Dramaturgy for Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus

Home , Prometheus (Manship), Prometheus (Orff)

translated by Elizabeth Barrett-Browning (1856)

with annotations by Dr. Clara Drummond

compiled by Fly Steffens, Dramaturg

MFA Generative Dramaturgy Protocol Sample

University of Arizona School of Theatre, Film, & Television Table of Contents Note from the Dramaturg Background Page 4 Aeschylus: from Critical Surveys of Literature: Critical Survey of Drama Elizabeth Barrett-Browning: from Great Lives from History: The 19th Century Select Production History Page 15 Timeline Articles / Reviews Suggested Critical Reading and Supplemental Resources Page 38 Texts available in Rehearsal Dramaturgy Library Digital Resources Contemporary Comparisons Prometheus Bound: the text Page 40 Barrett Browning’s Preface to the 1833 Barrett Browning Translation Scene Breakdown Annotated Text: compiled by Clara Drummond Additional Glossary and Pronunciation: Marianne McDonald Cut Recommendation Sample Steffens1

Note from the Dramaturg: Basic Protocol? When I began research for a pseudo-production of Prometheus Bound, I began my search

by solely looking for an engaging and lyrical translation. Among the thirty-plus translations and

adaptations, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s 1856 translation possesses a unique lyricism I find

incredibly compelling. However, after the buoyant joy associated with finding the perfect play, I

soon was drowning in Classical scholarship, endless literary commentary, stale summations

of Greek Theatre practices, and sore arms and eyes from carrying books or boring through

obscure digital articles. I am a graduate student in their late twenties who has no experience

as a dramaturg on a Greek play; surely to understand it I need digest the thousands of years of

lineage that leads me to this moment in the first place.

Normally when I begin work on play, I do a Fuchsian close read ((see EF’s Visit to a

Small Planet: Some Questions to Ask a Play). This tends to reveal the tautological rules and

realities – meta/physical, emotional, cultural, of the world of Prometheus Bound; such a singular

observation may help free a company from the burden of the entirety of all theatre history. What

is our – relationship to the text, now, as a group of people, in this moment? What’s going on in

this play? How do we feel about it? What is so?

The following dramaturgical materials take little of these questions into account. Instead,

they are basic and rudimentary outlines toward a conventional protocol based in historicism and

restricted by crippling precedent – by what we, what I, have been potentially conditioned to think

we need to understand and execute a Greek Tragedy in conventional theatre education and

practice. In reviewing these materials, I do not find them to be unhelpful or irrelevant, but in no way do these materials provide a better understanding of the play. Steffens2

I am no Prometheus – my capacity as a dramaturg is not oracular nor all-knowing – but this process has lead me to my own set questions: questions for dramaturgs working on a Greek

Tragedy. When I asked them of myself and my peers, I found that my approach to this task had been quite misguided. If I had begun my approach into the text with these questions instead of attempting to digest the origins of Western Theatre into something as meaningful, lyrical, and evocative as Barrett Browning’s brilliant translation, the following materials would look very different. Here they are:

1. What do you know about Greek Theatre? 2. When is the last time you saw a production of a Greek Play? a. Where was it? b. How was it staged? c. Did you like it? Why or why not? 3. Do you prefer reading or seeing Greek Plays? Why? 4. Do you find Greek Plays difficult to understand? Why or why not? a. What would help you to understand them? b. Does your previous exposure to Greek Plays help you? Why or why not? 5. Do you find Greek Plays difficult to enjoy? Why or why not? a. What would help you to enjoy them? 6. What do you think a director needs from a dramaturg to successfully stage a Greek Play? a. An Actor? b. A designer? 7. What does it mean to successfully stage a Greek Play? 8. What is your opinion on Greek Choruses? a. What is successful about them? Why? b. What do you wish was different, if anything? Why? 9. What are the benefits and consequences of removing significant context from a text, such as historical, geographical, cultural, political, or mythological references? 10. In Prometheus Bound, there is very little physical action paired with extensive monologues. How does this play need to be produced to stay engaging, if it isn’t already? 11. Do you think Greek Theatre is relevant to a contemporary audience? Why or why not? a. Should it be? Why or why not? Steffens3

Perhaps I was unknowingly drawn to Barrett Browning’s translation as we are kindred

spirits in a way. In 1833 she finished her first translation of the text in just two short weeks;

subsequently Barrett Browning was horrified and disappointed at how little heart and poetry she

found in the technically perfect translation. Twenty-three years later she published her revisions,

caring not about precision of meter and definition but more on gesture, sense, and affect – she

wanted to create something that communicated to others the incredible sensation brought on by reading Aeschylus’ original text in Greek. Though I may have little material to show for it, this process has affirmed my instinct that pursuit of dramaturgy is borne within the heart. The technical practice of dramaturgy is certainly useful and necessary in the creation of a production, just as Barrett Browning required the ability to basically translate text from one language into another. Prometheus gave humankind more than just fire; he stirred within humankind a fire of passion. More than just science; art. Steffens4

Background

Aeschylus

Excerpts from Critical Surveys of Literature: Critical Survey of Drama

Biography

The life of Aeschylus can be pieced together from ancient sources, especially from several biographies that survive in the manuscript tradition that are probably derived from an

Alexandrian volume of biographies, perhaps by Chamaeloon. Aeschylus was born in about 525-

524 B.C.E. in the Attic town of Eleusis. His father, Euphorion, was a Eupatrid (an aristocrat) and probably very wealthy. As a youth, Aeschylus witnessed the fall of Pisistratid tyranny in Athens and the beginnings of Athenian democracy, and he later lived through the Persian invasions of mainland Greece in 490 and 480 B.C.E. He is said to have fought at Marathon in 490, where he lost a brother, Cynegirus, and at Salamis in 480. Aeschylus's description in The Persians of the great sea battle of Salamis suggests that he was an eyewitness. Ancient reports that Aeschylus also fought in other battles of the Persian Wars, including Artemisium in 480 and Plataea in 479, are more doubtful. Aeschylus's well-known patriotism may have led to the tradition of his being involved in all these battles. Aesychlus lived in an age not only of the citizen-soldier but also of nationalistic and political poetry, and allusions to contemporary issues can be found in

Aeschylus's plays.

[…] Aeschylus's dramatic career probably began very early in the fifth century B.C.E. with his first dramatic production at the Greater Dionysia between 499 and 496.

His first tragic victory, for unknown plays, was won in 484, and he earned at least twelve more victories in his lifetime and several more posthumously. […] [Aeschylus] lost in the Greater

Dionysia of [468 B.C.E] to Sophocles, who won his first tragic victory. In the next year, Steffens5

however, Aeschylus was victorious with Laius, Oedipus, and the extant Seven Against Thebes, a

tragic group often called Aeschylus's Theban trilogy. Evidence suggests that Aeschylus produced

his Danaid trilogy, including the extant The Suppliants and the lost Egyptians and Danaids, in

463, when he was victorious over Sophocles. This trilogy was formerly dated on stylistic

grounds as early as 490, but subsequently discovered evidence has caused scholars to revise their

conclusions about Aeschylus's dramatic development and about the evolution of Greek tragedy

in general. Aeschylus's surviving trilogy, the Oresteia, was produced in Athens in 458 B.C.E. and

was followed shortly by the poet's second trip to Gela, where he died and was buried in 456-455.

[…] Aeschylus had at least two sons, Euaeon and Euphorion, both of whom wrote

tragedies. In 431 B.C.E., Euphorion defeated Sophocles as well as Euripides, who produced

his Mēdeia (Medea, 1781) in that year. Aeschylus's nephew Philocles was also a tragedian; according to an ancient hypothesis (an introductory note providing information about the play) to

Sophocles’ Oidipous Tyrannos (c. 429 B.C.E.; Oedipus Tyrannus, 1715), one of Philocles’ productions was even considered better than Sophocles’ play.

Achievements

The earliest of the three ancient Greek tragedians whose work is extant, Aeschylus made

major contributions to the development of fifth century B.C.E. Athenian tragedy. According to

Aristotle’s De poetica (c. 334-323 B.C.E.; Poetics, 1705), it was Aeschylus who “first introduced

a second actor to tragedy and lessened the role of the chorus and made dialogue take the lead.”

This innovation marks a principal stage in the evolution of Greek tragedy, for although one actor

could interact with the chorus, the addition by Aeschylus of a second actor made possible the

great dramatic agons, or debates between actors, for which Greek tragedy is noted. Steffens6

Aeschylus also is the probable inventor of the connected trilogy/tetralogy. Before

Aeschylus, the three tragedies and one Satyr play that traditionally constituted a tragic

production at the festival of the Greater Dionysia in Athens were unconnected in theme and plot,

and Aeschylus's earliest extant play, The Persians, was not linked with the other plays in its

group. All the other surviving plays of Aeschylus were almost certainly part of connected

groups, although the Oresteia, composed of the extant Agamemnon, Libation Bearers,

and Eumenides, is the only connected tragic trilogy that survived intact. However, the loss of

the Oresteia’s satyr play, Proteus, makes observations on Aeschylus's use of connected

tetralogies (three tragedies and one satyr play) nearly impossible. In fact, there is no certain

evidence that Aeschylus always used the connected group in his later productions, and imitations

of this dramatic form by other fifth century B.C.E. playwrights are not firmly documented. The

triadic form of the Oresteia, however, has certainly had a great influence on the development of

modern dramatic trilogies.

Aeschylus's brilliant use of the chorus as protagonist in The Suppliants may have been

another significant innovation. Until the discovery in 1952 of a papyrus text, this play was

universally considered the earliest surviving Greek tragedy, and the central place of the chorus of

Danaids was thought to reflect the choral role of early tragedy. As a result of the play's revised

dating to 463 B.C.E., The Suppliants’ chorus is now viewed as demonstrating a deliberate attempt to make the chorus a part of the action of the tragedy. Certainly, the chorus of The

Suppliants is the earliest known example of a Greek tragic chorus, traditionally nondramatic and reflective, transformed into a significant dramatic participant. Although later dramatists rarely borrowed this choral technique, The Suppliants’ chorus underscores Aeschylus's originality and experimentation in the development of Greek tragedy. Steffens7

[…] Perhaps because of the difficulty of Aeschylus's poetic language, which is generally

indirect and metaphoric, Aeschylus's extant corpus has not been as directly influential as the

works of Sophocles and Euripides have been on the history of tragedy since the Renaissance.

Nevertheless, Aeschylus is recognized today as a brilliant dramatist whose contributions to the

fifth century B.C.E.Athenian theater have made him a “father of Western tragedy.”

Analysis

Despite the fifth century B.C.E. Athenian political and religious issues that are diffused

more often in Aeschylus's tragedies than in those of Sophocles and Euripides and that demand

some historical explanation for the modern reader, the plays of Aeschylus still possess that

timeless quality of thought and form that is the hallmark of classical Greek literature and that has

made the themes of Aeschylean drama forever contemporary. Although Aeschylus's intense

Athenian patriotism and probable support for Periclean democratic reforms is fairly well

documented in his biographical sources and is reinforced by the dramatic evidence, it is his

attention to theological and ethical issues and especially to the connection between Zeus and

justice and to the rules governing relationships among humans and between humanity and

divinity that provide a central focus for his tragedies. It cannot be a coincidence that all seven

extant tragedies, while less than one-twelfth of his total corpus, reflect a constant Aeschylean

concern with the theme of human suffering and its causes. Again and again, the plays of

Aeschylus suggest that human suffering is divine punishment caused by human transgressions

and that people bring on themselves their own sorrows by overstepping their human bounds

through hybris, hubris or excessive pride. At the same time, the role of the gods, and especially of Zeus, in this sequence of human action and human suffering is of particular interest to Steffens8

Aeschylus, whose plays seek in Zeus a source of justice and of fair retribution despite the vagaries of an apparently unjust world.

Prometheus Bound

Prometheus Bound, the seventh play in Aeschylus's manuscript tradition, cannot be firmly dated and contains so many problems and idiosyncrasies of meter, languages, staging, and structure that a large number of modern scholars have come to question Aeschylean authorship.

The arguments on both sides of the authorship debate have been thoroughly discussed by C. J.

Herington in The Author of the “Prometheus Bound” (1970) and by M. Griffith in The

Authenticity of “Prometheus Bound” (1977), and the debate has remained a stalemate. If this play was written by Aeschylus, it must have been written toward the end of Aeschylus's lifetime, probably after 460, and may have been part of a connected trilogy including the lost Prometheus

Lyomenos (unbound) and Prometheus Pyrphoros (fire-bearer).

Sienkewicz, Thomas J. "Aeschylus." Critical Surveys of Literature: Critical Survey of Drama,

edited by Carl Rollyson, Salem Press, 2003. Credo Reference. Steffens9

Elizabeth Barrett-Browning

Excerpts from Great Lives from History: The 19th Century

Biography

Elizabeth Barrett was the eldest of the eleven children of Edward Moulton Barrett and

Mary Graham Clarke. She grew up at Hope End, a large country house in Herefordshire. Both parents, but especially her father, encouraged her to read widely; unlike most privileged girls of her time, she was allowed free use of her father’s library and shared her brothers’ classical tuition. Her father arranged for her epic poem The Battle of Marathon (1820) to be privately published when she was fourteen.

In 1821 Elizabeth suffered a severe but unexplained illness that affected her spine and lungs and left her a semi-invalid for the rest of her life. During the 1830’s, she produced her first successful poetry: The Seraphim and Other Poems (1838) was well received and gained its author considerable notice. At about the same time, her health broke down, and she traveled from

London to the milder climate of Torquay to recover. During her convalescence, she begged her favorite brother Edward (“Bro”) to visit her in Torquay; while there, he drowned on a sailing excursion. Elizabeth’s grief and guilt were so overwhelming that for the rest of her life she could never speak or write of the event.

Somewhat recovered but still very much an invalid, Elizabeth returned to London in 1841 and plunged into literary work. In 1844 her popular two-volume Poems appeared. One poem in this collection, “Lady Geraldine’s Courtship,” referred favorably to the work of then little-known poet Robert Browning. He wrote to thank her, and they began a correspondence that led to their first meeting four months later. For over a year they wrote to each other daily (sometimes twice daily). Elizabeth’s father had forbidden any of his children to marry, so Elizabeth and Robert Steffens10

married secretly and left for Italy in 1846. They settled in Florence, in Casa Guidi, where their son Pen was born in 1849 and where they lived for the rest of Elizabeth’s life.

Life’s Work

During the 1840’s and 1850’s, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s major works appeared, and her poetic reputation reached its height. Her 1844 Poems contain multiple voices, styles, and subjects. She experiments boldly with form, especially half-rhymes, metrical irregularities, neologisms, compound words, and lacunae. These experiments at once pleased, intrigued, infuriated, and disturbed her contemporary readers. More recently, they have been seen (by

Virginia Woolf and others) as formative influences on later poets and harbingers of literary modernism.

In 1850 Browning published a collection of her poetry, including the 1844 poems plus some new material such as the famous Sonnets from the Portuguese, written secretly to her husband during their courtship. These poems are by far her best known, less for any intrinsic artistic excellence than for their abiding romantic and psychological portrait of developing love.

They trace the emotional state of the poet—a thirty-nine-year-old invalid wooed by a younger man—from surprise, reluctance, and confusion to passion, trust, and hope for the future.

In addition to the sonnets, the 1850 Poems includes two poems focused on social issues. “The

Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point” is an impassioned first-person poem in which a slave murders her own child, who was conceived as a result of rape by her white master. “The Cry of the

Children” protests the inhumane conditions for child laborers in British coal mines and factories.

Not only did these poems provoke a powerful response from socially conscious readers, but they also anticipated the overtly political concerns of Browning’s next book of poetry. Steffens11

Browning’s next book, Casa Guidi Windows (1851), revealed her interest in the politics of the Italian Risorgimento. Casa Guidi Windows is “A Poem, in Two Parts,” the first written in

1848 and filled with the optimism attendant upon the abortive Italian revolution of that year. Part

2 was written in 1851 after the crushing defeat of the patriots at Novara in 1849 and is decidedly more pessimistic. The poem’s confident approach is noteworthy, particularly because it was unusual in Browning’s time for a woman poet to venture onto political terrain, which was considered reserved for men. Casa Guidi Windows is written in a modified terza rima, and some of its vivid ironic characterizations are reminiscent of Robert Browning’s poetry and have led critics to assume that Elizabeth was influenced by her husband.

Throughout the 1850’s, Elizabeth and Robert traveled widely in Europe and visited

England three times, in 1851, 1855, and 1856. Upon their return to Italy after the last trip,

Browning, after ten years of work, published what she and generations of readers after her have considered to be her masterpiece, Aurora Leigh (1857). Aurora Leigh is a novel in verse, an epic poem in nine books inspired in part by the novels of George Sand and Charlotte Brontë but also by the long, reflective Prelude (1850) of William Wordsworth. It tells the story of the eponymous poet-heroine Aurora Leigh, her lover-cousin Romney Leigh, and their turbulent and finally successful romance.

Aurora Leigh is described as a successful but lonely and dissatisfied poet. Early in the poem she rejects the marriage proposal of her cousin Romney, a dedicated philanthropist. At that point in the story, Romney is simply too overbearing for the self-consciously feminist Aurora, who believes that human betterment must come through individual inspiration; Romney, by contrast, believes in organized progress by and for large groups of people. Aurora secludes herself and writes, while Romney embarks on several idealistic but hare-brained schemes (such Steffens12

as building a phalanstery on his ancestral estate and proposing marriage to a poor seamstress).

After Romney’s plans fail—the poor people he has installed in the phalanstery burn it down, he is blinded in the fire, and his intended wife is tricked into prostitution—he and Aurora can finally get together. The poem ends with their marriage, as Romney realizes that social betterment must involve the soul as well as the body and Aurora realizes that a true artist must not separate herself utterly from the world she hopes to influence. Ironically, for all its stated concern for the poor, Aurora Leigh’s “moral” is a conservative one: The “mob” is to be feared, and poetry makes a greater impact on society than philanthropic activities.

Aurora Leigh contains Browning’s highest convictions on life and art, particularly the responsibilities of the poet. She believed fervently that a poet must bear truthful witness to the values of her society, must “represent the age” and never “flinch from modern varnish, coat, or flounce.” Thus her most poignant critique of both Aurora and Romney is that they are overly theoretical. Aurora chides Romney that his “social theory” is a better wife to him than she could ever be; she little realizes how greatly she herself is “wedded” to poetic theories.

In Aurora Leigh, Browning comes closest to integrating the idea “woman” with the idea

“poet.” In an important sense, it is about being or becoming a poet in a world that imagines the poet as male. By positioning herself at the center of her own story, the poet Aurora disrupts objectifying male discourse about women; she transforms herself from the object of Romney’s gaze to the subject of her own vision and thereby enacts her liberation. Browning has taken a quintessentially male form, the extended blank-verse epic poem, and put it to the service of women’s concerns. At the age of twenty, Aurora is aware of herself as “Woman and artist, — either incomplete.” By the end of the epic, ten years have passed, and Aurora has learned that true fulfillment comes from finding completion as both woman and artist. Steffens13

Browning’s father had not seen or spoken to his daughter since she had left England in

1846. At one point, he sent her a package returning all the unread letters that she had written to him over the years. In 1857, he died unreconciled. In 1860 Browning published Poems Before

Congress, the last volume to appear in her lifetime. Most English readers found this book to be a disappointment, too imbued with its author’s often faulty judgments on contemporary French and Italian politics. Browning herself described it as “a very thin and wicked brochure” and fully expected that its pro-Italian, anti-English tone would lead to a negative public reaction.

In 1861, after a long struggle with failing health and weak lungs, Browning died in her husband’s arms on the night of June 29. The following year, Browning’s Last Poems were published. This volume included a variety of poems left uncollected at the time of her death: several on the

Italian political scene, one (“De Profundis”) written after Bro’s drowning in 1840 but never published, and several passionate and lyrical poems in the author’s rich mature voice.

Significance

After the death of William Wordsworth, Elizabeth Barrett Browning was seriously considered to replace him as England’s poet laureate. Though she was not finally chosen—

Alfred, Lord Tennyson was—the mere suggestion that she might fill that position and speak with that “national” voice was extraordinary in 1850. It reveals how well known and well respected

Browning was among her peers.

In the decades following her death, her poetry was nearly forgotten. By 1932, Virginia

Woolf was complaining that in the “mansion of literature” Browning had been relegated to the

“servants’ quarters.” The revival of interest in her work that Woolf had called for did not take place until the advent of feminist literary criticism during the 1960’s and 1970’s. Since that time, readers have focused on Browning not simply as a poet but as a woman poet. The very Steffens14

characteristics of her work that were seen as most problematic by earlier generations—intense passion, interest in politics, feminist concerns—are now seen as the greatest strengths of her poetry.

Browning’s work is critical to understanding the ways in which a woman poet empowers herself to speak. Browning’s career provides a model for the relationship of a woman poet to a poetic tradition that privileges the male voice. Moreover, she has represented a poetic

“foremother” for generations of women poets after her—a figure she herself lacked and for whom she longed. Browning has typically been envisioned as a ringleted Victorian invalid living out an unlikely romantic legend. It is important to remember that she was first and foremost a technician devoted to the craft of poetry.

Meem, Deborah T. "Elizabeth Barrett Browning." Great Lives from History: The 19th Century,

edited by John Powell, Salem Press, 1st edition, 2006. Credo Reference. Steffens15

Select Translation/Adaptation/Production History c.456 BCE: Aeschylus writes Prometheus Bound 1518 CE: First printed edition of Aeschylus in Venice. 1663: Thomas Stanley’s Latin Translation of Prometheus Bound 1773: Thomas Morell’s Translation: first English translation of Prometheus Bound. 1777: First full English translation of Aeschylus 1789: Goethe’s Prometheus (poem) 1816: Byron’s Prometheus (poem) 1818: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein:or, the Modern Prometheus (novel) 1819: Schubert sets Goethe’s Prometheus (song) 1820: Percy Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound (play) 1833: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Prometheus Bound (translation) 1856: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s revised Prometheus Bound (translation). 1927: Eva Palmer’s Prometheus Bound at Delphi Festival. First revival of Greek Tragedy in an Ancient Theatre 1957: Eva Palmer’s Prometheus Bound revival in NYC (in English) 1967: Robert Lowell’s Prometheus Bound at Yale University Drama School* 1968: Carl Orff’s Prometheus Bound (Opera) 1971: Classical Greek Theatre Festival at in Salt Lake, Utah opens with Prometheus Bound 1985: Richard Schechner’s The Prometheus Project with the Wooster Group (adaptation)* 1989: Tom Paulin's Seize the Fire (adaptation) 1998: Tony Harrison, Prometheus (film) 2013: Prometheus Bound at Getty Villa, translated by Joel Agee* Works Consulted France, Peter, editor. The Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation. Oxford UP, 2001. Hartigan, Karelisa. Greek Tragedy on the American Stage: Ancient Drama in Commercial Theatre, 1882-1994. Greenwood Press, 1995. McDonald, Marianne, translator. Prometheus Bound. By Aeschylus, Self-published, 2008, olli.ucsd.edu/documents/aeschylus.pdf. Ruffell, Ian. Aeschylus: Prometheus Bound. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2012. [*Denotes supporting articles included in the following section] Theater: 'Prometheus Bound' Performed at Yale: Aeschylus's Play Given ... By WALTER KERR Special to The New York Times New York Times (1923-Current file); May 11, 1967; ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York TimesSteffens16 pg. 52

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Prometheus: Hero for Our Time: 'Prometheus' 'Prometheus' By ELENORE LESTER New York Times (1923-Current file); May 21, 1967; ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times Steffens17 pg. D1

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Steffens18

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Steffens19

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. If Actress Meets Opportunity...: If Actress Meets Opportunity... By WALTER KERR New York Times (1923-Current file); Jun 11, 1967; ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New YorkSteffens20 Times pg. 121

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Steffens21

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Steffens22

Richard Schechner

Uprooting the Garden: Thoughts around 'The Prometheus Project'

Richard Schechner is presently working towards a production of his The Prometheus Project, planned to open at the Performing Garage in New York before the appearance of this issue. Simultaneously, he is trying to come to terms with his own failures of communication with his eighty-year-old father. Personal preoccupations, theatrical work-in-progress, and performance theory mesh together in what amounts to the overview offered here of an avant-garde confronted by the prospect of global genocide - and, more specifically, Schechner offers an explanation of the tone of parody which seems increasingly to have characterized performance work. Richard Schechner took The Drama Review from its origins as a small academic journal to a lively forum for theatrical debate during his editorship from 1962 to 1969, by which time he was already directing the Performance Group, whose opening production was the controversial Dionysus in 69. He has been a Professor of Performance Studies at New York University since 1967, and resumed the editorship of TDR in 1985.

I WANTED to talk to my father, but he was Mabou Mines. It is from Brecht that these eighty by then and if we hadn't talked up to that contemporary masters learned two things: to point how could we? I grabbed him as he came insert their own consciousness between the down the stairs of the house my mother's father 'characters' (who for ever more need quotation built while she, my mother, was still a girl. I sat marks to distinguish them from 'real people' - my father down on the second step down from characters in another mode of performative the second floor landing. I took hold of his behaviour) and the spectators; and to look wrists, I leaned close into his face. toward Asia for concrete ways of achieving this 'Pop, Pop,' I said. 'Pop, Pop.' effect. An effect Brecht called verfremdung — not He stared at me. His eyes were very wide. His translatable but meaning, roughly, to be made mouth was moving open and shut, open and new, strange, distant, objective. shut, the way a fish on land grabs silently, The Asians - take for example Japanese Noh, dumbly, but desperately for air. How can this Kabuki, and Bunraku — use verfremdung easily fish be suffering? It isn't making a sound. and gracefully. The Noh actor wears a mask that Screaming, shrieking, howling, lamentation, and is too small to conceal his face; the master moaning are media of pain. When those who Bunraku puppeteer is unmasked so that suffer are silent we are permitted the illusion that connoisseurs in the audience can better enjoy his they are also peaceful. They can be 'regarded' - manipulations. And the Kabuki mie is defined as looked at from a distance, admired for the 'a picturesque and striking pose taken by an beauty of their appearance: aestheticized. actor at a climactic moment in a play in order Ironically, Brecht — who worked to open two to make a powerful impression on the audience. spaces in performance, one between character ...Normally wooden clappers are struck and and performer, the other between stage image music is played as the actor takes his pose.'1 and spectator, so that he would have room to The Kabuki jiien (in the American version com- insert political thought - actually paved the piled by Samuel L. Leiter) lists no less than nine way for today's (too) aestheticized theatre. different mie. Equally elaborate instructions - Brecht is one of the forerunners of Robert transmitted not in textbooks but through what Wilson, Pina Bausch, Richard Foreman, and Phillip Zarrilli calls 'in-body' methods2 -exist

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for Indian, Javanese, Balinese, and other Asian The comforting aspect of quiet - the at-least cultures. western identification of 'peace and (with) The past, then, has a double reference in the quiet' - explains some of the immense success performing arts and rituals - as history, a of the 'theatre of images', where suffering is collection of 'facts'; and, more important, as mostly silent and thereby rendered beautiful. what is learned and passed on in training for and This theatre of images - Phillip Glass's Satya- in the act of performing itself. graha or Robert Wilson's Civil Wars: a Tree Is In his own production of Mother Courage and Best Measured When It Is Down, for example, are Her Children, when Brecht wanted his audience full of images of war, beating, and assassination to think about why Swiss Cheese had been that are more beautiful than frightening. If a executed (because of his mother's greed, albeit remedy is called for it is not socialist realism. an understandable greed), he instructed Helene Of late the theatre of images has been finding Weigel, playing Mother Courage, to utter a its voice and showing its willingness to ' silent scream' converting an audience (listeners) surrender some of its prettiness: it is good to into spectators (lookers). Courage suffers but listen to the dancers of Pina Bausch or William we, instead of empathizing with her suffering, Forsythe talk, even if what they say is banal; or are able (maybe) to leam from it. She is not a to hear their breath and see, even smell, their tragic heroine but an exemplum. sweat as they work through physically demand- In a similar way people look at, learn from, ing dances such as Bausch's Bluebeard or and enjoy paintings of the martyrs. Because he Forsythe's LDC. is silent and still, the arrows piercing St. The sister to the dancer - and the actor Sebastian's flesh don't arouse our pity or horror too - is the athlete as much as the painter. Yes, so much as our curiosity. People even enjoy there are indications of a serious attempt to Munch's silent scream (possibly a model for bridge, even eliminate the gap between the Brecht's-Weigel's). Listening to the martyrs genres of music, dance, theatre, and sports. suffer, actually hearing their screams - even if There is plenty of room both for 'independent' rendered 'artistically'- would be too much: and 'integrated' genres, for purebreeds and silly, like a bad movie if done 'in art' and hybrids. And, learning lessons taught by unbearable if done 'in life'. postmodern dance and Happenings alike, to That's why it is impossible to fictionalize in integrate ordinary movement, athletics, and any mimetic way the Holocaust:3 the historical speech with classical and modern dance. moment has not yet come for it. That's why Forsythe, artistic director now at the Frankfurt when TV catches some actual horror - a Ballet, sets his explosive and sometimes verbal shooting, a fire where humans are burning to choreography on ballet dancers - who take to death, the starving of Ethiopia - very quickly it. Not that all performance ought to be the picture goes silent except for the smooth integrated - but we need more integration than voice of the reporter. It is so much easier to grand opera or pop music. close the eyes or turn the head than to stuff Back to silence. The comfort of quiet may also the ears. explain the rough treatment accorded New Not that there aren't many who savour 'real York's Wooster Group (successor to the death'. A videotape of just that - executions, Performance Group), certainly the noisiest, least fires, murders, air crashes: people in the peaceful, and most savage, of today's immediacy of their dying - is one of the avant-garde. biggest-selling items in America's video stores. Doesn't this...what shall I call it? 'bourgeois But here too what might be happening is an need'? for peace and quiet also help explain the attempt to escape deathly futures fantasized, modulation of the blasts of 'seventies punk into foreseen, or just vaguely felt by bathing in the the more moderate tones of today's pop music cruel 'immediacy' of someone else's dying. I put scene? Not to mention Reagan's soft radio- 'immediacy' in quotation marks because this is, voice, so soothing that people just don't com- after all, a videotape: a trace of things already prehend, or even really listen, to what it is he in the past. is saying.

The masters of silent film slapstick knew how beginning this universe was the Self alone - in much quiet took the sting out of mayhem. Their the likeness of a person. Looking around, this movies are epitomes of violence, but the silence person saw nothing other than itself....It was of the medium leaves room for roars of laughter afraid, this person, and it took thought, and said, in the house. The screams of the slapped, beaten, "Since nothing exists other than I, of whom (or flattened, car-crashed, and crushed are never what) am I afraid?'" Soon thereafter this primal heard. person split and then split again and again, At Auschwitz the screams were always through copulation, genetic multiplication, and there — except from the two most infamous birth, into all the beings that are. A chain barracks: the 'hospital' where Mengele carried reaction. out his 'experiments', and in Barracks 11, the In uncovering the past, digging into my own Gestapo's torture and special punishment special silence, what have I been seeking? Echoes barracks. These places were shut off from the of tradition? In my production of Oedipus - not rest of the camp. An attempt to hide and muffle Sophocles' but Seneca's -1 asked the actors to what was happening? Between the two barracks perform atop of and then dig into the three feet was the Wall of Death, where thousands of of earth we shovelled into the Performing naked prisoners were shot at close range, one Garage. Under that soil each night the masks the at a time usually, in a seemingly endless actors wore were found, and on its surface the procession of the murdered. meeting of the three roads where Oedipus slew The screams of history have a hard time Laius was mapped out. The earth itself signified getting through. There are those - more than not only the covered up past but blood. you might think — who deny the Holocaust. Naked, except for the blood from his And one of the functions of the Vietnam gouged-out eyes, which in this production was memorial wall in Washington, and all the media the mud of his extraordinary pastness, Oedipus attention given to it, is to soften the screams goes into exile. Jocasta is not so lucky. She has heard at My Lai ('And babies too? Yes, babies carried the knowledge of who this young man too.') We protest Reagan's visit to Bitburg - but is inside her, just as she carried his four children: are German soldiers any more individually her fecund revenge for the babies Laius did not guilty than American GIs? And where were the permit her to have - after Oedipus. And when Nuremberg trials for those who constructed and the secret comes out she impales herself on a conducted the Vietnam War? I mean the spear blade dug up from the earth - shoving it leaders — our leaders — who surely knew what up through her vagina into her womb. The earth they were doing. each night was stained by deep red (stage) So I could not really speak to my father. And blood. his silence protects me still from whatever it is There was room for lots of blood because he has failed through four generations to say to Jocasta wore a large hollow body mask from me. Or whatever it is I have refused to hear. My neck to thigh. In the Performance Group encounter with him on the stairs is both mute production this body mask worn by Joan and pregnant with inexpressible (for me and Macintosh as the pregnant Jocasta was cast on him) meanings. Probably this inexpressibility is her when she was eight months pregnant with what keeps me going, both in and out of the our child. Within a month after Oedipus closed theatre. the marriage was over. Where was the pastness Yes I have worked on this problem: speaking in all that? to my father - and through him, by this means, If theatre is to dare call itself an art it must to his father's father, and to all the others before: always risk the actual life-histories of those who mothers and sisters and daughters as well as make the performances. That's what shamans fathers, brothers, and sons. All. If we are related do; and we - performers, scenographers, costu- to each other around the world - and we are - it mers, musicians, directors - must find our own is no phony relation but a genetic web ways of doing the same. Hebraically expressed in the story of Adam, but I know it's possible to make performances as well explained by the Vedic Purusa: 'In the without such intense, intimate investments — but

I am not interested in those kinds of per- Krepieren are obsessive permutations on Kantor's formances. And whenever I have met a great own memories of pre-war Poland. Kantor is performer who seemed to be working solely present at and in each of his group's 'from tradition', very little digging convinced performances. He 'directs' as they perform- me that here too - among the masters of suspending himself between the roles of Kathakali and Noh - whole lives were at stake: puppeteer and orchestra conductor. Some of the climax of a family's line, secrets passed on Kantor's interventions are spontaneous, some across generations. rehearsed. In either case he is always mumbling The imagery/actions in my work are always to himself, running his own endless interior extremely personal as well as consciously tapes. traditional. In performance there is no place for In all these classical works of the avant-garde a past that is abstract history lived by others. there is little comic irony, but much parody — as The magnificence of Asian training is that in Linda Hutcheon uses the term: putting the dance (or character or song) into the The auto-reflexivity of modern art forms often lakes body the past is also put there. The history of the form of parody and, when it does so, it provides the genre culminates right here, in this person, a new model for artistic process. In an effort to as she/he works. demystify the 'sacrosanct name of the author' and Western dance has some of that, but theatre to 'desacralize the origin of the text', postmodernist very little. It is the ambition of theatre, these critics and novelists... have argued for the complemen- days, and rightly, to be more like dance. The tarity of the acts of textual production and reception. roots we dig at, and up, must be our own. The The writer must 'stand on equal footing with the garden uprooted is the garden we are endlessly reader/listener in an effort to make sense out of the replanting. language common to both of them'. ...Parody, This digging at the roots is what many people therefore, is a form of imitation, but imitation in experimental theatre/dance are doing. For the characterized by ironic inversion, not always at the avant-garde these days is looking very hard expense of the parodied text* backward. I don't mean that negatively, but as the recognition of necessity. Roots = routes = Need I add that 'text' includes 'performance ways: distinct kinds of in-body knowledge. And text' - acts done, gestures made, effects experiment = ex per and/or ex peri: to go evoked; previous performances, films, orations: through or beyond the boundaries. anything that is 'on record' either by virtue of From the nineteenth century to the 1970s the tradition or the new mechanical/electronic avant-garde thought these boundaries were means of preservation. bourgeois sensibilities, and to experiment meant Today's experiments are full of ironic and to shock or epater le bourgeois. Then came the parodic encounters. These often do not take the experiments of Grotowski during his 'poor form of satires: they are not 'making fun' of theatre' phase from 1959 to 1967. Here classic earlier works. Rather they are 'quotations', works - playtexts, novels, sacred literature - backward references - sometimes to classics, were cut up and reconstituted in performative sometimes to modern works, sometimes to the collages that also displayed the most intimate performers' own lives. These references underline aspects of the performers' own lives. But these what deconstructionist theorists such as Jacques intimacies were not seen directly, 'as is', but as Derrida et al. mean when they say texts are masked or reclothed in Grotowski's intense, 'open', full of holes, waiting for readers not so often harrowing mise-en-scenes. much to finish them as to keep them in the In this aspect of his work - using the personal fullness of their unfinishedness: a mutual lives of performers in the service of an attempt to 'make sense' out of the old texts - to 'objective' performance text - Grotowski was comprehend incomprehensible pasts. following directly in the footsteps of Stanislavski. This decoding is what I am trying to do with He no longer works that way, but fellow-Pole my father. The openness literary works can only Tadeusz Kantor does. Kantor's performances indirectly have, performed works have absol- from The Dead Class through Die Kiinstler Sollen utely. Each performance is a revision of what

has gone before, and every performance is works - to 'rework' them, as the Wooster provisional. Group's LSD did with Arthur Miller's The What contemporary performance artists Crucible - trouble follows. Director Elizabeth realize more clearly than their predecessors is LeCompte insists that LSD was not meant to that there are no settled texts 'behind' or debunk Miller's play, only to squeeze it so that 'before' the performance text. The performance it yielded its essential action. text is what it is not: present concretely in Dialogue was recited, even sung, too quickly seeming completeness and yet open to immediate to be comprehensible; the action took place at revisions. Revisions are in fact made on the a long table with the performers facing straight spot — even in the most conservative and out: the references to the McCarthy anti- classical genres. Zeami advises Noh shite to look communist witch-hunt of the 1950s which in at the audience prior to selecting what costumes Miller's play were subtextual were in LSD made to wear and to adjust the rhythms and intensity visually obvious; Tituba was played in hideous, of the performance on the basis of what kind of hilarious black-face taken from racist minstrel audience has gathered. shows (and Wooster Group's own Route 1 & 9, Every performer knows, of course, that the a self-quotation). minute details of any given performance vary Too much quotation, however, runs against from show to show, adjusting in tone, pace, and the property interests, the copyright, of authors. intensity to the situation at hand. These minute Lawyers arrive like flies on shit.5 The Wooster particulars are not incidental to the performance, Group was instructed to cease and desist using they are the core of the performance text. As the Miller's script. But only through unlimited rasa theory of Indian classical dance theatre access to material - new even more than asserts most forcefully: the experience of a classical - will a vital repertory emerge. What performance can be located neither in the needs protecting, if anything, are authors' performers nor in the spectators, but in the pocketbooks - so authors should be paid when virtual time/space between them. someone quotes them. But the material itself Quotations are often from the experiences of must be available: the great ages of performance the performers. These quotations from everyday are ages of piracy, plagiarism, and parody. life can be given in a cold, almost cybernetic But if I could not, cannot, speak to my own tone. What is happening is very different from father on the steps of my mother's ancestral the impassioned dismembering/remembering of home, what right have I to talk to anyone about Grotowski, or the obsessive replays of Kantor. the past? Sitting there on those steps I thought Postmoderns like Wilson, Bausch, and For- the land would open up and swallow me. sythe are referring, not reconstructing. They are His mouth just kept opening and closing. I intentionally not engaging in Stanislavski's could utter nothing more than 'Pop'. Like a 'emotional recall' work. While quoting they are kid's cork gun. keeping their distance from the quoted materials. At least let me try to tell you. The performers are not exposing intimate Tell you in terms of a theatre-dance piece I and/or painful moments of their lives a la am in the process of working on, The Prometheus psychodrama. Instead, performers utter refer- Project, an active meditation on nuclear wars past ences and identifications as a way of plugging- and future. I want to help sustain a collective up the aporia endemic to performance texts. need to pre-experience what we must never What the postmodern quotations are about, experience: performance as vaccination rather I think, is an attempt to 'recite' a 'sayable past'. than catharsis. Or, in old-fashioned Christian History has lost its authority, ethically speaking; terms: to know enough about hell to take steps and artistically western theatre and dance have to avoid going there. arrived at Artaud's condition of 'no more I began working on Prometheus in 1982.6 It's masterpieces'. In this condition banalities of the taking me a long time to finish and maybe I performers' lives can be presented side-by-side never will. Like talking to my father, it hangs on with the classics. me. There are problems, relating not only to the When there are attempts to quote recent subject matter but to parody and quotation, that

I am having a hard time resolving. Greek god, is nowhere in Lessing's novel. The What if, I say, Prometheus was wrong? redemptive passage quoted concerns the 'condi- Humans - men especially, their guns always tion of Shikastans [earth people] now'. cocked - cannot be trusted with fire. What if Io is pursued by Zeus, a male, and this Prometheus is hung up there on his mountain - prompted an exercise in workshop where the yes, Christlike - mumbling like Kantor a long actresses/dancers playing Io told stories of monologue of self-justification? The audience being pursued by men — their own stories, only hears some of this seamless monologue. actual or invented (I don't know which, and Prometheus is crazy — wouldn't you be if your don't want to know: as long as the stories are liver was eaten away each day, and the round convincing). Tape recorded, these tales form the of this torture was unending, and yet you could, undertext of the section of Prometheus Project by virtue of your name, see the future? called 'Io'. Prometheus the trickster, the thief, the friend But, I emphasize now (August 1985), this is of man, knows something has gone wrong, all pro-visionary: what I and the people I've something is not working the way he planned worked with have come to. It might not be this it. 'They got the light wrong', he keeps re- way in the next — final? — version of Prometheus peating. But the focus of my play is not Pro- Project. This very writing here now is just metheus — we all know his story — but Io, the another step in the ongoing process of making mad woman who dances into Prometheus' sight a performance text. Such a text is necessarily and then away again. open and unfinished. It is completable only Why her? Because somehow I feel the future provisionally each time it is co-created with the belongs to (or ought to belong to) her spectators.7 descendants. Remember Io? Zeus took a liking These texts and actions are played in front of to her. She resisted, he 'visited' her in dreams screens on which are projected slides of nuclear night after night, and aroused her. Or maybe it and post-nuclear visions. What it looked like at was the other way around: she desired the and from the perspective of ground-zero at attentions of the god and aroused him. Sooner Hiroshima. I intentionally avoid pictures of the or later Hera found out, was enraged. Zeus, to blast from a distance, the hypnotically beautiful/ protect Io, transformed her into a cow. Hera set phallic mushroom cloud. Avoided also are hundred-eyed Argos to guard the heifer-woman. pictures from nuclear tests showing explosions Zeus had Argos murdered. Hera set the stinging in slow motion. All these aestheticize nuclear gadfly on Io - and off she went on her war. world-wanderings. I believe I will also use slides made from Io danced to the very limits of the world the pictures drawn by the hibakusha, people who Greeks knew: across into Asia Minor, on were in Hiroshima or Nagasaki in August 1945. through Iran to the snowy slopes of the (One unfortunate man experienced both Himalayas, and then back again across the bombs.) And a set of slides from a book made Bosphorus (of course) into Africa down as far as from a 1970s animated film, Pica-Don. All these the great (Victoria) falls, the source of the Nile. 'Japanese documents' are offset by personal Finally Io comes to Canopus at the mouth of the slides supplied by the performers, pictures from Nile where she is 'healed'. their own daily lives past and present. And a few Io's story intersects Prometheus' when one of slides taken during rehearsals and/or earlier Io's descendants frees him. But this resolution is versions of The Prometheus Project. Quotations only obliquely in my production - as a reading within quotations. from Doris Lessing's Canopus in Argos: Archives. These are the visuals: but what might an Re: Colonised Planet 5: Shikasta. I assume Lessing audience hear? During the section called 'Zero', means the Canopus in the sky, but can she be while performers split into two groups - one unaware of Io and the Canopus at the mouth of headed toward Ground-Zero, there to receive the Nile? What I have selected from Lessing has the hydrogen communion: an instant, painless, nothing to do directly with freeing Prometheus - but irreversible vaporization; the other headed such an event, or even any reference to the toward evacuation, and an existence in the

condition of nuclear winter — the audience trying to find in what I stage as well as in what hears, concurrently and sometimes simulta- I write a hold, a voice, some kind of rational neously : a black Gospel version of the Baptist statement, for what I feel and can express best hymn, 'Peace Be Still', Max Bruch's Kol Nidre (but how inadequately!) in almost silent (live and on Walkman), 'Duck and Cover', a pictures. song taught to school kids in the 'fifties urging May I suggest to you that we are living in them to 'take cover whenever an atomic bomb a convergence of epochs: one which we thought goes off', and Mendelssohn's aria of warning, we had collectively escaped from — pre-industrial 'Hear Ye, Israel'. theocracies and city-states forever at war with Zero is sad and elegiac, filled with sounds and each other, wholly caste-bound societies - and sights of regret: whichever way we choose to one coming at us from the nuclear and go - toward vaporization or nuclear winter - ecological tomorrow: a crowded, uncomfortable, we have lost the game. Somehow we collec- dangerous world that can only be controlled by tively must find a way never to have to make arousing and exploiting humanity's deepest that choice. Horrific pictures are looked at fears. through a web of the performers' slow motion Can we ever buy enough LPs to end movements, regarded through an aural haze of starvation in Ethiopia? Yet what else can the music. The spectators/audience are reposi- ordinary people do? And don't such gestures do tioned as beings from a distant future, or another 'at least a little' good? But how many are ready planet, regarding these primitive, touching, to admit that what people really want is to stop stupid, lovely, pitiable earth people. hearing the shrieks that manage to get through Were this the all of Prometheus Project I would all the muffling? be subject to my own criticism of aestheticizing Human shrieks. When the Air India jumbo jet events too painful to look at in a cold light and dropped into the Irish Sea in June 1985, the listen to with open ears. But other sections, like International Herald Tribune reported: 'The 'Io', are more violent, parodic, farce-like, and Observer story also said that Irish air traffic angry. In 'Zero' I saw no way to avoid silence controllers at Shannon had recorded "a dull and beauty. bang, a gushing noise, and finally a human My file called 'Doomsday' fills up with shriek" in the seconds before the jet crashed.' dippings of all kinds of dead-ends we humans My report of a report of a report of a report. seem intent on heading toward, and I don't mean And I can tell you that at this instant, as I write, only the dead-ends that will lead to ultimate out on Eighth Avenue seven floors below me, stillness; the removal of human ears to listen, but a man is roaring. A Prometheus manque. also the deprivations of quality - the decline in So some people might say that what my feeling, in appreciation for suffering, that we colleagues and I are constructing in The appear to be heading into. This is the 'new Prometheus Project is an unfunny parody of medievalism' I sense all around me: an Aeschylus. Aeschylus because he is the father of acceptance of the (bad) way things are, a need western dramaturgy, the first playwright and for all kinds of 'mystical' belief systems, and a director in our tradition, and, as such, the source stability born from profound but nearly of our theatrical patriarchy: with Aeschylus the inexpressible fears. actor displaced the dancer. Prometheus Project is Hell exists again for intellectuals, sceptics, intended both to continue and refute Prometheus artists, and atheists as it has not for centuries. Bound, to restore the dancer to primacy while We can see (but just barely hear) us all going to not entirely rejecting the actor. hell, if not for our sins then for our stupidity and I am trying not to complete Aeschylus but to greed. It is this hell that Prometheus knows, open him up: as if western dramaturgy - and regrets, and sings about: and his hell is to be able the various systems it suggests, intends, to hear ours. supports, and reflects - could be restarted. So the 'past' - in my present vision of theatre Absurd, of course, for here we are, in the 1980s, at least - is more and more the future. I must put if not at the end, at least recognizing that we it in such a slippery way because I am groping, could be at the end: it is within our 'power' to

make it the end. The end of what, though? Of much', he said. Or did he say, 'Of course'? I the patriarchy? Surely. Of the world? Maybe. don't remember which. Nor do I remember But everyone knows it won't be, can't be, the asking him if he was afraid of dying - but I know end of 'the world'. How many times must that I am afraid of his dying: he that has been history teach us that humankind does not equal in my life since its very beginning and who, 'the world'? What we are up against is the end therefore, represents immortality to me: the of human life, that is human experience, as we Purusa from which I am. have known it. This is the message so many of I do recall clearly the next bit of dialogue. I our artists, scientists, intellectuals, and even asked him, 'Do you believe in life after death?' some politicians have been trying to deliver: 'Yes, yes I do', he replied. Then he got up from that no matter what, human life - its social his seat on the porch and walked inside to play arrangements, its political-economic arrange- solitaire. ments, and even the structures of its conscious- I don't believe in life after death, but I'm ness - is on the cusp of change, maybe has not as old as he is, not as 'original'. I'm a already changed, will either change or else. breaker-maker. And what I believe in is a Should theatre be concerned with such continuous deconstruction and reconstruction 'issues'? Yes, but how? Surely not by soupy of realities - an incessantly processual playful- 'ritualized' performances full of candles and ness: life after life. incense. Nor by sentimental 'docudramas' like The Day After. Issues that teeter between politics and metaphysics deserve farce and tragedy as their modes, but if these genres are too innocent, then give me parody. If we are emerging from Notes and References a period of aestheticized (I would even say 1. See Samuel L. Leiter, Kabuki Enq/dopedia: an English-Language anaesthetized) theatre into one of integration - Adaptation of Kabuki Jiten (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, not only of dance, music, and theatre, but also 1979), p. 232-4. of the 'unthinkable', with the 'playable' - then 2. Zarrilli is a scholar and practitioner of Kalarippayatt, a south surely what we need to think most about Indian (Kerala) martial art connected to both Kathakali and Kutiattam. From his work in Kalarippayatt, Zarrilli has developed is...what we can hardly dare play with. ideas detailing how 'performance knowledge' which resides in the That is maybe why such a period as ours is body of the performer is transmitted. See especially his 'Doing so full of parody. Through parody the past is the Exercise': the In-body Transmission of Performance Knowledge in a Traditional Martial Art', Asian Theatre Journal, I, accepted and rejected at the same time. It is 2, p. 191-206. Eugenio Barba in his International School of Theatre quoted, even made fun of, but still re-presented. Anthropology has been investigating the same problem. See Artaud wanted no more masterpieces. Possibly Barba's 'Theatre Anthropology', Drama Review, XXVI, 2 (1982), p. 5-32. See also my 'Performer Training Interculturally', in he was a bit hasty. Parody invites us to examine Between Theater and Anthropology (Philadelphia: University of the masterpieces - of art, of thought, of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), p. 213-60. events — holographically: to turn them around, 3. The only performance I've seen that is' satisfying' in dealing with the Holocaust is Leeny Sack's one-performer piece, The over, upside down. Parody can be at once Survivor and the Translator. Sack relates her own 'translations' - playful, scientific, disrespectful, and open: both literal and figurative - of her grandmother's recollections (in subversive and restorative simultaneously. Polish, German, and English) of the Holocaust. The perspective is clearly Sack's own - and her need is that so widely felt by the To go beyond modernism without re- children and grandchildren of survivors: to knit this intractable medievalizing, won't we need parody and her experience into the rest of their lives. Otherwise not enough sister processes? So I am glad ours is (and 'cultural time' has elapsed to put the Holocaust into mythology (as the Egyptian enslavement, the Exodus, and the establishment increasingly so) a period of genre-mixing and of the first state of Israel has been mythologized in the Old genre-busting, sceptically but playfully confusing Testament.) What we 'have' of the Holocaust today are survivors, the short story and the essay, Derridian testimonies, data, relics, historical interpretations, and art works. theoretics and the novel, theatre and ritual, Histories, novels, poems, and short stories, from Raul Hilberg to Eli Weisel to D. W. Thomas, can be more direct than what seems tragedy and parody. to be possible in the theatre. There the subject can be approached Just a few days ago I broke the silence with only obliquely, as with Grotowski's Akropolis, Sack's Survivor/ Translator, or The Diary of Anne Frank. Documentaries like The my father. On the porch of that same house I Investigation are less successful. Is it that the unsayable can be read asked him if he ever thought about death. 'Not but not heard/seen/enacted? Is this performative silence a

necessary and proper respect, avoidance, or both? I really don't devalued soon afterwards the project was suspended. In the know. summer of 1983 Carol Martin and I led a workshop on Prometheus 4. See A Theory of Parody (New York and London: Methuen, at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. On the final day of that 1985), p. 5-6. workshop we and the students showed more than three hours of 5. In LSD the Wooster Group, directed by Elizabeth LeCompte, dancing and scenes. In January 1984 I, and my assistant director deconstructed, conflated, reduced to 'pure' sound, and parodied Matthew Silverstein, went to the University of Texas, Dallas, Miller's The Crucible. The author was not amused. He saw the where we staged a version of The Prometheus Project with students production several times, shilly-shallied about whether to grant and professional performers from Dallas. This work-in-progress the Group rights to continue, and finally decided not to. The Miller was performed three times, on 7, 8, and 9 February 1985. At part of LSD was rewritten by Michael Kirby who wanted to keep present, I am planning another revision of Prometheus at the the rhythms of LeCompte's mise-en-scene intact. Because he was Performing Garage for December 1985. performing in LSD he was very familiar with these rhythms — in 7. The key deconstructionist concept of open text negotiated rewriting the Miller parts he was interested only in these rhythms, during each performance or reading is prefigured in classical Indian not in character or plot. See David Savran, 'The Wooster Group, 'rasa theory'. Rasa — the flavour or juice of a performance - does Arthur Miller, and The Crucible', and Arnold Aronson, 'The not exist except at the interface where the actions/sounds of the Wooster Group's LSD', both in Drama Review, XXIX, 2 (1985), performers interact with the expectations/knowledge of the p. 99-109, 65-77. spectators. This theory was first written down in the Natyasastra, 6. I first had the idea for Prometheus when, while leading a a performance treatise compiled between the second century BC workshop at the University of Mexico, I was taken by Nicolas and the second century AD. The Natyasastra has been commented Nunez and Helen Guardia to the' Sculpture Garden' near UNAM's on, elaborated, and practised ever since. Rasa reworked in various performing arts centre. This garden was a circle of monoliths facing permutations is also fundamental to Chinese, Japanese, and in on a field of naked black cold lava. The volcanic rocks were south-east Asian aesthetics. See my Between Theater and frozen liquid - twisting, bulbous, frothy, living. Immediately I Anthropology, and Pramod Kale, The Theatric Universe (Bombay: proposed doing Prometheus on this site. But when the peso was Popular Prakashan, 1974).

British Alternative Theatre Directory 1985/86

edited by Catherine Itzin

"... the little sister of the British Theatre Directory".

Trestle Theatre Company in 'Hanging Around'. From left to right, Toby Wilsher, Joft Chafer and Alan Rlley.

If you are at all interested in the development of contemporary theatre you must have a copy of the British Alternative Theatre Directory. This detailed guide to the fringe and touring companies and venues offers the most comprehensive Information about the groups operating today. It features over 500 companies — including small and middle scale touring companies, community theatre groups, dance, mime and children's companies, performance artistes, puppet companies and TIE organisations. Each entry details the company's policy, origins, subsidy and personnel, as well as listing its productions, equipment and preferred audiences. This section is complemented by a directory of the small scale touring venues in England, Scotland and Wales, featured in similar detail. There are 250 of these and their entries contain all the technical and programming information necessary to mount a tour. Finally, there is a reference section that features the organisations and associations that serve the alternative theatre movement, from the Arts Councils and Regional Arts Associations to the Theatre Writers Union and the Independent Theatre Council. There is also a directory of the Principal National Festivals and a map of London Fringe Theatres. The British Alternative Theatre Directory is published annually and the 1985/6 edition is now available. Price: £7.95 (plus £1.50 post and packing). Available from: John Oflord Publications, 12 The Avenue, Eastbourne, East Sussex BN21 3YA. Telephone: 0323 645871.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Arizona, on 19 Jan 2018 at 16:08:39, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266464X00001858 Theater: Schechner's 'Prometheus Project' By WALTER GOODMAN New York Times (1923-Current file); Dec 27, 1985; ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times pg. C8 Steffens31

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Steffens32

A rehearsal of the Center for New Performance's "Prometheus Bound." (Photo by Scott Groller) PREVIEWS | SEPTEMBER 2013 | SEPTEMBER 1, 2013 | 0 COMMENTS

In the Wheel World With ‘Prometheus Bound’

The Getty Villa presents a new take on the Greek classic.

By Rob Weinert-Kent Steffens33 MALIBU, CALIF.: A clock, a cross, a Ferris wheel, a horoscope, a torture rack—all these associations, and a few more besides, are handily evoked by the ve-ton steel wheel that anchors the Center for New Performance’s production of the Greek tragedy Prometheus Bound, at Getty Villa, Aug. 29–Sept. 28. Ron Cephas Jones plays the grounded god, lashed to an inner wheel that rotates more or less freely within the overarching wheel structure.

“I felt an obligation to bring a kind of weight and excitement to the project,” said director Travis Preston, who heads CNP, the professional producing arm of California Institute of the Arts (where Preston is also dean of the theatre school). “The wheel was my response to the challenge of Prometheus being bound throughout; because of the smaller inner wheel, he’s still bound but can move. It gave us the ability to create some dynamism.”The structure, assembled by LA ProPoint, also allows the play’s 12-member chorus to participate acrobatically in the action, in harnesses provided by Flying by Foy.

“Seen from the front, the wheel is almost like a vortex going back in space,” said Preston. And back in time. “As someone who is immortal, Prometheus’s being bound ties him to time.” Preston cited Prague Orloj, the medieval astronomical clock in the Czech capital’s town square, as a model for the wheel’s design. And he feels that the work’s “proto-Christian” aspects—the image of crucixion and sacrice—emerge starkly in this setting.

The outdoor amphitheatre, which overlooks the Pacic Ocean, has the classical-styled Getty Villa as its backdrop, along with the verdant hills of Malibu. But this is not an idyll; Preston feels that classics, including this one, have a prophetic power that remains unsettling.

“The interesting thing about the piece—and this is how I generally feel about the Greeks and Shakespeare—is that when you engage these plays, they are reenergized, and they give you access to exciting aspects of, and insights about, modernity.”

Prometheus’s crime—sharing the secret of re with humans—links him, Preston feels, “to the origins of human consciousness. In a sense, he is the creator of humanity; it’s essential to the evolution of humanity in modern and postmodern history, this transgressing on the territory of the divine that both condemns and denes us.”

When it comes to tragic transgression, humanity is always on a roll. Steffens34

← Back to Original Article Getty Villa's 5-ton wheel keeps 'Prometheus Bound' centered The monumental wheel at the heart of the Getty Villa's 'Prometheus Bound' works in concert with the actors to tell an ancient tale of a hero against the gods.

August 31, 2013 | By Mike Boehm

At first, director Travis Preston wanted to seat the audience for "Prometheus Bound" at the Getty Villa where the actors would normally be: on the plaza in front of the museum that doubles as a stage for the Getty's annual late-summer outdoor productions of ancient plays.

The drama would unfold high above the crowd, in the vacated rows and aisles of the Villa's steeply sloped Roman-style theater. The switch made sense for a play whose hero is chained to a mountainside above an ocean for having thwarted Zeus' plans.

Preston's idea was shot down for logistical reasons, so the veteran stage director, dean of the California Institute of the Arts School of Theater, needed to come up with a Plan B.

Set designer Efren Delgadillo Jr. was sitting with Preston on the theater's steps one day, looking out at the plaza and the museum and trying to figure out what to do next, when the director pulled out a paper napkin and drew a circle.

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"He said, 'I want a big wheel,'" Delgadillo recalled. "Actually, his words were, 'I want a big … wheel.'"

And that's what Delgadillo gave him, with help from LA ProPoint, a fabrication company that specializes in theme park rides and unusual stage machinery. The steel wheel is 23 feet tall and weighs 5 tons, not counting its untold metaphorical heft as a symbol for Time, the Cosmos, Fate, the Wrath of Zeus and what have you.

Getty officials enthusiastically agreed to Plan B and have proudly sported the wheel as a Villa adornment since mid-July, well before the Getty and the CalArts Center for New Performance present poet Joel Agee's new translation of the 2,500-year-old-piece, which runs Sept. 5 through 28.

When they arrive at the doorstep of one of America's leading collections of ancient Greek and Roman art, museumgoers encounter a monumental modernist contraption that looks as if it could have strayed from Fritz Lang's classic 1920s silent film, "Metropolis."

"Prometheus Bound," commonly attributed to Aeschylus although scholars have serious doubts, is about as thematically large as fiction can get. Prometheus has stolen fire from the gods and given it to the human race, throwing in mankind's first tutorials in science, medicine, technology and the arts. Now we watch him pay the price and are asked to consider whether it was worth it.

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Besides the metaphoric weight, the wheel bears about three-quarters of a ton of acting talent. In some scenes, Preston's 12-woman chorus of CalArts students and recent graduates clambers aboard, joining the hero on whom they alternately shower pity for his suffering and chastisement for helping those ridiculous humans and refusing to free himself with an apology.

Preston says the challenge of deploying a full-sized Greek chorus of actor-singer-dancers initially drew him to "Prometheus Bound." Getting to arrange them on a big wheel just ups the ante.

After watching the chorus sing in unison while dancing in ranks on the plaza flats during a recent rehearsal, the director turned them toward the wheel and they began ascending in waves. The soundtrack was L.A. jazzman Vinny Golia working an arsenal of reed and percussion instruments as the play's live accompanist.

Also audible was the clanking of metal safety clips attached to body harnesses worn by each actor. In addition to their lines and their moves, they've learned to clamp themselves to one of the wheel's rims or spokes before every step, to prevent falls.

"Your ascent is the ascent of humanity," Preston told the chorus after its surge up the wheel. "It has to be smooth. It doesn't have to be fast. We'll be looking for the timing to be slower than you've done, so the drama of the rising on the wheel gets enough time."

During a break, Kaitlin Cornuelle, a chorus actor in her first production since graduating from CalArts in May, said the rigor of dealing with the wheel is less physical than psychic. The job calls for graceful, well-timed movement while clearly intoning lines in unison with 11 others and hitting the right emotional notes, while also carrying out special safety protocols. After each rehearsal, she said, "It's not, 'Oh, my thighs hurt.' It's 'Oh, my mind hurts.'"

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Like everyone else in the chorus, her gear included a triangular pelvic harness shaped like a bikini bottom, with straps attached for the climbing clips. The apparatus comes from Flying By Foy, the Las Vegas airborne performance effects company engaged by the production to provide equipment and safety training. At first, said Gary Kechely, a CalArts faculty member and production manager for "Prometheus Bound," Flying By Foy hesitated becauseSteffens35 it specializes in flying, not climbing. "We said, 'We want to make use of your expertise. Whether it's flying or suspended, there's a commonality" in not wanting to see actors fall and break their necks.

Kechely said the first round of rehearsals with the wheel last winter at CalArts' Valencia campus and this summer's preparations at the Getty have been accident-free.

Topmost in the cast credits, and on the wheel, is Ron Cephas Jones, an experienced New York actor making his Los Angeles stage debut as Prometheus. Even though he'll spend the play bound by the wrists in a crucified-Jesus pose, Jones will be surprisingly mobile: his perch is a smaller wheel-within-the-wheel that can circle the big one like the hand of a clock.

"I'm hoping I don't have to scratch my nose or sneeze," said the lean, bony-faced actor, who won a 2007 Obie Award for "sustained excellence of performance" in off-Broadway shows. Jones has played his share of legendary characters, including Odysseus in Sophocles' "Ajax," Pontius Pilate in Stephen Adly Guirgis' "The Last Days of Judas Iscariot" and Shakespearean turns as Richard III, Othello, Caliban in "The Tempest" and the demonic avenger Aaron in "Titus Andronicus." Prometheus is his first immortal.

His 2011 experience in "Titus Andronicus" fed Jones' confidence about hitting the heights as Prometheus — in his exit scene at New York's Public Theater, he'd defied ancient Rome from a platform high above the stage. Here, he'll defy the gods from a peak elevation of 18 or 19 feet.

"Actors love challenges, and this presents a wonderful challenge," said Jones, who wears military dog tags from a past costume as a reminder that when he's performing he's "a soldier of the theater."

Mirjana Jokovic, director of performance at CalArts, will ascend the wheel as Io, another victim of the gods. It's the first stage role in seven years for the Serbian actress. Now she'll ascend to Prometheus' perch to receive a pep talk from the all-foreseeing Titan on how, thanks to her offspring, the wheel will eventually turn, metaphorically speaking, and humans will one day dethrone Zeus.

"This wheel deserves to be seen," Jokovic said. "It's a special work of art on its own."

But doesn't that make it dangerous in a way that has nothing to do with slips and falls? Might not this exceptionally distinctive set piece upstage the 20- member cast it's meant to hold?

No, says Jokovic. The 10,000-plus pound circle of steel makes a collaborative performance partner. "The wheel is our world, our microcosmic unit," she said. "We're not separate from it or against it. It helps to get us centered."

"One of the challenges is to constantly draw the audience into the story," Jones said. "If we tell the story, the wheel will become a byproduct of the story and not the story a byproduct of the wheel."

Preston does not believe his napkin scrawl birthed a Frankenstein's monster that could eat his production.

"That can happen with any piece of scenery if it's gratuitous," he said. "What we're dealing with here is pretty essential and utilitarian. Originally it was going to be 30 feet high" — nearly a third bigger than it wound up. "We feel this is the right proportion for the space and that it paradoxically creates a certain kind of intimacy."

Designer Delgadillo says he made sure to imbue the wheel with a special measure of beneficent karma, insisting that an actual ship's wheel serve as its primary control, rotated by a single technician at its base.

"They were going to fabricate one, but I was real picky" about hunting on EBay to find a used steering wheel from a yacht. He says the text itself dictated this as a spiritual necessity. Chained above the ocean, Prometheus ends by defying the gods to bring it on, knowing they can unleash nature's full force:

"Now all the winds are at each others' throats, the sea is mingled with the sky. And here it comes, in plain view, the onslaught sent by Zeus."

At a time like that, Delgadillo said, a production and its hero should be able to depend on a device that has braved the elements at sea. [email protected]

'Prometheus Bound'

Where: Getty Villa, 17985 E. Pacific Coast Highway, Pacific Palisades

When: 8 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays. Ends Sept. 28.

Tickets: $38 and $42

Contact: http://www.getty.edu (310) 440-7300

MORE Steffens36

← Back to Original Article Review: 'Prometheus Bound' is a graceful revival at Getty Villa 'Prometheus Bound,' directed by Travis Preston and starring Ron Cephas Jones, makes Aeschylus play feel new at Getty Villa.

September 06, 2013 | By Charles McNulty, Los Angeles Times Theater Critic

Prometheus has long been a symbol of the rebel hero, a revolutionary challenging an oppressive order. Dubbed "the patron saint of the proletariat," he is a god who sided with mankind against the immortals, bestowing on them enlightenment and the great gift of fire, crimes for which he is punished by Zeus, the universe's reigning tyrant at the time of the myth.

In Travis Preston's gracefully lucid staging of Aeschylus' "Prometheus Bound" at the Getty Villa's outdoor Barbara and Lawrence Fleischman Theater, Prometheus is carted out on a wagon that, were he not a deathless god, might be mistaken for a bier. As played by Ron Cephas Jones, this champion of humanity, already limp with pain before being enchained to a giant 5-ton wheel, brings to mind images of Jesus at the crucifixion.

"Prometheus Bound" is rarely performed, and with good reason. An immobilized protagonist presents undeniable dramatic problems, but perhaps even more difficult are the theatrical challenges posed by a playwriting imagination that conscripts into service a chorus of ocean nymphs, a few outlandish deities, and a victimized young woman transformed into a heifer and harassed by a gadfly, all of whom drop by to pay their respects to a prisoner being tortured on a far- flung mountainside.

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Imagine the stillness of Beckett's "Happy Days" crossed with the wildness of James Cameron's "Avatar" and you'll get a sense of the scale of the staging hurdles.

But the text (generally attributed to Aeschylus though questions remain) is so complexly woven and philosophically rich that it cries out for a director bold enough to meet its unorthodox demands. Preston, working with a new translation by Joel Agee that is smooth and clear without being reductive, negotiates an intelligent compromise between innovation and restraint.

His production — a collaboration between the Getty and CalArts Center for New Performance, in association with Trans Arts — is never in competition with Aeschylus' tragedy, never experimental for experiment's sake. A meditative rhythm, enhanced by an original jazz score by Vinny Golia and Ellen Reid, keeps the focus on the play's religious and political depths.

The 23-foot-tall rotating steel wheel dominating Efren Delgadillo Jr.'s set design may sound gimmicky, but the machinery is conservatively employed. Its presence is more sculptural than athletic. (Cirque du Soleil-style acrobatics aren't part of the equation.) This scenic approach taken by Preston, dean of the CalArts School of Theater and artistic director of the CalArts Center for New Performance, suits a play that is static on the surface yet nonetheless coursing with revelations.

"Prometheus Bound" harks back to an older style of tragedy than the one endorsed by Aristotle's "Poetics." There's drama, but as often with Aeschylus, it's a matter of intensification of theme. The protagonist's growing conviction in the righteousness of his resistance to Zeus' tyranny substitutes for rising action.

The plot, lyrically handled, revolves around a series of exchanges between Prometheus and his visitors. The chorus of ocean daughters, who speak, sing and move in unison, plead for stories. Full of sympathy, they want to know everything Prometheus knows. "Tell us, unless telling adds to your pain" is their refrain.

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Prometheus obliges them. He will not, however, relent in his defiance of the current brutal Olympian regime. When Okeanos (Joseph Kamal), the father of the chorus, preaches the wisdom of political expediency, Prometheus only becomes more adamant.

Prometheus' encounter with Io (an emotionally supercharged Mirjana Jokovic), the innocent lass whose life was derailed by Zeus' lust, takes us inside the inner workings of his mind. The fates of these victims of Zeus are entwined. It's a complicated tale but suffice it to say that Prometheus, whose name is derived from the Greek word meaning forethought, sees far into the future and knows that the arc of the moral universe is bending infinitesimally toward justice.

This faith sustains him when Hermes (Michael Blackman) races in with more threats from Zeus. Prometheus' suffering will be excruciating, but it won't be for naught. No wonder he has come to epitomize, despite the fanaticism of his character, the courageous nobility of principled dissent.

Jones' performance lets you feel the emotional weight of Prometheus' position. He speaks less in anger than in weary determination. The cost of his agonizing ordeal isn't skimped over.

For Aeschylus, wisdom doesn't replace suffering. It can, however, accompany it. There's pain and there's progress. This double reality is captured in Jones' portrayal of a character who is indeed larger than the drama containing him. (Don't blame Aeschylus: "Prometheus Bound" is the only surviving play in what may have been a trilogy.)

The production doesn't crack the conundrum of the chorus. The young women assuming these impossibly ethereal roles, which may be more sea bird than sea maiden, haven't yet found a tone that harmonizes with the gravity of Prometheus' predicament, and Mira Kingsley's choreography for them is still a work in progress. Steffens37

This "Prometheus" may not be the most radical production in the Getty Villa's annual outdoor staging of an ancient classic, but it is one of the clearest and, notwithstanding a few shaky spots, the most theatrically assured. Best of all, it establishes a dialogue between the world of 5th century B.C. Athens and our own. Truly, this is a revival. [email protected]

'Prometheus Bound'

Where: Getty Villa's Barbara and Lawrence Fleischman Theater, 17985 Pacific Coast Highway, Pacific Palisades

When: 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays. Ends Sept. 28.

Tickets: $42

Contact: (310) 440-7300 or http://www.getty.edu

Running time: 1 hour, 15 minutes

Suggested Critical Reading and Supplemental Resource List

Texts Available in Rehearsal Dramaturgy Library:

McDonald, Marianne. The Living Art of Greek Tragedy. Indiana UP, 2003.

This very brief and accessible introduction covers both textual and performance traditions

and methods, considering the practical challenges presented by Greek Tragedy such as language,

translation, voice and movement performances, and scenic design. McDonald explores each of

these areas for the major plays of three major Greek Tragedians, including Aeschylus and

Prometheus Bound.

Taplin, Oliver. Greek Tragedy in Action. Methuen, 1978.

Although this book has now graced the shelves of libraries for forty-years, Taplin’s short text remains informative and inspiring for anyone with an interest in Greek Tragedy – from the student actor to the seasoned director, the experimental designer or the Classical intellectual.

Especially useful are the sections illuminating how to transport the text of a Greek Tragedy into the perfomance, including thoughts on staging, entrances and exits, movement and gesture, props, and orientation of the house. While constant in its practicality, Greek Tragedy in Action returns in each section to questions of meaning and interpretation: what does emotional and narrative authenticity mean when we stage Classical work for contemporary audiences? What are our responsibilities as directors, actors, designers, and dramaturgs to the Greek Tragedian, our audiences, and ourselves? Steffens39

On Greek Mythological Figures:

Gods, Goddesses, and Mythology, Marshall Cavendish Reference, 2012, Credo Reference.

General Entries on Background and Artistic Representation (digtal links): Prometheus Hephaestus Oceanus Nymphs Hermes Zeus

On Aeschylean Tragedy (digital links):

Said, Suzanne. “Aeschylan Tragedy.” Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World: A

companion to Greek Tragedu. Justina Gregory, Editor. Wiley, 2005. Credo Reference.

Brief and accessible overviews historical and mythological contexts, major thematic

concepts, and Aeschylean style. A very short critical history of Aeschylus and his major works

are included at the end of the entry, pointing toward resources regarding the major trends in

Aeschylean Criticism, including: major commentaries on the plays, the critical introductions,

stagecraft, language, and politics.

Contemporary Comparison: Aeschylus and Beckett

Available in the Rehearsal Room:

Chioles, John. “The Inner Eyes of The Prometheus Bound.” Aeschylus: Mythic Theatre, Political

Voice. University of Athens Publications, 1995, pp.428-431.

These few pages from Chioles extensive study on Aeschylean Dramaturgy provide an

excellent entry point into Prometheus Bound for current artists with familiarity and foundations

in Modern, Post-Modern, and Experimental Theatre, bridging the potential divide between

antiquated and contemporary practices. Drummond, Clara. Two Translations of Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound by Elizabeth BarrettSteffens40 Browning. Proquest Dissertations and Theses, 2004. Proquest.

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SCENE BREAKDOWN

SECTION CHARACTERS LINES PROLOGOS Strength 1–98 Force (silent) Hephaestus- Prometheus (silently bound)

Prometheus 99-142

PARODOS Chorus 143–33 Prometheus

EPISODE I Chorus Leader 234 – 332 Prometheus

Oceanus 333 – 461 Prometheus

STASIMON I Chorus 462–504 Prometheus

EPISODE II Chorus 436–594 Prometheus

STASIMON II Chorus 595 - 647 Prometheus

EPISODE III Io 648 - 1040 Chorus Prometheus

STASIMON III Chorus 1041-1074 Prometheus

EXODOS Chorus 1075 – 1121 Prometheus

Chorus 1122 - 1285 Prometheus Hermes Drummond, Clara. Two Translations of Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound by Elizabeth BarrettSteffens46 Browning. Proquest Dissertations and Theses, 2004. Proquest.

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Steffens100 Glossary and Pronunciation Guide from Marianne McDonald’s Notes and Translations

AETHIOP (EE-thee-op) River, “Black” river, possibly the Niger, or the Nile in Egypt. AMAZONS (AM-ah-zons), warlike women. ARGOS (ARE-gos) an area of the Peloponnesus (southern Greece). ARIMASPS (AR-i-masps), one-eyed people who lived in the far north, between the Issedones and the Hyperboreans. ATLAS (AT-lass), brother of Prometheus. He carries the heavens on his shoulders because he was one of the Titans who opposed Zeus. CHALYBES (KA-lib-eeze), iron workers who live in Asia Minor near the Pontus. CANOPUS (Ka-NO-bus), city at Nile’s mouth, in Egypt, near the later Alexandria. CAUCASUS (KAW-ka-sus), mountain chain that extends from the Black Sea to the Caspian Sea. CERCHNEA (kerk-NYE-a), lake near Argos. CILICIAN CAVES (si-LI-sian) caves in Cilicia located in Asia Minor, west of the Euphrates river. CIMMERIAN (SIM-meer-ian) ISTHMUS or BOSPORUS (BOS-por-us), passage of water that lies between the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea. Bosporus means “cow’s ford” referring to Io herself passing over it in a cow’s shape. CISTHENE (sis-THEE-nee), far eastern plains where the Gorgons lived. Proverbial for a far away place. COLCHIS (KOL-kis), country to the east of the Euxine (Black) Sea. CRONUS (KRON-us), youngest son of Uranus and Gaia, and among the first gods before the Olympians. He deposed his father, and in turn was deposed by Zeus. DELPHI (DELL-fee), oracular seat on the side of Mount Parnassus, where the Pythia delivered Apollo’s oracles. DODONA (doh-DOH-nah), sanctuary of Zeus in Epirus with a grove of talking oaks whose messages were interpreted as oracular pronouncements. EPAPHUS (ee-PAPH-us), son of Io and Zeus, founder of Memphis in Egypt. FURIES, (also called Erinyes, ER-in-ee-ez), elemental forces of familial vengeance who later become Eumenides (you-MEN-ih-deeze) ‘kindly ones’ or benevolent goddesses of fertility. They are earth goddesses in contrast to the Olympians, Apollo and Athena. GAIA (GUY-ah), earth, consort of Uranus, also another name for Themis. GORGONS, three sisters: Stheno (STHEN-o) “Strength,” Euryale (your-RYE-ah-lee), “Wide-leaper,” and Medusa (me-DOO-sah), “ruler,” who have snakes for hair (Medusa, whose gaze turned people to stone, was the most famous). GORGONIAN (Gor-GO-nian) PLAINS, where the Gorgon’s dwell. Steffens101 GRIFFIN (GRIFF-on), huge mythical birds with powerful wings, lions’ bodies and eaglebeaked. HADES (HAY-deeze), the underworld, and also king of the underworld. HEPHAESTUS (hef-FES-tus), god of fire, blacksmiths and artisans. He was conceived by Hera, queen of the gods, with no male help. Athena likewise was Zeus’s child alone, with no mother. HERA (HAIR-ah) queen of the gods, married to Zeus. HERACLES (HAIR-ah-cleeze), son of Zeus and Alcmena, Hera forced him into performing labors. He eventually killed the Eagle feasting daily on Prometheus’ liver. HERMES (HER-meeze), messenger god and half-brother of Apollo. HESIONE (hes-EYE-oh-nee), Oceanid, wife of Prometheus. HIPPOCAMP (HIP-po-camp), front horse, rear sea serpent, and sometimes represented with wings. An amphibious form of transportation for sea-deities. HYBRISTES (hu-BRIS-teeze), river in Asia Minor, whose name means “audacious.” INACHUS (IN-ah-cus), founder and ruler of Argos, father of Io. IO (EYE-oh), daughter of Inachus. Zeus pursued her which resulted in her being changed into a white cow and pursued by a gadfly (because of Hera’s jealousy). She wanders over the world until she comes to Egypt where she will regain her human form and give birth to Zeus’s son, Epaphus. Heracles will be his descendent. IONIAN (IO-nian) Sea, located off the coast of western Greece. LERNA (LER-nah), lake in the Peloponnese, near Argos. Meadow nearby where Io met with Zeus. MAEOTIS (may-OH-tis), large lake or body of water (Sea of Azov) between Asia and Europe, north of the Black Sea. OLYMPUS (oh-LIMP-us) tallest mountain in Greece and home to the gods who were called Olympians. PELASGUS (pe-LAS-gus), name of early king of Sicyon, and Pelasgian comes to mean Greek, usually referring to the Peloponnesians, who lived in Southern Greece. PHORCYS (FOR-kis), sea god, father of the Gorgons and the Graeae, old women (Pemphredo, “wasp,” Enyo “war,” and Deino “terror”), who share one eye and one tooth. POSEIDON (pos-EYE-don), god of the ocean. PROMETHEUS (pro-MEE-the-us), cousin of Zeus. Titan who sided with Zeus in his war against the giants, but who stole fire from the gods and is punished for that theft. Heracles will eventually shoot the eagle that is feeding on his liver. RHEA (REE-ah), wife of Cronus, mother of Zeus, and his brothers and sisters (Olympians). Rhean Gulf is the Adriatic Sea, north of the Ionian Sea. SCYTHIA (SITH-ee-a), land northeast of the Black Sea. TARTARUS (TAR-tar-us), another name for Hades, the underworld, also the section of Hades where the worst offenders were punished. Steffens102 THEMIS (THEM-is), daughter of Uranus and Gaia (also another name for Themis), mother of Prometheus by Zeus. THEMISCYRA (them-is-KYE-ra), town where Amazons lived in Cappadocia in Asia Minor, next to the Thermodon river. THERMODON (THER-mo-don), Cappadocian river that flows into the Black Sea. THESPROTIS (THES-pro-tis) and MOLOSSIAN (mo-LOS-sian) Plain, areas in Epirus (North-western Greece), near Dodona. TITANS (TI-tans), children of Uranus and Gaia, large immortals who were the generation of gods before Zeus and the other Olympians. TETHYS (TETH-is), daughter of Uranus and Gaia and wife of Oceanus. TYPHON (TIE-fon), hundred-headed giant who opposed Zeus and was buried under Mount Etna. URANUS (YOUR-ah-nus), pre-Olympian king of the heavens, a sky god who was deposed by his son Cronus. ZEUS (ZYOOSE), king of the gods.

Work Cited: McDonald, Marianne, translator. Prometheus Bound. By Aeschylus, Self-published, 2008, olli.ucsd.edu/documents/aeschylus.pdf.

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CUT SCENE SAMPLE Lines 333-647, or Episode 1 through Stasimon II

Objectives and Motivations for Proposed Cut Suggestions: • Clarify “Him” as Zeus • Create more hostility in Prometheus’ interactions with Oceanus • Pare down repetition of expository information • Remove mythological/historical/geographical references with which contemporary audiences may be unfamiliar • Translate description of physical activities into executable stage action, then remove • Preserve stichomythia • Truncate Strophes/Antistrophes in Chorus (not necessarily maintaining integrity of symmetry in their meter and form), while preserving Barrett-Browning’s lyricism • Focus Prometheus’ contributions to humankind • Clarify/update some obscure language while preserving Barrett-Browning’s lyricism o not necessarily technically maintaining meter nor rhyme, to heighten the affect and immediacy of the text for a contemporary audience • Get Io onstage faster (gratuitous cutting)

[Enter OCEANUS on a giant bird]

OCEANUS I reach the end of my weary road Where I may see and answer thee, Prometheus, in thine agony! On the back of the quick-winged bird I glode, And I bridled him in With the will of a god! Behold, thy sorrow aches in me, Constrained by the force of kin. Nay, though that tie were all undone, For life of none beneath the sun, Would I hope for benediction Than I hope for thine! And thou shalt learn my words are truth That no fair parlance of the mouth Grows falsely out of mine. Now give me a deed to prove my faith, For no faster friend is named in breath Than I, Oceanus, am thine.

Prometheus. Ha! what has brought thee? Hast thou also come To look upon my woe? How hast thou dared To leave the depths called after thee, the caves Self-hewn and self-roofed with spontaneous rock, Steffens104

To visit earth, the mother of my chain? Hast come indeed to view my doom and mourn That I should sorrow thus? Gaze on, and see How I, the fast friend of your Zeus,-how I The erector of the empire in his hand,- Am bent beneath that hand, in this despair!

Oceanus. Prometheus, I behold,-and I would fain Exhort thee, though already subtle enough, To a better wisdom. Titan, know thyself. And take new softness to thy manners since A new king rules the gods. If words like these, Harsh words and trenchant, thou wilt fling abroad, Zeus haply, though he sit so far and high, May hear thee do it, and, so, The wrath of Zeus Which now affects thee fiercely, shall appear A mere child's sport at vengeance. Wretched god, Rather dismiss the passion which thou hast, And seek a change from grief. Perhaps I seem A harsh curse waits To address thee with old saws and outworn sense, yetsuch a curse, Prometheus, surely waits For lips that speak too proudly!-thou, meantime, Art none the meeker, nor dost yield a jot To evil circumstance, preparing still To swell the account of grief with other griefs Than what are borne. Beseech thee, use me then For counsel! do not spurn against the pricks, Seeing that who reigns, reigns by cruelty Instead of right. And now, I go from hence, And will endeavour if a power of mine Can break thy fetters through. For thee,-be calm, And smooth thy words from passion. Knowest thou not Of perfect knowledge, thou who knowest too much, That where the tongue wags, ruin never lags?

Prometheus. I gratulate thee who hast shared and dared All things with me, except their penalty! Enough so! leave these thoughts. It cannot be That thou shouldst move HIM. Zeus may not be moved And thou, beware of sorrow on this road.

Oceanus. Ay! ever wiser for another's use Than thine! the event, and not the prophecy, Steffens105

Attests it to me. Yet where now I rush, Thy wisdom hath no power to drag me back; Because I glory, glory, go to Zeus And win for thee deliverance from thy pangs, As a free gift from Zeus.

Prometheus. Why there, again, I give thee gratulation and applause! Thou lackest no goodwill. But, as for deeds, Do nought! 'twere all done vainly; helping nought, Whatever thou wouldst do. Rather take rest, And keep thyself from evil. If I grieve, I do not therefore wish to multiply The griefs of others. Verily, not so! For still my brother's doom doth vex my soul, My brother Atlas, standing in the west, Shouldering the burden of the heaven and earth, A difficult burden! I have also seen, And pitied as I saw, the earth-born one, The inhabitant of old Cilician caves, The great war-monster of the hundred heads, (All taken and bowed beneath the violent Hand), Typhon the fierce, who did resist the gods, And, hissing slaughter from his dreadful jaws, Flash out ferocious glory from his eyes, As if to storm the throne of Zeus! Whereat, The sleepless arrow of Zeus flew straight at him, The headlong bolt of thunder breathing flame, And struck him downward from his eminence Of exultation! Through the very soul, It struck him, and his strength was withered up To ashes, thunder-blasted. Now, he lies A helpless trunk supinely, at full length Beside the strait of ocean, spurred into By roots of lEtna,-high upon whose tops Hephrestus sits and strikes the flashing ore. From thence the rivers of fire shall burst away Hereafter, and devour with savage jaws The equal plains of fruitful Sicily, Such passion he shall boil back in hot darts Of an insatiate fury and sough of flame, Fallen Typhon,-howsoever struck and charred By Zeus's bolted thunder! But for thee, Thou art not so unlearned as to need My teaching-let thy knowledge save thyself I quaff the full cup of a present doom, Steffens106

And wait till Zeus hath quenched his will in wrath.

Oceanus. Prometheus, art thou ignorant of this, That words do medicine anger?

Prometheus. If the word With seasonable softness touch the soul, And, where the parts are ulcerous, sear them not By any rudeness.

Oceanus. With a noble aim To dare as nobly-is there harm in that? Dost thou discern it? Teach me.

Prometheus. I discern Vain aspiration,- unresultive work.

Oceanus. Then suffer me to bear the brunt of this! Since it is profitable that one who is wise Should seem not wise at all.

Prometheus. And such would seem My very crime.

Oceanus. In truth thine argument Sends me back home.

Prometheus. Lest any lament for me Should cast thee down to hate.

Oceanus. The hate of Zeus, Who sits a new king on the absolute throne?

Prometheus Beware of him,-lest thine heart grieve by him.

Oceanus. Steffens107

Thy doom, Prometheus, be my teacher!

Prometheus. Go! Depart-beware!-and keep the mind thou hast.

Oceanus. I rush before; thy words drive after. Lo! Thy words drive after. as I rush before Lo! my four-footed Bird sweeps smooth and wide The flats of air with balanced pinions, glad To bend his knee at home in the ocean-stall.

[Exit OCEANUS on a bird]

Chorus, [1st strophe.] I moan thy fate, I moan for thee, Prometheus! From my eyes too tender, Drop after drop incessantly The tears of my heart's pity render My cheeks wet from their fountains free, Because that Zeus, the stem and cold, Whose law is taken from his breast, Uplifts his sceptre manifest Over the gods of old.

[1st antistrophe.] All the land is moaning With a murmured plaint to-day. All the mortal nations, Having habitations In the holy Asia, Are a dirge entoning For thine honour and thy brother's, Once majestic beyond others In the old belief,- Now are groaning in the groaning Of thy deep-voiced grief.

2nd strophe. Mourn the maids inhabitant Of the Colchian land, Who with white, calm bosoms, stand In the battle's roar! Mourn the Scythian tribes that haunt The verge of earth, Mreotis' shore. Steffens108

'2nd antistrophe. Yea! Arabia's battle crown, And dwellers in the beetling town Mount Caucasus sublimely nears, An iron squadron, thundering down With the sharp-prowed spears. But one other before, have I seen to remain, By invincible pain Bound and vanquished,--one Titan!-'twas Atlas, who bears In a curse from the gods, by that strength of his own Which he evermore wears, The weight of the heaven on his shoulder alone, While he sighs up the stars! And the tides of the ocean wail bursting their bars Murmurs still the profound,- And black Hades roars up through the chasm of the ground, And the fountains of pure-running rivers moan low In a pathos of woe.

Prometheus. Beseech you, think not I am silent thus Through pride or scorn! I only gnaw my heart With meditation, seeing myself so wronged. For so-their honours to these new-made gods, What other gave but I,-and dealt them out With distribution? Ay-but here I am dumb! For here, I should repeat your knowledge to you, If I spake aught. List rather to the deeds I did for mortals!-how, being fools before, I made them wise and true in aim of soul. And let me tell you-not as taunting men, But teaching you the intention of my gifts, How, first beholding, they beheld in vain, And hearing, heard not, but, like shapes in dreams, Mixed all things wildly down the tedious time, Nor knew to build a house against the sun With wicketed sides, nor any woodcraft knew, But lived, like silly ants, beneath the ground In hollow caves unsunned. There, came to them No stedfast sign of winter, nor of spring Flower-perfumed, nor of summer full of fruit, But blindly and lawlessly they did all things, Until I taught them how the stars do rise And set in mystery, and devised for them Steffens109

Number, the inducer of philosophies, The synthesis of Letters, and, beside, That sweet muse, mother of all things: Memory. The artificer of all things, Memory, That sweet Muse-mother. I was first to yoke The servile beasts in couples, carrying An heirdom of man's burdens on their backs. I joined to chariots, steeds, that love the bit They champ at-the chief pomp of golden ease! And none but I, originated ships, The seaman's chariots, wandering on the brine With linen wings. And I-oh, miserable! I did devise for mortals all these arts. I’ve no device left now to save myself From the woe I suffer.

Chorus. Unseemly woe Thou sufferest, and dost stagger from the sense, Bewildered! Like a bad leech falling sick Thou art faint at soul, and canst not find the drugs Required to save thyself

Prometheus. Hearken the rest, And marvel further-what more arts and means I did invent,-this, greatest!-if a man Fell sick, there was no cure, nor esculent Nor chrism nor liquid, but for lack of drugs Men pined and wasted, till I showed them all Those mixtures of emollient remedies Whereby they might be rescued from disease. I fixed the various rules of mantic art, Discerned the vision from the common dream, Instructed them in vocal auguries Hard to interpret, and defined as plain The wayside omens,-flights of crook-clawed birds, Showed which are, by their nature, fortunate, And which not so, and what the food of each, And what the hates, affections, social needs, Of all to one another,-taught what sign Of visceral lightness, coloured to a shade, May charm the genial gods, and what fair spots Commend the lung and liver. Burning so The limbs encased in fat, and the long chine, I led my mortals on to an art abstruse, Steffens110

And cleared their eyes to the image in the fire, Erst filmed in dark. Enough said now of this. For the other helps of man hid underground, The iron and the brass, silver and gold, Can any dare affirm he found them out Before me? none, I know! unless he choose To lie in his vaunt. In one word learn the whole, That all arts came to mortals from Prometheus.

Chorus. Give mortals now no inexpedient help, Neglecting thine own sorrow! I have hope still To see thee, breaking from the fetter here, Stand up as strong as Zeus.

Prometheus. This ends not thus, The oracular Fate ordains. I must be bowed By infinite woes and pangs, to escape this chain. Necessity is stronger than mine art.

Chorus. Who holds the helm of that Necessity?

Prometheus. The threefold Fates and the unforgetting Furies.

Chorus. Is Zeus less absolute than these are?

Prometheus. Yea, And therefore cannot fly what is ordained.

Chorus. What is ordained for Zeus, except to be A king for ever?

Prometheus. 'Tis too early yet For thee to learn it: ask no more.

Chorus. Perhaps Thy secret may be something holy?

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Prometheus. Tum To another matter! this, it is not time To speak abroad, but utterly to veil In silence. For by that same secret kept, I 'scape this chain's dishonour and its woe.

Chorus, [1st strophe] Never, oh never, May Zeus, the all-giver, Wrestle down from his throne In that might of his own To antagonise mine! Nor let me delay As I bend on my way Toward the gods of the shrine, Where the altar is full Of the blood of the bull, Near the tossing brine Of Ocean my father! May no sin be sped in the word that is said, But my vow be rather Consummated, Nor evermore fail, nor evermore pine.

[1st antistrophe] 'Tis sweet to have Life lengthened out With hopes proved brave By the very doubt, Till the spirit enfold Those manifest joys which were foretold! But I thrill to behold Thee, victim doomed, By the countless cares And the drear despairs, For ever consumed,- And all because thou, who art fearless now Of Zeus above, Didst overflow for mankind below With a free-souled, reverent love.

Ah friend, behold and see! What's all the beauty of humanity? Can it be fair? What's all the strength?-is it strong? Steffens112

And what hope can they bear, These dying livers-living one day long? Ah, seest thou not, my friend, How feeble and slow And like a dream, doth go This poor blind manhood, drifted from its end? And how no mortal wranglings can confuse The harmony of Zeus?

Prometheus, I have learnt these things From the sorrow in thy face. Another song did fold its wings Upon my lips in other days, When round the bath and round the bed The hymeneal chant instead I sang for thee, and smiled,- And thou didst lead, with gifts and vows, Hesione, my father's child, To be thy wedded spouse.

[Io enters.]