that there is no need for rigor in respect to matters of terminology: indeed, in a volume covering the Americas as a whole, there are areas that are in especial need of lexical precision and finessing. And it is the language of postcoloniality, above all, that demands such exactitude.
The Postcolonial Nature of the Americas
If the Americas are to be considered “postcolonial” (and it seems undeniable that this is an apt label in at least a number of respects), then it is nonetheless important not to allow the term to sweep over the many differences that exist across the continent, even in terms of their colonial and neo-colonial experiences. Amitav Ghosh’s salutary warn- ing that “‘Postcolonial’ is essentially a term that describes you as negative” should not be neglected either. Ghosh goes on to elaborate, explaining that the chronological sense of “postcolonialism” is undeniable but should not be made to define whole nations that were previously colonized, as if that past comprises their whole identity. Furthermore, he remarks that the postcolony of each nation is different and distinct, and must not be elided into one state of “the postcolony” (on the importance of thinking in terms of spe- cificities rather than generalities in postcolonial discourse, see Goff and Simpson, this volume; Kumar 2007: 105; cf. Mbembe 2001). The United States’ central role in the transatlantic slave trade ensured that it has never been overlooked in discourses of colonialism; as such, its place in the discourse of post- colonial theory has never been under threat, even while it has not been unchanging. The 8 Macintosh, McConnell, and Rankine positions of Canada, Central America, and South America in these discourses have, on the other hand, tended to be neglected or erroneously assumed to partake of the same experiences as the United States.4 As Moraña, Dussel, and Jáuregui make clear in their introduction to Coloniality at Large: Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate (2008), there has been a systematic exclusion of the region (i.e., Latin America) from the vast repertoire of historical experiences and philosophical and political discourses often examined in connection with the topic of colonialism (Moraña, Dussel, and Jáuregui 2008: 5). The Caribbean, too, has a different postcolonial history and identity from the U.S.A., but its centrality in the colonial processes of the eighteenth and nineteenth cen- turies, in particular, has ensured that it figures prominently and decisively in most dis- cussions of postcolonialism and postcolonial theory.5 The same has not been true of continental Latin America, however; indeed, Iberian colonialism has often been overlooked, especially by anglophone scholars. The fact that the Spanish and Portuguese began colonizing South America more than 100 years prior to the first successful colonizing missions of the French, Dutch, and British is often neglected. A tendency to sweep all nations into the category of the postmodern has, at times, led to a blind-spot which fails to take account of the different situations which pertain across the Americas as a whole, and which demand that only specifici- ties can accurately illuminate the diversity of histories and cultures found across North and South America, which includes Canada, Central America, and the Caribbean. This fact may be cause to reassess not only the widely accepted history of colonialism, but also our sense of modernity as a whole. Gilroy’s influential model of the Black Atlantic tied in colonialism to modernity, but if his vision of colonialism (pertinent, powerful, and important as it is) fails to take account of the Iberian empires, the different circum- stances of the latter may mean that the model does not fit Latin America so aptly (and Gilroy never claimed that it would) and that this view of modernity should be adjusted. Moraña, Dussel, and Jáuregui’s important 2008 edited volume makes this point most clearly.6 For a handbook of Greek drama in the Americas, it is also fitting to note that the first use of the term “post-colonial” (hyphenated and in a mostly temporal sense) comes in an essay by T. W. Allen in the Journal of Hellenic Studies in 1910.7 Yet it is not until the 1990s that the primarily temporal use of the term begins to be predom- inantly replaced by the more theoretical use in published works (Quayson 2012: 5). When it does, and when the classification “postcolonial literature” becomes com- mon, classical literature took a place in the discourse as a body of work that con- tributed to the foundation of the “western canon” with which many modern writers were engaging. A number of scholars over the last decade have explored these lit- erary engagements, and theorized about postcolonial engagements with Classics (Goff 2005; Ronnick 2005; Rankine 2006; Goff and Simpson 2007; Hardwick and Gillespie 2007; Bradley 2010; Cook and Tatum 2010; Greenwood 2010; Stephens and Vasunia 2010; Hall and Vasunia 2010; Goff 2013; McConnell 2013; Rankine 2013). Indeed, in this volume, Classics and postcolonialism loom large not only in Goff and Simpson’s chapter, but also in discussions by Rabinowitz, McConnell, Fradinger, Introduction 9
Powers, Eastman and Walcott, and Hardwick. Some of the reasons behind this prev- alent connection between Classics and colonialism have been lucidly delineated by Goff in the introduction to her 2005 edited volume, Classics and Colonialism: in particular, the fact that Classics frequently played a part in the ideology of European imperialists—and had nearly always featured in their education—and that it like- wise had a role in the opposing movements of anti-colonialism and resistance (Goff 2005: 1–24). In addition to nations that were part of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European empires, the United States should be considered as a postcolonial nation, although not unilaterally. For more than 150 years the Thirteen Colonies that went on to form the United States were ruled by Britain;8 after the American Revolution there- fore, the United States was a postcolonial nation. However, the story does not end there because, as Sangeeta Ray and Henry Schwarz have remarked: It is in the US, of all the “postcolonial” societies around the world, in which we find perhaps the most dramatic example of turning the colonial relationship on its head. Post-colonies are obviously capable of becoming oppressor states, but none has been quite so “successful” as the US. (Ray and Schwarz 1995: 165 n. 3)
In addition to the neo-colonialism referred to here, the United States also very soon became implicated in the European colonization of Africa and the Caribbean by its prominent role in the transatlantic slave trade. The United States’ colonial past is com- plex and its engagement with Classics can often be seen to reflect and illuminate this; so too can be the response of Canada to both the United States and classical literature (see Day, this volume).
Omni-Americans
Postcolonial or otherwise, the U.S.A., like all other nations covered in this volume, has a past, and that past is often mythologized and then mixed into deeper, older—and often classical—layers. In her discussion of the play Topdog/Underdog, in which she names two black street hustlers as [Abraham] Lincoln and [John Wilkes] Booth, associated allusions intended, Suzan-Lori Parks accounts for her persistent return to the char- acter of Lincoln in terms of an American mythology. For Parks, Lincoln’s role in the grand story of the United States of America is a “subterranean thing,” to which she keeps returning (quoted in Shenk 2002). Lincoln is to the U.S.A. what an Antigone, Medea, or Oedipus was to the Greeks. (Parks makes this association (Rankine 2013).) We might extend Parks and say that all of these figures (the Greek ones as well as Lincoln and Booth) are, for Americans, “subterranean things.” Parks’s reference to the “subterranean thing” is consonant with the approach that Hall and Macintosh take in speaking of the “subterranean” presence of the Classics in modern life, a reality always there to be dug 10 Macintosh, McConnell, and Rankine up from under our feet, at once primarily unnoticed and permeable, solidly tangible yet easily disregarded (Hall and Macintosh 2005). If the classical past is in the modern world a “subterranean thing,” then the idea of an archaeological dig—a botched one, like that of Heinrich Schliemann, where the expert muddles layers of cultural artifacts, to the extent that onlookers no longer know which remnant relates to which society—might be an apt metaphor for the processes whereby Greek drama has come to the Americas. The promiscuous mix of the Greek and the contemporary, like a black street hustler named Abraham Lincoln, is true not only in the U.S.A.; the imagery obtains throughout the Americas. As with the archaeological dig, an investigation of classical presences in the new worlds of the Americas reveals the past as under our feet, though hidden from plain sight. In fact, the reality of the Classics as a discipline in the New World is not that deeply buried (see Goff and Simpson, this volume). Colonizers to the New World as early as the sixteenth century brought with them their education, however incomplete, steeped in knowledge of Greece and Rome. This was true whether they were Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, French, or English. These colonizers and explorers often saw themselves in the imperial light of Rome, or in the civilizing vein of Greek colonization from the eighth century bce, but many posited that they were in certain respects better than their forebears (Lupher 2006). In other words, it is not necessary to go as far back as the ancient world for an archaeology of the “subterranean thing”: classical artifacts, the metaphors and contexts out of which nine- teenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century Americans have crafted the world around them, are within three, four, and five centuries respectively. We might argue, as do Goff and Simpson, that the colonists quickly became post-colonial in their relationship to the empires that they left behind, whether Greece, Rome, in the distant past, or Spain, Britain, and France, more recently. At the same time, the presence of the “New,” the pro- miscuous contact with local populations and black slaves, would forever impact how the “New World” came to know the past, and what it came to be. These presences, too, would leave their imprint on the postcolonial states. Once we account for the recentness of the Americas as a phenomenon in the world, we are less surprised by the fact that the subterranean presence of the past is closer to the surface than it is generally conceived in everyday life, or by the extent to which it keeps emerging. The Greek dramatic presence in the New World is evident in the archival approach to what Americans remembered—and chose to forget, or bury (see Manning, this volume). Just like the attempt of women writers such as Margaret Fuller to deploy the Greeks for their sense of place within the United States, the Frogs Society of African-American artists in the early twentieth century remind the reader of a pen- etration (though not easily achieved) beneath the cultural overlay in North America of gender inequity and segregation. The overlay is a façade, a cover that belies the real: namely that, whatever the apparent social order, black people, brown people, and women of any color engaged with the Classics and crafted their sense of self out of this material, at least in part. As black women engaging with the Classics in public spaces, Phillis Wheatley and Harriet Jacobs might be anomalies, but their existence gives the lie to the real and uncovers the façade of a certain social order. Introduction 11
The realities of gender and racial inequity are as true across South, Central, and North America as they are within the United States. Notwithstanding a social framework that denied their essential humanity—their “inalienable” rights—women and racial minorities realized their own potentialities. For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the artifacts that could reify freedom and equality were, for blacks as well as women, just beneath the surface and very often ancient Greek in their provenance. Harriet Jacobs’s confinement to a closet as she likely read and absorbed everything from Robinson Crusoe to contemporary poetry is an example of the closeted reality of suppressed groups in the Americas. Blacks and women read and engaged in the sub- terranean Classics to craft their values in the New World, those of freedom, equality, literacy, art, and so on. As Curtis shows, the Frogs of Aristophanes were present as a reality for African-American artists in the U.S.A. at the beginning of the twentieth cen- tury, even if the significance of the reference to classical drama was lost on the judge who rejected their plea for legitimacy. The juxtaposition of the knowledgeable black artists, a phrase that for many at the time would have been an oxymoron, and the ignorant judge is emblematic of the American joke that so tickled Ralph Ellison. In his reference to Constance Rourke, Ellison affirmed that in America, the absence of class and the easy, trickster-like play on identity mean that anyone can be anything at any time, no matter what others think, and this is the joke. As it pertains to race, lighter complexioned blacks might “pass” out of the racial hierarchy and segregation; and the mutability of social status is to some extent true even for those who might not be able to pass with regard to appearance. In this case, there is always the closet. For Ellison, the reality of the American joke called for individuals to be cultures unto themselves, to “always be your best,” because one never knows whether the person with whom you are interacting might be a connoisseur of music, fine art, or the Classics. This is Ellison’s “Little Man at Chehaw Station,” the seemingly homeless, seemingly ignorant man who sits in the stove at the train station but is conversant with the Classics. The American joke, the knowing, comedic wink of the Little Man at Chehaw Station, or even of the serious writer, is not only a reality in the U.S.A.: the joke is equally at home in Brazil, as Alfredo Dias Gomes’s O pagador de promessas (Payment as Pledged) demon- strates (see Dixon, this volume). Here the character Joe wants to fulfill a promise to St Barbara because an African religious figure told him to do so. In contrast to this seem- ingly illegitimate authority, the priest at the Catholic (Portuguese) church refuses to hear Joe’s pleas. Little does this priest, the legitimate embodiment of God on earth, know that Joe’s source also has power. The Catholic priest neither knows nor understands the influence of knowledge other than his own. Here is Antigone’s dilemma, the choice between state-sanctioned authority and physis, natural or divine law, which Gomes presents with characteristic Brazilian social satire and irony. Gomes accomplishes his joke with the subterranean material of Sophocles’ Antigone. The ostensibly illegitimate power of African knowledge is, to Joe, as the natural law to Antigone, which says that her renegade brother Polyneices is to be buried. The priest is no more in a position to acknowledge a power other than his own knowledge than Creon is in Sophocles’ play. Ellison’s joke is alive and well in Brazil. 12 Macintosh, McConnell, and Rankine
Given the ubiquity of the Classics as a “subterranean thing”—their presence under the ground, as it were, as material as the black soil, whose “enduring value” need not be argued—the archaeological metaphor of Greek drama in the Americas is apt. As with the archaeological dig, attempts to dig up these realities often further disturb the setting. Social constructions of race, class, and gender confront the Americas as if permanent realities, and yet right beneath the surface is the truth of more permanent artifacts, such as the primitivism concomitant with proclaimed modernities. Thus performances of Greek drama in Philadelphia were staged alongside the burlesque renditions of black- face Medeas and lowbrow versions of the high classical forms. To be in an American theater in the nineteenth century was to know Euripides alongside Joe Coon. Rather than an edifice of race (black, white, brown), class (high-culture and low-culture, the classic and the new), and gender, the muddled mess of identity in the Americas dis- turbs all of these categories. These juxtapositions occurred in the old worlds as well. Blackface farces were staged in London alongside classical theater. But in the Americas, the closeted and those who pass—women, blacks, Latinos, Asians, and so on—take up the Classics as their own at an unprecedented rate. Within the seemingly surreal context of these experiences in America, we see the struggle for the real in primitivism. In answer to the question, “What is Greek Drama?” at the dawn of Modernism in the United States, we find primitivism, ritual, and a cri- tique of the military and capital, all in the name of gender equity and the search for an American idiom (see Hall, this volume). In this sense, Greek drama frames the mate- rial realities of what Toni Morrison might allude to in Playing in the Dark, namely the way that dark bodies and non-European genealogies served to reify identities in the Americas. The juxtaposition of the burlesque with the classical within the American context takes on specific form, with particular bodies in distinct spaces. Lost American cultures (Aztec, Inca, and so on) were onstage alongside the Greek textual artifact of a Euripidean tragedy, in the form of sets built from the visual realities of these local spaces and characters. The Taurians of 1915, in this sense, illuminated the parallel encounters in the New World (see Slater, this volume). Blackface comedy in the U.S.A. drew from the presence of black slaves on Southern plantations; and in the mid-nineteenth century, white performers mimicked the African slaves’ folklore, gestures, and rhythms, right alongside imported, European theatrical troupes performing Euripides’ Medea. Here again, black artists take up the form as their own by the late nineteenth century. American identities were formed in the shadows, beneath the surface, as it were, of genteel, civil society. And shadows, unlike realities, are soon forgotten, or at least subli- mated while the haunting presence remains. That Susan Glaspell is a chief influence for Eugene O’Neill and yet forgotten is resonant with so many claims within this volume (see Hall, Lambropoulos, Leontis, this volume). The “migrant muse,” in Hall’s designa- tion, provides an alternative narrative and continues to inspire from the shadows, rou- tinely undetected. The imprint of Greek drama may be readily detectable in anglophone North American modern drama (from O’Neill through Miller and down to La Bute), but there is equally importantly a primitive, subterranean presence consonant with the discovery of indigenous ruins in the American West, or Machu Picchu in Peru. These Introduction 13 primitivisms continue to inspire, along with the African presences, and are simultane- ously set against conceptions of the modern, and of the slave body in North, Central, and South Americas. These “primitivisms” reveal that there is in fact no modern, only a thin veneer over the realities that form the Americas. Civilized Europe is a fiction, as is the falsehood of the “primitive” that Hegel, Nietzsche, and others perpetuated. Behind the masks of the Taurians in the 1915 production of Iphigenia menacingly lurked the hoods of the Ku Klux Klan (see Slater, this volume). Should there be any surprise, when beneath the surface of modernity is a nascent world where black bodies are mixed up with Greek artifacts daily, where native “civilizations” find parallel archaeologies in the discoveries of Argos and Crete? Modernity is thus a normativity that belies these subterranean realities. In her article on Greek dance on the American dramatic stage, Susan Manning refers to normativity as a cloak, which overlays the gender trouble of Martha Graham and Nijinsky’s Greek dances. The cloak, the myth of normativity, might also metaphorically apply to receptions of Greek drama in Aristotelian terms (see Monoson and Lodewyck, this volume). We can queer Aristotle’s Poetics because it was never the straight truth in the first place. The over- prioritization of Aristotle’s Poetics as an avenue back to Greek drama led the Brazilian critic and theater director Augusto Boal and August Wilson to different places. In the lat- ter case, we find a Greek drama devoid of Aeschylus, Euripides, or Sophocles, as Rankine shows in his chapter. August Wilson’s Radio Golf features no Oedipus, Clytemnestra, or Jason, and yet it is Greek drama, given Wilson’s deep reading—and perhaps misreading— of the Poetics. Wilson wanted to craft an expressly American drama out of the artifact of Aristotle, which he knows to be tantamount to “European drama.” At the same time, the renditions of Greek drama were countenanced in the Theater of War before and beyond Aristotle’s Poetics. Here we see the Greek playwrights not as experts in Aristotelian approaches to drama, but rather as war veterans. As Monoson and Lodewyck reveal, the disturbance of Aristotelian narrative priorities in these twenty-first-century commu- nity theater events unearths some truths in Greek drama to which Augusto Boal points us (Boal 1979). There is nothing “white” or anesthetized about Greek drama, as Ancient Greek/Modern Lives, and the Theater of War project demonstrate. The crude realities of war were onstage in ancient Greece, as they are in the U.S.A. in (post)modern times. When we dig beneath the surface, we disturb the sense of normativity and linear- ity that the “modern,” with its Hegelian direction, brings. Beyond black and white, old and new, is the reality that the artifact was always present; it was never deeply buried. The artifact of Greek drama is present in the Americas because of the seafaring jour- ney across the Atlantic Ocean. The sea journey is the unifying factor for all of Greek Drama in the Americas. The sea journey is the reality of black bodies transported across the Atlantic Ocean between the fifteenth and the nineteenth centuries, evident in the Brazilian receptions of Greek drama, whether that of Alfredo Dias Gomes, or Agostinho Olavo (see Dixon and Santos, this volume); and it is there too in Lee Breuer’s The Gospel at Colonus (see McConnell, this volume). Equally, the sea journey is the reality of instantiations of Greek drama in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when Americans within the United States imported much of their Greek drama through 14 Macintosh, McConnell, and Rankine
European theatrical companies (see Pearcy, Macintosh, Bosher and Cox, Davis, Hall, Slater, Day, this volume). The sea journey is central to the “alternative archaeology” which Artemis Leontis charts in the work of Isadora Duncan and Eva Palmer Sikelianos. That is, the transatlantic journey is not only true of the black Atlantic of Paul Gilroy; it is the unifying reality of any New World archaeology, equally applicable to Greek drama in the Americas or the reification of “the Americas” for any discursive practice. In the end, what we have in Greek Drama in the Americas is an archaeology that reveals what the Omni-American might look like. The Omni-Americans of course refers to the work of the late Albert Murray (d. 2013), who argued that the Negro was the quintessential American because of the way that she or he embodied the strug- gles for freedom, equality, and democracy which best encapsulate the Americas. We would expand the Omni-Americans to include all of the strivers represented in this volume because, in the end, these strivings incorporate what it might look like to be “American” or to practise Greek drama in the Americas. The Omni-American embod- ies an archaeology of disturbed layers, Parks’s “subterranean thing”; and it includes the atemporality that comes when we disrupt artifacts from their layers of meaning. Murray was referring to the Negro American as the Omni-American, but the appel- lation can obtain beyond the U.S.A. The Brazilian Medea is no more American than she is Greek, no more black than she is European, in her embodiment of the various practices and relics that make her whole (see Santos and Gemelli, this volume). The sea journey across the Atlantic broke bodies as much as it made the American experi- ence whole, embodied in black, white, brown, and everything in between. Here there is no black, white, brown, high or low culture; there is only meaning newly generated and regenerated.
Notes
1. Douglas Campbell does appear, however, unmasked in the prologue to the film version of April 1956 before metatheatrically masking himself in front of the camera to signal that the play proper is about to begin. 2. The Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama (APGRD) was set up in Oxford in 1996 (see Macintosh (2013) for an overview of the scholarship in the 1980s and 1990s that led to this). Hartigan 1995 was the first systematic study of Greek drama in the American commercial theater, although there was Pluggé 1938 on university drama in America and Colakis 1993 on the 1960s and early 1970s, and the unpublished doctorate of Rogers (1986) on the New York theater. On classical performance reception, see Hall and Harrop 2010. 3.
5. Carole Boyce Davies would disagree; her Caribbean Spaces: Escapes from Twilight Zones (2013) is, in part, an effort to reinscribe the centrality of the Caribbean in discourses of postcolonialism and the transatlantic. 6. Moraña, Dussel, and Jáuregui 2008: 5–9. However, see also Salvatore 2010. 7. Quayson 2012: 5. The essay is on the Homeric Catalogue and appeared inJHS 30: 292–322. 8. The first of the Thirteen Colonies was founded by the British in Virginia in 1607, the last in Georgia in 1733. The American Declaration of Independence was issued by these Thirteen Colonies on July 4, 1776, but the United States was only officially “recognized” in 1783 after seven years of war.
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