Sex and War on the American Stage

American adaptations of Aristophanes’ enduring comedy Lysistrata have used laughter to critique sex, war, and feminism for nearly a century. Unlike almost any other play circulating in contemporary theatres, Lysistrata has outlived its classical origins in 411 BCE and continues to shock and delight audiences to this day. The play’s “make love not war” message and bawdy humor render it endlessly appealing to college campuses, activist groups, and community theaters— plays are performed in the West as frequently as Lysistrata. Starting with the play’s first mainstream production in the US in 1930, Emily B. Klein explores the varied iterations of Lysistrata that have graced the American stage, page, and screen since the Great Depression. These include the Federal Theatre’s 1936 Negro Repertory production, the 1955 movie musical The Second Greatest Sex, and Spiderwoman Theater’s openly political Lysis- trata Numbah!, as well as Douglas Carter Beane’s Broadway musical, Lysistrata Jones, and the international Lysistrata Project protests, which updated the classic in the contemporary context of the Iraq War. Although Aristophanes’ oeuvre has been the subject of much classical scholar- ship, Lysistrata has received little attention from feminist theatre scholars or performance theorists. In response, this book maps current debates over Lysis- trata’s dubious feminist underpinnings and uses performance theory, cultural studies, and gender studies to investigate how new adaptations reveal the socio-political climates of their origins.

Emily B. Klein is Assistant Professor of English and Modern Drama at Birmingham-Southern College. Her work has appeared in Women and Perfor- mance and Frontiers as well as Political and Protest Theater After 9/11: Patriotic Dissent (Routledge, 2012). This page intentionally left blank Sex and War on the American Stage Lysistrata in performance 1930–2012

Emily B. Klein ROUTLEDGE Routledge Taylor & Francis Group

LONDON AND NEW YORK First published 2014 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Text © 2014 Emily B. Klein The right of Emily B. Klein to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data Klein, Emily B. Sex and war on the American stage : Lysistrata in performance, 1930-2012 / by Emily B. Klein. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Aristophanes. Lysistrata. 2. Aristophanes--Adaptations--History and criticism. 3. Aristophanes--Stage history--United States. 4. Theater--United States--History--20th century. 5. Sex in literature. 6. Women in literature. 7. War in literature I. Title. PA3875.L8K64 2014 792.9’5--dc23 2013039819

ISBN: 978-0-415-81215-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-203-06963-9 (ebk)

Typeset in Sabon by Taylor & Francis Books For Dan and Julian This page intentionally left blank Contents

List of illustrations viii Acknowledgements x

Introduction – Power play: History, theory, and adaptation 1

1 Sophisticated or seditious? Broadway, Gilbert Seldes, and Pablo Picasso (1930) 23

2 Raced bodies/erased bodies: The Federal Theatre Project’s Negro Repertory Lysistrata (1936) 43

3 Cold War cowboys at home on the range: The Second Greatest Sex (1955) 63

4 Spinning yarns: Spiderwoman Theater’s Lysistrata Numbah! (1977) 87

5 Staging strikes and trafficking in trauma: The Lysistrata Project (2003) 108

6 Opting out and giving (it) up: The Uncoupling and Lysistrata Jones (2011–12) 127

Bibliography 146 Index 156 Illustrations

1.1 Set model for Lysistrata. Photograph by Maurice Goldberg. Image courtesy of the Edith Lutyens and Norman Bel Geddes Foundation. Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin 28 1.2 Myrrhina. Pencil drawing by Mildred Orrick. Courtesy of the Mildred Orrick fashion and costume collection. Kellen Design Archives, New School Archives & Special Collections 29 1.3 Spartan Herald. Pencil drawing by Mildred Orrick. Courtesy of the Mildred Orrick fashion and costume collection. Kellen Design Archives, New School Archives & Special Collections 29 1.4 Production photograph of Lysistrata. Photograph by Maurice Goldberg. Image courtesy of the Edith Lutyens and Norman Bel Geddes Foundation. Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin 30 1.5 Picasso’s “Kinesias and Myrrhina from Lysistrata” published in Gilbert Seldes’ Lysistrata, courtesy of MBI, Inc. 36 1.6 Picasso’s “two lovers” published in Gilbert Seldes’ Lysistrata, courtesy of MBI, Inc. 36 2.1 Flyer for Lysistrata at Moore Theatre. Florence Bean James Papers. University of Washington Libraries. Special Collections UW 35781 46 2.2 A scene from Lysistrata at Moore Theatre. University of Washington Theaters Photograph Collection. University of Washington Libraries. Special Collections UW 35783 47 2.3 The cast of Lysistrata at Moore Theatre. University of Washington Theaters Photograph Collection. University of Washington Libraries. Special Collections UW 35782 55 3.1 The Second Greatest Sex poster, Universal Picture Company, Inc. (1955) 67 3.2 Opening scene. Universal Pictures Company, Inc. (1955) 71 3.3 Kathleen Case. Universal Pictures Company, Inc. (1955) 71 3.4 Jeanne Craine and George Nader. Universal Pictures Company, Inc. (1955) 74 3.5 The wedding night barn dance. Universal Pictures Company, Inc. (1955) 77 Illustrations ix 3.6 Telling the story of Lysistrata. Universal Pictures Company, Inc. (1955) 80 3.7 Universal Pictures Company, Inc. (1955) 81 3.8 Bert Lahr. Universal Pictures Company, Inc. (1955) 82 3.9 At the old Indian fort. Universal Pictures Company, Inc. (1955) 83 4.1 The original cast of Lysistrata Numbah!:Lisa Mayo, Lois Weaver, Gloria Miguel, Pam Verge, Naya Beye, and Muriel Miguel. Photograph by Antonio Sferlazzo/Françoise Lucchese. From the Native American Women Playwrights Archive, Walter Havighurst Special Collections, Miami University Libraries, Oxford, Ohio 92 4.2 Lysistrata Numbah! poster. From the Native American Women Playwrights Archive, Walter Havighurst Special Collections, Miami University Libraries, Oxford, Ohio 95 4.3 Photograph by Antonio Sferlazzo/Françoise Lucchese, From the Native American Women Playwrights Archive, Walter Havighurst Special Collections, Miami University Libraries, Oxford, Ohio 96 4.4 Photograph by Antonio Sferlazzo/Françoise Lucchese. From the Native American Women Playwrights Archive, Walter Havighurst Special Collections, Miami University Libraries, Oxford, Ohio 99 4.5 Lysistrata Numbah! restaging with Sylvia Robinson and Kashaka Snipe 104 4.6 Photograph by Martin S. Selway. From the Native American Women Playwrights Archive, Walter Havighurst Special Collections, Miami University Libraries, Oxford, Ohio 104 4.7 From the Native American Women Playwrights Archive, Walter Havighurst Special Collections, Miami University Libraries, Oxford, Ohio 106 4.8 From the Native American Women Playwrights Archive, Walter Havighurst Special Collections, Miami University Libraries, Oxford, Ohio 106 5.1 Lysistrata Project poster. Image courtesy of Kathryn Blume. Poster design by Mark Greene 112 5.2 Accidental Activist poster. Image courtesy of Kathryn Blume/ Tamzina Films and Mighty Ruckus 113 6.1 The cast of Lysistrata Jones. Photograph courtesy of Joan Marcus 130 6.2 Patti Murin and Jason Tam as Lysistrata and Xander. Photograph courtesy of Joan Marcus 131 6.3 The women swear their oath. Photograph courtesy of Joan Marcus 132 6.4 The men of Athens University. Photograph courtesy of Joan Marcus 135 6.5 The boycott. Photograph courtesy of Joan Marcus 139 6.6 The players. Photograph courtesy of Joan Marcus 139 6.7 Hetaira presides over the Eros Motor Lodge. Photograph courtesy of Joan Marcus 140 6.8 Liz Mikel as Hetaira. Photograph courtesy of Joan Marcus 141 Acknowledgements

In my long list of thank yous, it seems only right to begin with this project’s true starting point, at Theatre Bay Area in San Francisco, 2003. I am grateful to my friend and then-boss, Dale Albright, for sympathetically looking the other way more than once while I quietly slipped out of the office to watch the anti-war rallies on Market Street. January, February, and March of that year were rife with downtown protests and street theatre as the US’s invasion of Iraq grew increasingly imminent. In those months, between running in and out of the Flood Building among police officers in riot gear and groups of chanting picketers, I heard artists excitedly plan for the Lysistrata Project. The whole world seemed to be thinking about public performance and acts of resistance. For the first time, I could feel theatre’s danger and its power. Since then, I have been fortunate to find inspiring mentors, colleagues, students, and friends who have shared my enthusiasm for political performance and enriched my thinking about theatre, war, gender, and their tangled history. My deepest thanks go to Jenny Andrus, Julie Bowman, Natka Bianchini, Stephanie Batiste, Michael Chemers, Jill Dolan, Kathy Newman, Kristina Straub, Michael Witmore, Barbara Johnstone, Peggy Knapp, Jenny Spencer, Jane Archer, Amy Cottrill, Clare Clifford, Anne Yust, Mary-Kate Lizotte, David Resha, Michael Flowers, Susan Hagen, Alan Litsey, Mark Schantz, and Sandra Sprayberry. I am also indebted to the groups that have given me a sense of home within the academy: the Women and Theatre Program of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education, the Theatre and War Working Group of the American Society for Theatre Research, and the English and Drama departments at Carnegie Mellon University and Birmingham Southern College. I am grateful to the wonderful members of the Routledge staff who patiently shepherded this project from its earliest days to its completion, especially Talia Rodgers, Ben Piggott, and Harriet Affleck, as well as my research assistant, Nona Nichols. It was my honor to receive advice from Alan Sommerstein, J. Michael Walton, and the anonymous readers of my early work. Their suggestions and insights helped me flesh out a richer project. Chapter 5 of this book includes excerpts from another volume in which I am proud to have my work included, Political and Protest Theatre after 9/11: Patriotic Dissent (2012). My research would not have been possible without the use of archival material and images Acknowledgements xi from the George Mason University Special Collections and Archives, Miami University’s Native American Women Playwrights Archive, MBI Inc., the Uni- versity of Washington Theaters Photograph Collection, the New School’s Kellen Design Archives, the Estate of Pablo Picasso and the Artists Rights Society of New York, the Library of Congress Music and Performance Collection, and the Harry Ransom Center’s Performing Arts Collections at the University of Texas at Austin. I am especially grateful to Brad Simmons, Lewis Flinn, Joan Marcus, Kathryn Blume, Deborah Ratelle, and Muriel Miguel for their willingness to talk with me about their work in the theatre and/or their generous permission to use their words and images in this book. My work was also supported by generous grants from the Faculty Development Committee and the Provost’s Office at Birmingham Southern College. Finally, there is the kind of unbounded gratitude that is most difficult to put in writing. To my mom and dad, my family, and dear friends, the people whom I have the unmatched privilege of loving: your incisive questions, humor, and understanding made this work possible. Dan and Julian, my two hearts, this book is dedicated to you. When Hercules sat at the feet of Omphale and helped with her spinning, his desire for her held him captive; but why did she fail to gain a lasting power? To revenge herself on Jason, Medea killed their children; and this grim legend would seem to suggest that she might have obtained a formidable influence over him through his love for his offspring. In Lysistrata Aristophanes gaily depicts a band of women who joined forces to gain social ends through the sexual needs of their men; but this is only a play. In the legend of the Sabine women, the latter soon abandoned their plan of remaining sterile to punish their ravishers. In truth woman has not been socially emancipated through man’s need—sexual desire and the desire for offspring—which makes the male dependent for satisfac- tion upon the female. Master and slave, also, are united by a reciprocal need, in this case economic, which does not liberate the slave. Simone de Beauvoir

E.H. Carr describes the march of history as serpentine. Remote periods suddenly loom close to the present as the march of time snakes on. We are in a moment in which classical antiquity feels proximate, and those aspects of human life which have not changed much since the time of the great Athenian dramatists are of particular importance to us now. To some of us the classics are important only because they prove that people don’t change. To others […] they prove rather that the struggle for change, the desire for change, is ancient and unconquerable. Tony Kushner Introduction – Power play History, theory, and adaptation

Peace in patriarchy is war against women. Maria Mies

That is what war is and dancing it is forward and back, when one is out walking one wants not to go back the way they came but in dancing and in war it is forward and back. Gertrude Stein

In 2012 I went to Nashville for a conference. I was on a panel to discuss the history of Lysistrata on Broadway. My research suggested that Aristophanes’ famous comedy made for a pretty hot ticket on the Great White Way in the 1920 and 1930. But what was it, I wondered, about the naughty old play that started to pique American interest in those roaring days of suffrage, prohibition, and later, economic depression? Was it something particular to the high culture theatre scene in New York? Maybe it gave the city’s elite a chance to take in a light sex farce under the guise of classical sophistication? What I didn’t realize until I got to town was that Tennessee’sstatecapital,“the Athens of the South,” had been in a swoon of its own over Hellenic life since the turn of the twentieth century. Who needed Broadway? The Nashville Parthenon, first constructed as a temporary showpiece for the Tennessee Centennial Exposition in 1897, is a full-scale replica of the Greek original. When, in 1920, its popu- larity began to noticeably outlive its crumbling plaster façade, the city’s Board of Parks decided to hire an architect and fund the building’s reconstruction, making it a permanent fixture of the municipal park. The renovation was completed in 1925—the same year that Aristophanes’ Lysistrata enjoyed its inaugural visit to Broadway. Since then, the Parthenon has served as an art gallery, and now hosts visitors under the watchful gilded eye of a 42-foot tall Athena Parthenos. Though the Nashville Parthenon now functions as a museum, my own research is not curatorial. The worthy investigations of Greek drama in its ancient context are better left to my colleagues whose knowledge of classical theatre and philology is far greater than my own. Besides, it isn’t artifacts that interest me so much as the weird contemporary responses and reprises that old things evoke. Like my 2 Introduction delight at being able to hang out at Music Row and the Parthenon on the same day, it’s the uncanny juxtapositions of ancient and present-day, “exotic” and all-American that fascinate me. This is not to say that I wasn’t wowed by my long-ago visit to the real Parthenon in Greece, but there was certainly something both quaintly kitschy and unsettlingly remarkable about watching caterers set up buffet stations for a wedding party on the steps of the Nashville Parthenon. For me, exploring contemporary re-visionings of Lysistrata produces a similar effect; the old play is always a site of new pleasures and queasy tensions. Since my initial encounter with Lysistrata in performance, first as guerilla theatre on a San Francisco street in 2003, and then in 2005 as a staged adaptation by J.A. Ball and Michael Chemers at Carnegie Mellon University, I was struck by the ways that twenty-first century activists and theatre artists used and reused this old play. How did Aristophanes’ silly make-love-not-war script, the one I remem- bered from college, with its bad puns and strap-on penis props, suddenly become a vehicle for millennial activism and a trendy season anchor for progressive theatre companies? As it turns out, Lysistrata’s reappearance was not so new or sudden. A little research led me back through centuries of international revivals and reappro- priations, and a particularly rich inventory from the last hundred years alone. In 1908, the famous Austrian director Max Reinhardt staged Lysistrata in Berlin. In 1918 George Cram Cook, writer, philhellenist, and husband of Susan Glaspell, produced a Lysistrata-inspired anti-war play called The Athenian Women, which was performed by his Provincetown Players (Foley 68). The text had been amply employed by suffragists in Europe and the US as a time-honored treatise in support of the rights of women. Once liberated from the classical constraints of the all-male cast, the play’s female protagonist became a center- piece of women’s protest in academic settings in the UK and community theatres in the US.1 It was also reimagined across a variety of media: as a German operetta in 1910, a ballet in London in 1932, a film, Flickorna, about Swedish feminists in 1968, and an American graphic novel, Lysistrata in Gangland, in 2012. Herb Blau’s San Francisco Actors Workshop opened its doors with Lysis- trata in 1953 and the play was also performed at Wayne State and on countless other college campuses in the 1960s in protest against the Vietnam War. Though I’m not a classicist, and I don’t read Greek, I was compelled to learn more about the origins of the ancient text. I discovered that Aristophanes, now revered as the father of Old Comedy, was sometimes hailed as a first-rate journalist of his day. Between 427 and 386 BCE he used the theatre to report on the daily realities of Greek life as he saw it. Of course, some of his critics regarded him as a salacious gossip writer. An ancient master of broad sketch comedy, one part Tina Fey and one part Oscar Wilde, his plays were beloved by Athenians for their piercingly relevant satires on Greek political life, but that same opus may have had him in and out of court, as he faced charges of slander. Throughout the interminable Peloponnesian War, two oligarchic overthrows, and the dramatic reshaping of the Greek empire Aristophanes made a career out of using humor to sling political Introduction 3 critique. His 40 or so plays, 11 of which still survive today, were staged at the City Dionysia and Lenaia festivals for Greek audiences of 10,000 or more. Popular with the mass citizenry and judges alike, the plays were frequent award winners. His scripts—the subjects of doctoral dissertations and burlesque shows, labeled as everything from treason to pornography—explain why. The ones that we know of today were discovered in Ravenna in the eleventh century and copied by Byzantine monks in the twelfth. Although the scandalously bawdy Lysistrata has historically been Aristophanes’ least anthologized piece, appearing in only a handful of manuscripts until the 1900s, in the last century it has enjoyed a vibrant cross-continental revival. Like the crumbling Parthenon and its glossy modern duplicate, Lysistrata has enjoyed its own eerie and amusing transnational cycles of ruin, revivification, and replication.

A play with legs Like almost no other play circulating in contemporary theatres, Lysistrata has long outlived its classical origins in 411 BCE and has continued to shock, delight, and titillate audiences to this day. The play’s “make love not war” message renders it endlessly appealing to college campuses, activist groups, and community theatres—so much so that none of Aristophanes’ plays are now performed in the West as frequently as Lysistrata. Theatre managers would be hard-pressed to find a play timelier than this 2500-year-old classic, with its focus on war, politics, public sex scandals, protests, citizenship, and gender dynamics. Adding to the play’s interest and controversial appeal is the fact that its sex strike plot is grounded in a raunchy, pun-filled world of blue humor and burlesque sight gags. Of course, these performance traditions were nothing new or shocking to Athenian audiences of Aristophanes’ day, but over time they have become the very features that have gotten the play’s performances censored or shut down in some historical contexts and, alternately, lauded in others. Bawdy double entendres, however, aren’t the play’s only area of controversy. With its vocal female protagonist who unites Athenian and Spartan women in a sex boycott to end the Peloponnesian war, Lysistrata’s explorations of gender roles and female leadership have also been at the heart of debates for centuries. The question inevitably asked today by most students, audiences, actors, and directors who know the text is: Is Lysistrata a feminist play? The Lysistratas portrayed in many contemporary performances seem to respond with a commanding “Yes!” Often staged as an early antecedent to a popular brand of post second-wave girl power, many current college productions figure the play’s hero as a 1990s Spice Girl lookalike, wielding her own incipient sexuality like a weapon while advocating a chaste war against war. The recent Broadway run of Lysistrata Jones, set in the world of college cheerleading, perfectly represents this figuration. Yet, despite this contemporary production trend, classicists have understood Aristophanes’ use of a central female hero as an ironic way of showing that the Peloponnesian War had become so unceasing 4 Introduction and pointless that even the most irrational beast—woman—could imagine a way to bring the decades-long crisis to resolution. In fact, the comedy’s fearless attention to female sexual desire and the corporeal qualities that link sex to war, and violence to pleasure, have troubled feminists and anti-war activists, classicists, and theatre historians alike. As playwright Sarah Ruden writes in the commentary to her own translation, the play’s “protest is remote from modern feminism [ … ] That women have to make peace is less an encomium of women than a mockery of the men who have failed to do it. That women characters are farther-seeing, more self-restrained, and more willing to act decisively on behalf of their city than the men are is an uproarious joke and a pitiless condemnation of their husbands” (107–8). Alas, Aristophanes was likely not the feminist visionary some readers imagine him to be. His original play might even have been a re-telling in its own right – a comment on the city’s priestess of Athena Polias, the similarly-named “Dissolver of Combat.” Still, as I argue in these pages, part of the comedy’s longevity may stem from its many points of interpretive conflict, like the kind Ruden points out above. Tempting as it is to try and define different adaptations of Lysistrata as explicitly feminist or not, I intentionally avoid such designations here. Such an effort would foreclose opportunities to tease out what I see as one of the play’s greatest features—its interpretive ambiguity. Each chapter seeks, instead, to pursue elements of “feminist residue,” a term I borrow from Janelle Reinelt and apply broadly, not just to the ripple effects of second-wave feminism, but also to the post-war and post-suffrage residue of first-wave feminism in texts of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Though adaptations may not be “overtly feminist” they often reveal “thepresenceofthe‘post,’ the effects of coming after” (Reinelt). I take up this work through two lines of investigation. My first goal is to parse the gendered (and often also raced and classed) performances of agency and self-determinism as they are figured in each new version of the play. Second, I consider how each adaptation’s treatment of sex and war reflects the tenor of those themes in their broader historical moment. Since war has long been understood as a social force constitutive of our most basic conceptions of masculinity and femininity, Lysistrata’s updates and itera- tions are like petri dishes for the study of these isolated themes. “Causality runs both ways between war and gender,” international relations theorist Joshua S. Goldstein writes (6). “Gender roles adapt individuals for war roles and war roles provide the context within which individuals are socialized into gender roles […] War shadows every gendered relationship, and affects families, couples, and individuals in surprising ways.” Therefore, this study seeks not only to map current debates over Lysistrata’s dubious feminist underpinnings, but it also examines the ways that American productions of the last 80-odd years have revealed cultural anxieties of the day and reconciled popular responses to war and shifting gender roles in the US. Starting with Lysistrata’s first mainstream nationally touring production in the US in 1930, this book explores the widely varied iterations of the comedy that Introduction 5 have graced the American stage, page, and screen since the Great Depression. While the 2003 anti-war Lysistrata Project might be familiar to theatre fans, few are likely to know of the 1936 Negro Ensemble production sponsored by the Federal Theatre Project that was shut down on the heels of a sellout opening night. Film buffs may also be surprised to learn about the 1955 Lysistrata-inspired musical, The Second Greatest Sex, which was directed by George Marshall and set in an all-American Midwestern town, populated by distracted husbands and frustrated housewives. Though rarely critiqued in the American academy, this rich lineage of US treatments of Lysistrata also includes Gilbert Seldes’ published adaptation for Broadway, illustrated by Pablo Picasso in 1934 and the Spiderwoman Theater’s Lysistrata Numbah from 1977. Finally, at the book’s conclusion I turn to two new adaptations from 2011 and 2012: Douglas Carter Beane’s Broadway musical Lysistrata Jones, and Meg Wolitzer’s acclaimed novelistic update, The Uncoupling. To be sure, these particular selections only represent a handful of the many brilliant reimaginings of Lysistrata that have emerged around the globe in the last century.2 This project is not an historical inventory of such adaptations, nor is it an attempt to reconstruct the details of Lysistrata’s production and reception in ancient Greece. Those broad endeavors would have quickly led me out of my depths as an Americanist and a scholar of modern theatre and performance. Instead, I chose to limit the scope of this project to a handful of popular twentieth and twenty-first century Lysistratas that earned national recognition and revealed some unique purchase on American cultural life, aespecially American attitudes about feminism, citizenship, sex, and war. All of the performances and texts discussed here interest me as objects of critical and aesthetic interpretation unto themselves, as well as heuristic devices for interpreting the rich historical context of their own production. Every iteration frames questions of sex and war through a fresh interpretive lens.

Why feminism? (or Your body is a battleground) Although Aristophanes’ oeuvre has been the subject of much classical scholar- ship to which this book is indebted, his most popular comedy has received little attention from feminist theatre scholars or performance theorists.3 As I sought out studies of the play, this relative silence both belied and confirmed the text’s anxiety-producing potency. Even though the comedy continues to be staged in mainstream American theatres, scholars other than classical philologists have produced proportionately little work on the subject. One of the original work- ing titles for this book, Your Body is a Battleground, alluded to this quiet tension; the play fills theatres because of its comic focus on battles and bodies, but in a play about feminism, sex, and war, the idea of bodies under siege verges into more treacherous political territory than some audiences might like to admit. The bodies of Lysistrata and the other female characters in the play are battlegrounds as well. Lysistrata’s tenuous feminist status marks her as a 6 Introduction contemporary object of political tug-of-war. On one hand, today’s audiences like to envision her as a proto-feminist because she models women’s agency and a refusal to submit to a patriarchal status quo. She is an heroic protector of human life and a champion of female empowerment and patriotic revolt. She exposes government corruption and embodies a more responsible and active kind of democratic engagement than the male officials can muster. She even acknowledges female sexual desire and, through her negotiations, treats physical pleasure as a normal and healthy form of individual expression for women and men alike. And yet, Lysistrata also undermines women’s authority because she sees women’s sexuality as their only asset, sexual refusal their only weapon. She essentializes women as nurturers and men as warmongers. Moreover, she brokers a peace that is achieved through a troubling misogyny; audiences are expected to laugh as the Athenian and Spartan delegates fight over Greek territories by mapping their partitions onto the parts of a woman’sbody.4 That character, known in most adaptationsas Reconciliation, is the very essence of empire embo- died. “Pylos, the secret entrance,” claims the Spartan delegate. “We’ve always wanted it and now I’m going to grope it.”“No way, they can’t have that,” the Athenian protests. “Where can we attack them from? Give us [ … ] the Legs of Megara.” Lysistrata reprimands the men, “Don’t argue about a pair of legs” (Aristophanes, trans. Ewan 98). As the negotiators topically refigure Reconci- liation’s thighs, breasts, buttocks, and vagina, her body is divided against itself, the property of rival factions. Your Body is a Battleground also references Barbara Kruger’s similarly sub- titled 1989 pop art collage, which was created for that year’s Women’s March on Washington in support of reproductive rights. Kruger’s black and white portrait of a woman’s face, vertically bisected by its own negative image, nicely illustrates the struggles of so many female characters in Lysistrata; what each historical appropriation of the play confirms is that women’s bodies have indeed, been battlegrounds for quite some time. The question that remains, though, is how feminism gets cast as both the battered war hero and the blighted victim in such a disparate range of adaptations. One possible answer that I explore in these chapters depends on the idea of feminist impersonation. I consider how our understanding of the adaptations might change if we think of them as unintentionally staging a kind of “feminist minstrelsy” or mock-feminism that undermines a legitimate feminist politics. With its bold, vocal women, defying the codes of patriarchal convention by demanding entry within the public sphere the play performs a recognizable kind of liberal feminism and is often staged as a feminist tribute. Yet, one might argue that the show actually helps to reify traditional conservative ideologies by foregrounding women who go against the status quo, giving them their day in the sun, and then reabsorbing them into the old social order. In other words, Lysistrata presents feminism as a temporary rupture, a set of topsy-turvy power inversions that operate like a pressure valve, letting off enough steam for dominant power structures to remain stable in the long term. This perspective shares common ground with the one Sue-Ellen Case articulates in her Introduction 7 groundbreaking Feminism and Theatre. “[T]he feminist reader can [ … ]beginto comprehend the alliance of theatre with patriarchal prejudice,” she posits. “The feminist theatre-practitioner might, for instance, understand Lysistrata not as a good play for women, but as a male drag show, with burlesque jokes about breasts and phalluses playing well in the drag tradition” (19). Perhaps the show should be understood as an instrument of faux-feminism—one that an audience can briefly identify with, then safely recede from after the curtains close. Such a line of inquiry begs a few key questions: what might performances of feminism look like in a given historical period? How do the performances change over time? What feminist ideals does each adaptation make visible or obscure? And how do performances of feminist minstrelsy operate or become inoperable in each text? Feminist and performance theories are essential artillery for responding to these questions. As two of the disciplines most interested in dismantling, or at least critiquing, Western structures of patriarchal power, theories of feminism and performance may not seem suited to metaphors of ammunition and deployment, but for a pacifist play riddled with physical conflict and protruding weaponry, Lysistrata’s militaristic tropes offer an ironic proving ground for these twinned fields. Both are outgrowths of the countercultural movements of the 1960s and 1970s “enmeshed in considerations of the body and the embodied” (Case, Feminism and Performance 146). While classical philologists and historians of ancient Greek theatre have made considerable gains in expanding our knowledge about the role of Hellenist women in the theatre and the polis, my theoretical approach is rooted in understanding Lysistrata’s relevance to our contemporary cultural context. As my first guiding framework, performance studies, a wonderfully malleable hybrid field in its own right, draws on the work of scholars of race, feminist studies, and queer theory, discourse analysts, cultural critics, anthropologists, trauma theorists, and theatre historians and practitioners. These subfields support my multidirectional study of Lysistrata, and help me situate my feminist analysis of each new adaptation within its socio-historic context. Performance studies’ diverse and flexible rubric gives me the freedom to consider each appropriation at the detailed level of language, production style, theatrical influences, and performance techniques while also attending to forces of cul- tural formation like economic and political conditions. Its inherent intersections with cultural materialism also allow me to treat adaptations as “social pro- ductions” that reflect and respond to their unique historical situations. In effect, these documents are “culture in action”–Foucaultian epistemes encapsulated (Bressler 189–94). Of course, part of the fun of working with Lysistrata is exploring its many interpretive ambiguities, but examining the ways that dif- ferent American adaptors have chosen to innovate within the structure of Aristophanes’ play also reveals compelling patterns and trends. Intersecting theories of performance and performativity are particularly instrumental as they provide tools for analyzing performances of gender (as well as race, citizenship, and nationalism) in each text. Through these theoretical lenses the ways that characters perform, for example, masculinity or patriotism or motherhood can 8 Introduction be “read” as responses to modern American social structures: heteronormative militarism, institutionalized sexism, and modes of democratic engagement all enjoy their time in the limelight and must be reconciled in each new adaptation. Studying the elements of performativity that converge around this one fascinating ancient text is possible because of the way that performance studies makes meaning of the concept of “liveness.” Richard Schechner, one of the foun- ders of performance studies writes, “A performance studies scholar examines texts, architecture, visual arts, or any other item or artifact of art or culture not in themselves, but as players in ongoing relationships [ … ] the artifact may be relatively stable, but the performances it creates or takes part in can change radically” (2). Schechner sees a cultural object’s behavior as part of the new process of reception that is created every time it is used or viewed. In that vein, each chapter that follows focuses predominantly on an instance of Lysistrata in performance, whether that performance is staged or filmed, but informing each chapter’s attention to an acted production is a discussion of other key artifacts and players, like written texts. In other words, elements of development, publicity, and reception are as central to this study as the productions themselves. As objects of inquiry, all texts and embodied acts—films, theatrical productions, literature, promotional materials, and protest—are up for grabs, and the serious play of the theatre is put on analytical par with the conscious and unconscious role-playing that constitutes both the written word and daily, lived experience. Feminist theory, a longtime academic bedfellow of performance studies, is my other weapon of choice for confronting the cultural questions that these productions pose. Like performance theory, feminist studies also wrestled its way into the academy in the late 1970s and 1980s as a product of shifts in activist and artistic practice and epistemology. Just as happenings, performance art, and theatrical protest forms began to redefine theatre’s scope for practitioners and academics, the second-wave feminist movement’s investment in conscious- ness raising and women’s lived experience also made its way into academic institutions. For new scholarly programs in feminist and gender studies as well as performance studies, new, non-scriptocentric kinds of knowledge that cen- tered on the experiential and the embodied gained traction as valid epistemological forms. As Case claims, “Embodied knowledge is positioned differently, though centrally in the institutional practices of both feminism and the theatre […] The absorption of the social, and the focus on the body, shared by feminist studies and theatre studies, has brought them into a more proximate relation to one another” (Feminism and Performance 145–6). For both fields the body is a crucial site of individual engagement with the social world—the body is a text on and through which cultural meaning is inscribed. The goal of feminist theory, then, is to make sense of the ways that bodies, those biologically material but culturally defined and disciplined sites, have been marshaled into systems of valuation, inclusion and exclusion, that privilege male discourse and marginalize the position of women. As Charlotte Bunch argues, feminist theory starts with the belief that “power is based on gender differences and that men’s illegitimate power over women taints all aspects of Introduction 9 society,” but it doesn’t just constitute a list of issues that need changing, “it is also a way of viewing the world” (13). To better view the nuances of Lysistrata, I turn to materialist and postmodern feminists, like performance theorist Jill Dolan, who discusses gender as “a construct oppressive to both women and men […] and formed to support the structure of the dominant culture” (10). This branch of feminism argues that women’s experiences are not universal, but diverse, and largely formulated as a product of social and historical conditions. Because gender roles are constructed in this model as highly fluid, arbitrary and contextual, materialist feminists tend to be especially interested in the ways that gender shapes women and men’s own understanding of their experiences. This lens allows me to see the Lysistratas of each historical period as products of an ephemeral and contingent moment of gender construction. While a liberal feminist might expect a liberated Lysistrata to show that she can compete with or outdo men in their own political games, a postmodern approach resists the urge to see women achieve success within a patriarchal system. Likewise, a cultural feminist might hope to see Lysistrata champion motherhood, pacifism, and patience as feminine values to which women are especially attuned—not a very persuasive way to help men imagine their own role within a peace movement. Rather, from a postmodern feminist perspective, each adaptation can be critiqued for the way it offers audiences a Lysistrata who conforms to and resists the specifically gendered norms of her own place and time. Ultimately, I use these theories of feminism and performance to analyze modern Lysistratas in terms of both production and reception. While cultural producers and the material conditions of their labor take up the lion’s share of this analysis, the responses of scholars, reviewers, and audiences also figure prominently in this analysis. I’m interested in the goals of the Lysistrata adaptors, the artists, activists, agencies, and studios that choose to work with Aris- tophanes’ text, and the responses of the public, whether that means police officials, government bureaucrats, and censors, or reviewers, readers, and playgoers. This double-barreled approach helps to patch together a fuller picture of each adaptation’s mainstream cultural context.

Passing over hot embers: Lysistrata’s reception history Lysistrata has had particular purchase for American audiences over the last hundred years because of the much-needed resources it provides for comic explorations of gender and war. Yet, prior to the twentieth century, the play spent hundreds of years regarded as what theatre scholar J. Michael Walton calls “some sort of pariah piece that classicists preferred to disown” (11). The earliest published English translations of Aristophanes’ work simply ignored Lysistrata and omitted it from his opus. When the play was finally published by Charles Wheelwright in 1837, it was heavily edited and prefaced with the following disclaimer: “The Lysistrata bears so evil a character that we must make but fugitive mention of it, like persons passing over hot embers” (Walton 15). But for those who enjoyed the occasional dalliance with hot embers, a full-length text 10 Introduction was eventually translated by Samuel Smith and printed in 1896 as “a limited edition of sophisticated pornography” complete with graphic illustrations (Walton 15). In terms of US production history, the first widely known mainstream staging of Lysistrata was the Moscow Art Theatre’s Musical Studio production in New York in 1925. The Time magazine review of the show bluntly asserts:

Lysistrata is of course Aristophanes’ ancient comedy of feminism. The Russians have chosen to exhibit an extremely rowdy and briskly amusing version. If the police commissioner could understand it there would cer- tainly be difficulties. But he cannot nor can much of the population, and what does anybody care about the morals of anyone so obviously peculiar as to speak Russian? “The Theatre”

Although the show wasn’t in English, it was well received enough to inspire a playwright who had a competing show opening on Broadway during that same week of 1925 to stage his own version of Lysistrata in English a few years later. Gilbert Seldes’ production of the comedy in 1930, discussed in the following chapter, was “an outstanding hit” (Blum 248). Long before Seldes’ introduction of Lysistrata to Broadway audiences, the roots of the play’s contemporary revisionings can be traced back to a number of historical precursors. Classical Greek theatre, fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Commedia dell’Arte, American vaudeville, Russian agitprop, and Brecht’s Epic Theatre are among the many influences often cited as antecedents to the con- temporary American adaptations in this study. Many of the artists under investigation express a certain affinity with this theatrical lineage, from Lysis- trata Project playwright Ellen McLaughlin’s sense of connection to ancient Greek playwrights to Federal Theatre Project administrators’ embrace of theatre as a classical civic tradition. While anti-war activist Kathryn Blume sees Aris- tophanes as her predecessor in offering mainstream audiences utopian visions of how a critical citizenry might challenge state policy, Federal Theatre director, Hallie Flanagan, placed Works Progress-sponsored productions within a long tradition of politically provocative theatre:

[A]ny powerful play on a controversial subject, [makes] enemies as well as friends. There is nothing new about this situation. Aristophanes was accused of treason because The Babylonians, paid for out of government money, criticized Athens’ foreign policy; as late as 1937, the Greek gov- ernment censored Antigone because in it Sophocles argued for the freedom of the individual conscience against the State; Coriolanus caused riots in the streets of Paris in 1934. 220

As Flanagan points out, what writers like Aristophanes, Sophocles, and Shake- speare have in common with many of the artists in this book is their interest in Introduction 11 staging the struggle between the will of individuals and the doctrines of the state. Some of the more activist Lysistrata productions, like Spiderwoman’s 1977 show, treat the stage as a site for challenging audiences to examine their relationship to the political status quo. But the call for democratic engagement as a response to problematic national policies or attitudes is not shared by all the theatre forms that influenced contemporary American Lysistratas. Rather, two trajectories of classical influence—the aesthetic and the socio-political—appear equally important in placing modern Lysistrata adaptations in a theatrical lineage. The Athenian theatre’s central place in the polis, both in terms of its physical location and its place in the civic imaginary, is a model whose ripple effects can be seen in aspects of the Federal Theatre Project and the work of the Spider- woman Theater Group. The same can be said for many of the formal elements of classical theatre; its use of the chorus, masks, and archetypal characters is also taken up by many American performance groups working in the ancient tradition. Though some facets of Attic performance tradition, like the capacious amphitheatre setting and the all-male crossdressing casts, might seem remote to contemporary audiences, today’s Western theatre can clearly trace its roots back to the civic and religious practices of ancient Greeks. Their rites of worship for Dionysus, the god of fertility, winemaking, and ecstasy gave shape to the traditional forms of theatre that came to be part of Greece’s regular festival schedule. While tragedy and its rituals of catharsis and purification initially dominated the multi-day theatre competitions at the festivals of Lenaia and the City Dionysia, comedy and satyr plays became popular intermediary shows that gave audiences a few hours of respite from the serious themes of tragic drama. The players on the comedic stage usually included a singing and dancing chorus, an ever-present flock of narrator/onlookers, ready with commentary about the dramatic action of the play and its relevance to Greek life. Whether voicing the opinions of the playwright or the audience, the chorus (or choruses in the case of Lysistrata) had the privileged job of speaking what was usually left unsaid about religion, gods, Athenian institutions, and political leaders. Historians tend to agree that the theatre of Aristophanes’ day was a place of civic gathering and exchange, which meant it was no place for respectable Greek women.5 Slave girls and courtesans may have gained entry to the theatron to sell their wares, and may even have been cast in non-speaking roles, but all the theatrical parts of consequence, male and female alike, were assigned to male actors. Those actors, paid for by the polis like all the elements of production, often wore exaggerated, oversized masks. Prosopon masks were useful not only for amplifying the voices of actors in the large, outdoor arenas, but they also tele- graphed the key features of each character in terms of age, sex, and any arche- typal roles they represented. In Aristophanes’ comedies, as in many dramas of the fifth century BCE, actors also wore costuming props like progastreda and prosterneda, fake breasts and bellies, to signal female roles and protruding phallic attachments to signal male fertility in all its robustness. In Lysistrata, 12 Introduction these props serve as the visual basis of many of Aristophanes’ relentless puns and double entendres. Since the most delicate issue for each new American adaptation and staging is often the problem of how to manage the play’s explicit attention to genitalia, a close reading of one the text’s bawdiest moments can offer some insights.

Myrhinne and Kinesias: a little tease In this scene we witness an exchange between a visibly frustrated husband, Kinesias, who has come to the Acropolis to beg his wife, Myrrhine, to give up the sex strike and return to their marital bed. The double entendres of the characters’ names would have given Greek audiences their first clue about the scene’s plot. Myrrhine, meaning a wreath made from myrtle tree, was both a classical symbol of female generosity and a slang term for vagina. Similarly, Kinesias, derived from the Greek kinein, meaning “to put in motion,” or to “get up” roughly translates as “fucker” today.6 In the scene adapted by feminist scholar Germaine Greer in 1972, the immediacy of the Vietnam War looms large over the couple’s encounter. While war’s devastating effects are present in this exchange, comedy still overrides any discussion of trauma even though both dramatic elements are symbolically situated at the same genital site:

MYRRHINE: So you’ve had all the other women in the world have you?

KINESIAS:No… would I be running round like a ram in rut if I had? (He deliberately bangs her with his phallus)

MYRRHINE: Kinesias! How can you? (She puts one finger on his phallus and elaborately walks around it)You’re so insensitive to a woman’s needs. You rush in here with Mr. Wibbly on and expect me to fling myself down and serve you!

KINESIAS: Don’t you want it? Don’t you want it just a little bit?

MYRRHINE:I’ve been worrying about you since the day you left. I have terrible dreams of you lying disemboweled on the battlefield or running wild with the other soldiers, killing children and raping women like a maniac. I’m frightened that you’ve turned into a monster.

KINESIAS:Officers don’t get to do much raping, or killing either, for that matter. I’m still soft as butter.

MYRRHINE: That’s not how you look to me. 69–70

Here, Myrrhine’s concerns about war’s violence and monstrous psychic effects are ignored by Kinesias. The brutal war crimes that Myrrhine fears most are the very elements of battle that her husband sees as military privilege. By virtue of being denied those soldierly opportunities, Kinesias is still emotionally “soft,” not yet hardened by the atrocities of war. But Myrrhine’s ironic play on words as she Introduction 13 remarks at the oversized phallus-prop worn by the play’s male soldiers signals that not only does Kinesias appear to be physically hard, but he also appears to be emotionally hardened, having lost his sense of humanity as a result of his role in the war. These interpretive snippets offer some initial insights into bawdy’s mechanics in Lysistrata. While oversized phalli and raunchy humor were familiar to Aristophanes’ festival audiences, their foreignness to contemporary American audiences have been a key source of the play’s controversial popularity. With its raunchy comic focus on the genitals as independent and agentive forces, the play locates violence, humor, and healing, both personal and political, as all con- verging at one common embodied site. For many of the characters in Lysistrata, this site connotes pleasure, possibility, birth, and fruition in powerful ways that only sometimes exceed the war traumas they also represent. For contemporary interpretive purposes, one could argue that the obvious psychoanalytic impli- cations inherent in the images of the genitals also apply here—the vagina as a confessing mouth and a vagina dentata, taking revenge on men, and the penis as a powerful weapon and a projecting liability. But genitalia in this play also function as embodied sites of great tension and places where both trauma and healing can originate. In fact, turning what is usually unmentionable into the butt of jokes and the focus of serious conversation functions as a metaphor for one of the play’s loftier goals: exposing private pain in the public sphere as a means of healing divisive partisanship and inciting social change. But despite those noble ends, productions of the last hundred years suggest that this play still pricks the conscience, so to speak, when it comes to matters of feminism. As directors and audiences attempt to reconcile Aristophanes’ bawdy treatment of bodies with his competing representations of women’s agency in this play, each era’s anxieties about gender roles and feminism come more into focus.

Let me hear your bawdy talk: discourse, feminism, and embodied acts Alternately useful in its noun, adjective, and homophone forms, bawdy seems to be an etymological soul mate for Lysistrata. Meaning “dirty or filthy” in Old English, bawdy is likely derived from the Frankish term bald, meaning “bold” and the Old French baud meaning “gay and licentious” (Wedgwood 126). Though Chaucer used “bawd” to indicate nastiness and filth, it later became the term for a procurer of partners for “debauchery and prostitution” (Craig 165). Quite literally then, Aristophanes’ love of bawd translates nicely to the thematically ‘pimped out’ adaptations that contemporary playwrights like David Studdard and Douglas Carter Beane have penned, with their fore- grounding of brothels, madams, and sex work as central to the play’s social order. Aristophanes’ bawdy also matters in that it puts a kind of sexual agency and self-possession into the mouths of female actors. While lewd humor was a common feature of classical satyr plays performed in Aristophanes’ time by all-male casts, the scripted bawdy of some contemporary adaptations gives lines to women performers as dirty as those in any Margaret Cho or Wanda Sykes 14 Introduction stand-up routine. In my experience, these bawdy jokes are often heralded in today’s theatres by an even combination of gasps and cheers, a mirror of the “raunch culture” debate that puts feminists at odds over the politics of promiscuity and pleasure. By keeping bodies at center stage, Aristophanes’ bawdy ironically forces us to take more seriously the things that make twenty-first century discussions of war and gender so fraught. Despite the serious and sometimes graphic traumas of battle that are depicted in Lysistrata, one of the play’s most salient features is the way it uses language to render bodies violent or vulnerable, predatory or ridiculous. Talk helps to both illustrate and manage the impact of wartime violence on military and civilian bodies. Yet, as talk imposes its definitional containment on bodies, it also helps to augment and explode them, making them grotesque, hilarious, layered with meaning, and larger than life. All the adaptations in this book reconcile Aristophanes’ bawdy body talk in different manners, but like Olivia Newton-John’s famous plea, Lysistrata’s plot depends on language’s potential to get physical. This very argument provides an appropriate opportunity for some meta- discursive discussion of word play and bawdy talk. For starters, a caveat: bad puns are necessarily part of any serious study of Aristophanes; expect to find them here. My defense of my own occasional use of facile word play and blue humor is twofold. First, I don’t think people can enjoy Aristophanic comedy (or books about it) unless they have some appreciation for silliness. Goofy jokes are often what first pique students’ interest in Lysistrata, and I hope that read- ers of this text will similarly see double entendre, satire, and cheekiness as a way into the populist world of classical civic theatre. Second, humor helps with heavy lifting. In other words, jokes have lent Lysistrata some of its staying power and its mass appeal, but more importantly, they bring levity to ideolo- gical standoffs. Performance theorists from Augusto Boal to Harry J. Elam Jr. have noted the political force of humor and its impact on actors and spectators alike.7 As a physical experience, laughter jostles us. It opens the mind by lit- erally loosening the body. It releases tension in muscles; it expels held breath from our lungs. Occasionally, in the darkened theatre, it is the thing that causes us to inadvertently bump shoulders or knock knees in shared bemusement with the strangers next to us. Moreover, theatre scholar Yolanda Broyles-González argues that laughter has an “oppositional relationship to imposed values and to the seriousness of officialdom” and through its unifying force it “constitutes a rehearsal of collective freedom” (28). Humor in the form of word play offers a linguistic break—a chance to toy with the very syntax that regulates our lives through policy, oath, and custom. As performance theorist Rebecca Schneider demonstrates in her study of feminist performance art, puns “both play with and question dominant habits of interpretation” (2). To play on words is to resist and counter what’s expected linguistically; puns in Aristophanes’ work marshal rhetorical weaponry for recreational use. Effectively, Lysistrata establishes its tone of rhetorical recreation by setting up a false dichotomy between the discursive and the corporeal. In this play Introduction 15 bodies talk and power listens. Through the withholding of sex, bodies achieve a goal words cannot. Yet, while Lysistrata treats the bodies of her fellow female compatriots as the weapons of last resort, wielded only after the failure of words, the rhetorical and the corporeal actually seem to be mutually con- stitutive of one another in this text. The women’s bodies cannot be interpolated as tools until talk defines them as such. For example, Dudley Fitts’ popular 1959 translation has the women repeat in chorus, “I will have nothing to do with my husband or lover […] though he come to me in pitiable condition […] And if he constrains me […] I will be cold as ice and never move” (170). The women may agree to celibacy—they may speak their pledge—but their bodies are liable to forsake that promise, either through their own insuppressible desire or through rape. One might argue that the characters begin their efforts where J.L. Austin leaves off in his theorizing about the power of performative utterances; they are always thinking about “how to do things with words,” and then using those words to extend the agentive reach of their bodies. Still, words in this play, whether written or spoken, don’t compel characters to action and determine their fate in the ways that bodies do. Judith Butler conceives of bodies as both powerfully deterministic and yet mutable in that they are transformed by their context. They are the physical sites on which identity is performed, and the “bounded systems” through which humans interface with and are made assailable to the outside world (Butler 168). In fact, bodies and language, themselves, are often at war in Lysistrata, vying for per- suasive authority as the female characters strive to identify their most effective political assets: lusty talk or bare breasts, extended metaphors that compare weaving to war or the allure of an unraveling garment? Through a feminist analysis of different adaptations of Lysistrata, this study explores the many ways that language in the play renders women’s bodies as battlegrounds. As I see it, descriptive language about bodies serves three key purposes in this play. First, it makes real the gruesome corporeal atrocities of war; the rapes, murders, torture, and brutality usually written off under euphemisms like “col- lateral damage.” Lysistrata traffics in talk about bodies in pain. Both sexual suffering and traumatic injury receive ample linguistic attention. On the other hand, descriptive language in this play also aids in the psychological management of trauma. Performance theorists Julie Salverson and Diana Taylor have both outlined the ways that humor can help to make bearable an audience’s labor of traumatic witnessing.8 Bawdy language not only makes the play’s potentially propagandistic pacifism easier to bear, but it also takes the emotional edge off the play’s fleeting moments of real pain and grief. Finally, bawdy body talk makes it impossible to avoid a discussion of the Western cultural associations that have for so long figured womanhood and bodies as linked in their essential opposition to manhood and the mind. As classicist Froma Zeitlin argues, unlike man, “Woman can never forget her body[ … ] Bodiliness is what most defines her in the cultural system that associates her with the physical processes of birth and death and stresses the material dimensions of her existence” (Winkler and Zeitlin 74). 16 Introduction So how do these discursive claims support a feminist critique? I would argue that through language, Aristophanes twists our arms across time, hectoring us into a consideration of how post-second-wave feminisms (whether we know them as third-wave, postmodern, sex-positive or otherwise) understand the relationship between war, gender, and corporeality. Although we know the playwright had little concern for these questions in 411 BCE, the demands of our own cultural moment steer us away from intentional fallacy and toward a more gender-conscious investigation. Classical theatre historian Kenneth McLeish has argued that bawdy supports Aristophanes’ agenda of moral thematizing in which sex, women, bodies, and the natural are conflated and coded positively against the negative qualities of civil war: impotence, non-reproductivity, and artifice (93). But this essentialist reading of the play treats female power as both explicit and explicitly tied to embodiment and nature in Lysistrata. Though unproblematic for cultural feminists, the play’s focus on the universality of women’s experience and the valuing of so-called “feminine” abilities like con- flict resolution and consensus building flies in the face of constructivist and postmodern feminist approaches. Perhaps that pleasingly pun-friendly term, bawdy, is the key to a postmodern consideration of Lysistrata’s feminist effi- cacy; only through the raucousness of its characters and the anthropomorphic liveliness of their genitals does the play invite audiences to laugh about topics like gender roles and feminist activism that historically have tended to make Americans nervous. Humor is a potent form of critique. Obstreperous gender play and the rejection of stable sex roles is what gives the comedy its enduringly perplexing feminist potency. As McLeish points out, bawdy’s treatment in each production can give clues about moral thematizing, but it is not a perfect litmus test for the mores of the moment; through the distancing effect of theatre, bawdy episodes that might offend in real life can come off as funny onstage (95). Also, because of his classical clout, Aristophanes can get away with the kind of blue humor for which most playwrights of the last hundred years would have been panned. More than 30 English language adaptations of the play have been published in the last century and each of them represent different ways of making Aristophanes’ voice relevant to new audiences. Further, it is my belief that Aristophanes would take no small delight in the punny possibilities for double meaning within an analysis of his bawdy attention to bodies in this play. Bawdy both supports and puts pressure on the peace and love thematics of a story in which a women’s sex boycott impels an end to war. Historically, bawdy has been both the quality that draws new audiences to this text and what classicists consider the most frequent source of critical misreadings of the play. It is also the not-so- secret ingredient that turns what could be a heavy-handed cautionary tale into a comic romp, gender-bending camp, or feminist vamping depending on the pro- duction. Above all, what interests me is the murky historicity of bawdy’sreception and its relationship to feminist interpretations of this play. As Schneider insists, “word play [often] doubles as serious body play, wrapped up with the ways words have played, with significant effect, upon bodies” (2). Production Introduction 17 histories reveal the way bawdy bodies and word play have attracted an array of different readers and theatergoers to Lysistrata.9 Moreover, bawdy is the fea- ture that I can count on each semester to make theatre fans out of a few of my most recalcitrant students and it is the element that seems to have helped make Lysistrata the go-to anti-war play of our time. It is not hard to see why Lysistrata is so frequently employed as a text that can help to manifest latent features of the American zeitgeist. Regardless of differences in their ideological approach, bawdy body talk in most con- temporary adaptations makes the play feel accessible, even current, despite the fact that today’s bawdy comedy, played out on the bodies of female actresses, functions very differently than it would have for Aristophanes’ audiences as they responded to the institutionalized gender inversions of all-male casts. Thus, a historically situated study of the play’s reception must consider how essentialist figurations of women’s embodiment make meaning differently when staged on men’s bodies. Also crucial to the study of corporeality in this play is the fact that in Lysistrata women’s bodies function either in resistance or deference to the play’s primary symbol of the penis. While the plot of women withholding sex from men does lead to staged discussions of issues like female sexual desire and rape, these concerns are not as prominent in Lysistrata as the ever-present will of the phallus. Not only was the exaggerated phallus a standard costuming device of classical Greek theatre, but it also paid tribute to Dionysus, the Greek god of both theatre and fertility. Men’s bodies as the vehicles of their desire, aggression, militarism, and survival emerge as the play’s true cynosures as the frustrated soldiers are “reduced to helpless appendages of their own phalli” (Sommerstein 66). In other words, instead of the female body, the oversized erect phallus is the play’s central symbol, which effectively draws attention to the absence of a central symbol of female power. If anything, absence itself, or the absence created by sexual refusal, stands in as the play’s haunting specter of female agency. Even though the play is named for Lysistrata, the female activist who ends the war with her sex strike, her power does not gain representation through some potent female symbol. Instead, the locked down treasury in the Acropolis might be interpreted as the play’s silent backdrop and quiet metaphor for a kind of commodified femininity armed against the laughable yet ineluctable rule of men. Thus, war-related trauma is also represented at the site of the ridiculous and “larger than life” phalli, as Germaine Greer describes them, donned by male characters as they return from war in search of sexual healing (8). I would argue that by employing the sexual and visibly oversexed body as its central symbolic image, Lysistrata is a play that laughs at its own reductive treatment of bodies.

Lysistrata’s American life As mentioned earlier, the adaptations examined here represent just a handful of well-known modern approaches to Lysistrata. In my process of selection, 18 Introduction I sought out performances and texts that were either geared towards main- stream audiences or, through history, had become popular and canonical in spite of their limited reception. I wanted Lysistrata case studies that seemed to be uniquely marked by the context of their production—a Broadway debut during the Depression; the federal sponsorship of an all-black cast. For this reason, “firsts,”“onlies” and “biggests” stood out, while many significant col- lege, community, and professional productions fell by the wayside. By no means should these chapters be taken as an exhaustive inventory of recent produc- tions. Nor do they represent the full breadth of the 30-plus published English translations of Lysistrata in prose and verse, contemporary slang and metered rhyme. This project merely attempts to offer historically contextualized close readings of a few notable reimaginings. I believe they have the potential to change the way we understand Aristophanes’ work as well as our own society’s attitudes about war and gender. The book’s first chapter takes up questions of bawdy as they relate to percep- tions of high and lowbrow entertainment in 1930. Cultural critic and playwright Gilbert Seldes made a career out of wrestling with the relationship between art, media, and popular entertainment in the US and his adaptation of Lysistrata became the first English language version of the show ever to appear on Broadway. His playful treatments of female agency and sexuality won him the honor of having his script published alongside illustrations by Picasso, but they also riled censors and led to cast arrests. Chapter 2 takes up similar concerns about public decency, but its focus on the all-black cast of the Federal Theatre’s Lysistrata also examines representations of imperialism, otherness, and racial discrimination in Theodore Browne’s 1936 script. The responses of government bureaucrats to Lysistrata’s bawdy hyper-sexualization of black bodies suggests that the actors onstage were read as always already oversexed and socially threatening in Depression-era American culture. Newspaper accounts of the show’s cancellation help me piece together details of the aborted production. Chapter 3 explores constructions of Cold War masculinity as represented in the 1955 film, The Second Greatest Sex. Released by Universal International as its box office response to MGM’s Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, the musical takeoff on Lysistrata was directed by George Marshall and boasts an original score by Henry Mancini. By combining elements of the Hollywood Western with big budget musical numbers the film lauds the virtues of feminine domes- ticity in wartime and evokes nostalgia for an idyllic American frontier past that never was. Spiderwoman Theater, the focus of Chapter 4, also explores the role of the wild west in the American imaginary. Their Lysistrata Numbah! from 1977 uses parody to critique stereotypes of Native American culture, as well as sexism and violence against women. Through “Storyweaving,” their develop- ment and workshoping method, the feminist collective intertwines elements of Aristophanes’ text with the discourse of second-wave identity politics. Moving more solidly into the domain of the political is the Lysistrata Project of 2003. This one-day international theatre event boasted more than a thousand amateur and professional productions of Lysistrata, all staged in an effort to Introduction 19 protest the Bush administration’s plans to invade Iraq. As I argue in Chapter 5, much of the discourse surrounding the event intermingles elements of personal, political, and war-related trauma. Both the Project’s co-founder Kathryn Blume, and incisive playwright Ellen McLaughlin use the language of pain, memory, and witnessing to frame their war-related writing and activism. Finally, Chapter 6 offers a concluding look at two very recent adaptations of Lysistrata. Both Meg Wolitzer’s 2011 novel The Uncoupling and Douglas Carter Beane’s Broadway musical Lysistrata Jones appear to downplay and even evacuate some of the key political flashpoints that have roused interest in Lysistrata in recent years including its anti-war and feminist themes. Both works problematize contemporary notions of activism through their focus on millennial protagonists who do much of their research and political organizing online. The adaptations suggest that for the millennial generation intimacy and critical thinking have become highly mediated by technology. Their views on sex and war reflect that cultural turn. As the chapter reflects on Beane and Wolitzer’s new places in Lysistrata’s long artistic lineage it also imagines the potential of the comedy’s futurity. All the adaptations in this study reiterate the malleability and timeless appeal of Aristophanes’ famous farce, but they also alert us to the jarring differences between the classical world and our own. The inherent intertextuality of adap- ted texts means that today’s concerns can be written into yesterday’s classics, and they are sometimes written by many different hands. Classicist Gonda A.H. Van Steen insists that “beyond the poet’s impressive record of hits, reprints, and ticket sales, he has been revived in the broadest sense. Every major interpretation of Aristophanes was an act of rewriting—rewrighting—and revision of the classical text in light of contemporary sociocultural anxieties” (4). But the “rewrights” also suggest that the play’s staying power may be as much a product of its flexibility as its dynamic aptitude for causing controversy, or in the case of The Second Greatest Sex, raising its own eyebrows at insinuated controversy in the most wholesome contexts. Perhaps Lysistrata has lasted in the public imaginary because it is so good at seeming venerable while it stirs up trouble. Erudite culture vultures must honor the classical Greek drama’s place in the Western literary canon, but they also cannot deny its carnivalesque play with motifs of anti-structure and hegemonic reversals. Of course, to some extent, all adaptations are defiantly anti-structural and resistant of authority. In their audacious newness they proclaim the ‘death of the author’ and rebel against the supremacy of the original. Fortunately, in spite of that death, ghosts, gaps, and present absences always linger around. Literary theorist J. Hillis Miller claims that aesthetic works can be “inhabited […] by a long chain of parasitical presences, echoes, allusions, guests, ghosts of previous texts” (qtd in Sanders 5). Adaptations like the ones in this study come equipped with their own baggage. As they enter into new relationships with modern audiences, the haunted texts, as Marvin Carlson calls them, bring their pasts along with them.10 Uniquely, in the case of Lysistrata, the most recent adaptations also carry the resonances of the plot’s many successful and thwarted real-world applications. 20 Introduction The list of efficacious sex protests in the last decade alone includes a Liberian women’s boycott in 2002, Pereira, Colombia’s no-sex campaign targeting the city’s drug traffickers in 2006, a 2009 strike in Kenya to protest the growing divide in the country’s coalition government, and a Filipino sewing coopera- tive’s sex strike for peace in 2011 (Smith, Sayare). Of course, as American lawmakers’“War on Women” has increasingly cut off women’s access to med- ical care, cancer screenings, birth control, and abortions women in this country have also proposed Lysistrata’s sexual lockdown as a solution. The wife of Virginia republican state delegate Dave Albo notoriously refused him marital relations because of his support of a bill that would have made ultrasounds, often with a vaginal probe, mandatory for women seeking abortions in 2012 (Dowd). Months later, Democratic member of Michigan’s House of Repre- sentatives, Rashida Tlaib, called for a sex strike to stop highly restrictive anti- abortion legislation from being passed in that state. “We’re launching a war on women,” she said of her colleagues’ bills. “Stop having sex with us, gentlemen, and I ask women to boycott men until they stop moving this through the House” (Gray, Murdoch). While no sex refusal movements have taken off in the US, the number of states considering sweeping anti-abortion bills has continued to rise in 2013. Issues of sex and gender in the American military also made headlines in 2013 when, amidst an untimely smattering of sexual assault and harassment arrests among high-level military officials, the US Defense Department released a study revealing that an estimated 26,000 men and women on active duty were subject to forms of sexual assault in 2012, an increase of about 40 percent over two years. Many of the incidents involved rape, aggravated sexual assault, or non- consensual sodomy. With just 3,374 of the incidents shown to have been reported, and only 302 of those incidents actually prosecuted, the Senate and Congress began debating new bills calling for changes to the military’s policies on the reporting and prosecution of sexual assault cases (Steinhauer, Editorial Board). Working on adaptations of Lysistrata for the last few years as I fervently observed the unfolding media coverage of sexual assault in the military and the War on Women has often prompted me to revisit the lexical and idiomatic puzzles that link women, activism, war, and theatre. Military life, war, and war resistance have been represented amply in American drama.11 The theatre’s well-defined spatial setting grants artists and audiences a unique mode of investigation into the affective and embodied experience of being at war. What does war feel like? How does war look? Through military service and through artistic and media representations of war, we know well the gestures, postures, and formations that war and its resistance entail. Our bodies can readily perform the stance and salute of the soldier or the raised fist of the militant protester; sometimes the lines of embodiment even blur as being at war and fighting war come to resemble one another. After all, Lysistrata, whose name means “the disbander of armies” is also an army recruiter. She needs troops to win her war on war. Introduction 21 The analogy of a “theatre of war” used by military strategists offers a further indication of the spectacular and performative elements of embodiment and display that are thought to comprise battle. In military parlance, the term “theatre of war” denotes a unique staging ground for battle in a bound geo- graphic space. The strategic parameters of such an engagement require specially dedicated planning for an isolated area of combat that may be emblematic of the war as a whole. Carl von Clausewitz, the noted German military theorist often credited with coining the term, describes a theatre of war as “not a mere piece of the whole, but a small whole complete in itself” (2). Thus, the term elucidates some of the crucial connections between dramatic performance and war—they both serve as representations, reflecting on a small scale a message with relevance to a broader context. Moreover, they both require extensive planning and rehearsal leading up to the moment of display. Intentionally staged and marked for the purposes of showmanship and witnessing, both theatre productions and theatres of war are made even more high stakes by their own fleetingness. Their liveness may be brief, but their meaning often accrues over time. Reconciling this ephemerality sometimes requires stand-ins. In Nashville, the Centennial Park Parthenon gives visitors an architectural kind of access to the past. As an imitation Athena Parthenos presides over the new-old civic center- piece, that flawlessly transfigured goddess of wisdom and war reminds visitors how unlike her original she is, even in her likeness. Adaptations, substitutes, surrogates, and copies echo aspects of our cultural past, but they also transform it as they remake it anew.12 New approaches to Lysistrata enact this transposition as well. The comedy’s adaptations let us map contemporary associations onto Aristophanes’ original. They remind us that the play’s meaning is not fixed; it is irreducible to one interpretation. In uniquely prismatic ways, the texts in this study each do the work of Athena, calling on audiences to contemplate the laws of the polis, the power of women, and the justness of war in their own historical moments. Through new versions of Lysistrata, we can recuperate pieces of history, too, all the while noticing how unlike our history we’ve become.

Notes 1 See Edith Hall’s discussion of suffrage and Laurence Houseman’s 1911 Lysistrata, which featured Gertrude Kingston in the title role (85–88). 2 For engaging treatments of international Lysistratas see Marina Kotzamani 13–41; George O. Outa 199–208; and Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr. 50–52. 3 Mary Kay Gamel observes that “the reception of Athenian comedy has to date received little attention” compared to the numerous examinations of the production histories of popular Greek tragedies (226). While I agree with Gamel’s assertion about the comparative lack of critical attention to Athenian comedy, and Lysistrata in particular, there does seem to be a growing interest in Aristophanes’ comedies among classical philologists, whereas theatre historians, feminist scholars, and per- formance theorists have not taken up the play in equal measure. As this book makes plain, I also disagree with Gamel’s claim that “[f]ew playwrights working in Eng- lish … have adapted Aristophanes’ plays or tried to write Aristophanic scripts” (209). 22 Introduction 4 I am grateful to Natka Bianchini for her astute consideration of this scene, which she directed in 2012 and discussed in her Association for Theatre in Higher Education con- ference presentation, “A Partial Reconciliation? Dissecting Women’s Bodies Onstage in Lysistrata.” 5 Interestingly, classicist Alan Sommerstein cites a line from Lysistrata as the primary source of evidence for the popular belief that women may have occasionally attended theatrical performances in ancient Greece. In lines 1050–1 of the comedy, “the chorus, pretending to offer the audience gifts of money, ask ‘every man and woman’ to let them know if they want some.” Sommerstein concludes that while few females of citizen status seem to have gone to the theatre, they probably weren’t legally barred from attending (5). 6 For interpretations of the Greek derivations of characters’ names see J.A. Ball and Michael M. Chemers 17 and Kenneth McLeish 99. 7 See Augusto Boal 170 and Harry J. Elam Jr. 469. 8 See Diana Taylor 149–69 and Julie Salverson 119–25. 9 Charalampos Orfanos notes that while nineteenth-century European translators of Aristophanes took great pains to conceal the obscenities in Lysistrata, there is a “reversal of this tendency in modern productions, since nowadays the obscenity of the play is often the very reason why it is staged” (116). Similarly, Jeffrey Henderson writes of Aristophanic obscenity in 1975 that “it is usually assumed that the plays would be better without it” (x). Thanks, in part, to his research, things have certainly changed. 10 See Marvin A. Carlson for a fuller discussion of adaptation and memory in theatrical contexts. 11 These themes have received ample treatment in the American theatre’s long history. Among the most recent additions to the list are plays and documentary theatre pieces by Eve Ensler, Coco Fusco, Ellen McLaughlin, Emily Ackerman, and K.J. Sanchez. Also see Jenny Spencer’s anthology Political and Protest Theatre after 9/11: Patriotic Dissent. Interestingly, female playwrights and performers are at the forefront of this most recent wave of theatrical explorations of American militarism and war. 12 See Joseph Roach for an explanation of surrogacy in the context of cultural memory. Bibliography

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Wallace-Sanders, Kimberly, ed. Skin Deep, Spirit Strong: The Black Female Body in American Culture. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002. Print. Witham, Barry. The Federal Theatre Project: A Case Study. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Print. Yaeger, Patricia. Dirt and Desire, Reconstructing Southern Women’sWriting,1930–1990. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Print.

Chapter 3 Barr, Charles. “CinemaScope: Before and After.” Film Quarterly, 16.4 (1963): 4–24. Print. Bordwell, David. “Widescreen Aesthetics and Mise en Scene Criticism.” The Velvet Light Trap 21 (1985): 118–25. Print. Case, Sue-Ellen. “Classic Drag: The Greek Creation of Female Parts.” Theatre Journal 37.3 (1985): 317–27. Print. Casper, Drew. Postwar Hollywood, 1946–1962. Malden MA: Blackwell, 2007. Print. Cohan, Steven, ed. Hollywood Musicals: The Film Reader. London: Routledge, 2002. Print. Corkin, Stanley. Cowboys as Cold Warriors: The Western and US History. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004. Print. Crowther, Bosley. “The Lone Ranger (1956) Screen: ‘Lone Ranger’ Rides Again; Western Hero Returns in CinemaScope.” New York Times. 11 February 1956. Print. Eldridge, David. Hollywood’s History Films. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Print. Hadleigh, Boze. The Lavender Screen: The Gay and Lesbian Fils, Their Stars, Makers, Characters, and Critics. New York: Citadel Press Books, 1993. Print. Hischak, Thomas S. Disney Voice Actors: A Biographical Dictionary.Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2011. Print. Hannesberry, Karen Burroughs. Femme Noir: Bad Girls of Film.Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland and Company, 1998. Print. May, Elaine Tyler. Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era. New York: Basic Books, 1988. Print. McNutt, Randy. The Cincinnati Sound by Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2007. Print. Mordden, Ethan. Broadway Babies: The People Who Made the American Musical. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. Print. Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen 16.3 (1975): 6–18. Print. The Second Greatest Sex. Dir. George Marshall. Perf. Jeanne Craine, George Nader, and Bert Lahr. Universal Studios, 1955. DVD. Seldes, Gilbert. Lysistrata by Aristophanes: A New Version. (1934). New York: Heritage Press, 1962. Print. Solomon, Jon. The Ancient World in the Cinema. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. Print.

Chapter 4 Abbott, Larry. “Spiderwoman Theater and the Tapestry of Story.” The Canadian Journal of Native Studies XVI.1 (1996): 165–80. Print. 152 Bibliography

Adcock, Joe. “The Wackiness shines through in this up-to-date ‘Lysistrata.’” What’s Happening. 24 February 1983. Print. Allen, Paula Gunn. Grandmothers of the Light: A Medicine Woman’s Sourcebook. Boston: Beacon Press, 1991. Print. Aristophanes. Lysistrata. Trans. Dudley Fitts. (1959) The Bedford Introduction to Drama, Sixth Edition. Ed. Lee A. Jacobus. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2009. 167–87. Print. ——. Lysistrata. Trans. Charles T. Murphy. (1942) Stages of Drama: Classical to Contemporary Theater. Eds. Carl H. Klaus, Miriam Gilbert, and Bradford S. Field Jr. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003. Print. ——. Lysistrata. Trans. Nicholas Ruddall (1991) The Norton Anthology of Drama. Eds. J. Ellen Gainor, Stanton B. Garner Jr., and Martin Puchner. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2010. 140–67. Print. Baracks, Barbara. “Living On Truth Serum: Gay and Lesbian Performance Artists Look at Themselves.” Village Voice.20–26 May 1981. Print. Boal, Augusto. Theatre of the Oppressed. Trans. Charles A. and Maria-Odilia Leal McBride, New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1985. Print. Bringhurst, Robert. The Elements of Typographic Style, Version 3.0. Vancouver, BC: Hartley and Marks, 2004. Print. Cahill, Nicholas. Household and City Organization at Olynthus. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. Print. Canning, Charlotte. Feminist Theaters in the U.S.A.: Staging Women’s Experience. New York: Routledge, 1996. Print. Crimmins, Sandy. “Spiderwoman Theater: A Stage Manager’s Notes.” American Writing: A Magazine. 13 (1996): 42–50. Print. Dolan, Jill. Presence and Desire: Essays on Gender, Sexuality, Performance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993. Print. Elam Jr., Harry J. “Ritual Theory and Political Theatre: Quinta Temporada and Slave Ship.” Theatre Journal (1986): 463–72. Print. Fliotsos, Anne L. and Wendy Vierow. American Women Stage Directors of the Twentieth Century. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2008. Print. Gomez, Anna Nieto. “Chicana Feminism.” Feminist Theory: A Reader, Second Edition. Eds. Wendy K. Kolmar and Frances Bartkowski. Boston: McGraw Hill, 2005. Print. Greer, Germaine, and Phil Willmott. Lysistrata: The Sex Strike: After Aristophanes. Twickenham, UK: Aurora Metro Press, 2000. Print. Haraway, Donna J. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991. Print. Haugo, Ann. “Colonial Audiences and Native Women’s Theatre: Viewing Spiderwoman Theatre’s Winnetou’s Snake Oil Show from Wigwam City.” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism (1999): 131–41. Print. “History of Spiderwoman Theater.” Native American Women Playwrights Archive, Walter Havighurst Special Collections, Miami University Libraries. Spiderwoman Theater. Box 1, folder 3. Print. Kotschenreuther, Hellmut. “Lysistratissima!” Translator unknown. Der Tagesspiegel.31 October 1982. Native American Women Playwrights Archive, Walter Havighurst Special Collections, Miami University Libraries. Spiderwoman Theater. Box 1, folder 29. Print. Lazarus, Pat. “The Lysistrata Numbah” Back Stage, 15 April 1977. Print. Mayo, Lisa, Judy Burns, and Jerri Hurlbutt. “Secrets: A Conversation with Lisa Mayo of Spiderwoman Theater.” Women and Performance. 5.2 (1992): 166–83. Print. Bibliography 153

Miguel, Muriel. Personal interview. 24 June 2013. Nason, Richard. “Spiderwoman Does ‘Numbah’ on Aristophanes and Us.” The Villager. 21. 13 April 1978. Print. “Promotional correspondance.” Native American Women Playwrights Archive, Walter Havighurst Special Collections, Miami University Libraries. Spiderwoman Theater. Box 3, folder 2. Print. Sainer, Arthur. “Arachne’s Truths.” The Village Voice. 17 April 1978. Print. Schechner, Richard. Performance Studies: An Introduction, Third Edition. New York: Routledge, 2013. Print. Schneider, Rebecca. The Explicit Body in Performance. New York: Routledge, 1997. Print. Shewey, Don. “Scathing feminism.” The Boston Phoenix. Section Three, 10 January 1978. Print. Silko, Leslie Marmon. Ceremony. (1986) New York: Penguin Books, 2006. Print. “Spiderwoman Theater” Boston Arts Group materials. Native American Women Play- wrights Archive, Walter Havighurst Special Collections, Miami University Libraries, Spiderwoman Theater Box 1, folder 3. Print. Spiderwoman Theater from New York. Dir. Ulla Ledin. Perf. Lisa Mayo, Gloria Miguel and Muriel Miguel. Video AB, 1979. DVD. “Storyweaving Workshop” Spiderwoman Theater. n.d.Web. 10 June 2013. Yamada, Mitsuye. “Asian Pacific American Women and Feminism.” Feminist Theory: A Reader, Second Edition. Eds. Wendy K. Kolmar and Frances Bartkowski. Boston: McGraw Hill, 2005. Print.

Chapter 5 The Accidental Activist. Dir. Kevin Morrison. Perf. Kathryn Blume. Tamzina Films and Mighty Ruckus, 2005. DVD. “Ajax in Iraq by Ellen McLaughlin” Playscripts Inc. n.d. Web. 18 May 2013. Bachner, Sally. “The Wrong Victims: Terrorism, Trauma and Psychic Violence.” Inter- ventions: Activists and Academics Respond to Violence. Eds. Elizabeth A. Castelli and Janet R. Jakobsen. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. 23–28. Print. Berlant, Lauren. The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008. Print. Blume, Kathryn. “The Short(ish) Story of Lysistrata Project.” Kathryn Blume. n.d. Web. 8 October 2005. ——and Sharron Bower. “About the Play.” The Lysistrata Project. n.d. Web. 8 October 2005. ——and Sharron Bower. “What is Lysistrata Project?” The Lysistrata Project. n.d. Web. 8 October 2005. ——. “About the Accidental Activist.” Kathryn Blume. n.d. Web. 12 December 2008. Caruth, Cathy. Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. Print. Cohen, Patricia. “Rethinking Gender Bias in Theater.” New York Times, C-1. 24 June 2009. Print. Elam Jr., Harry J. “Ritual Theory and Political Theatre: Quinta Temporada and Slave Ship.” Theatre Journal (1986): 463–72. Print. Felman, Shoshana and Dori Laub. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature Psychoanalysis and History. New York: Routledge, 1992. Print. 154 Bibliography

Freud, Sigmund. “Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through (Further Recommen- dations on the Technique of Psycho-Analysis II).” Standard Edition of The Complete Works. Trans. J. Strachey. New York: Vintage, 2000. Print. Friedman, Matthew J. “PTSD History and Overview.” United States Department of Veterans Affairs. 1 January 2007. Web. 7 August 2013. Greenstein, Leah. “An Accidental Activist.” Political Affairs. 3 February 2004. Web. 14 March 2009. Henstra, Sarah. “The Politics of Talk: The Oprah Interview as Narrative.” Studies in Popular Culture. 30.2 (2008): 59–77. Print. Illouz, Eva. Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism. Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2007. Print. Kaplan, E. Ann. Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Litera- ture. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005. Print. Klein, Emily. “Anti-War Activism and The Structures of Trauma in the Plays of Eve Ensler and Kathryn Blume.” Political and Protest Theater After 9/11: Patriotic Dissent. Ed. Jenny Spencer. New York: Routledge, 2012. 111–126. Print. Kushner, Tony. “Foreword.” The Greek Plays. By Ellen McLaughlin. New York: Thea- tre Communications Group, 2005. vii–xi. Print. McGee, Micki. Self-Help, Inc.: Makeover Culture in American Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Print. McLaughlin, Ellen. The Greek Plays. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2005. Print. Miller, Nancy K. and Jason Tougaw, eds. Extremities: Trauma, Testimony, and Com- munity. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2002. Print. Mitovich, Matt. “Grey’s Anatomy’s Kevin McKidd: Love and War Haunt Hunt.” TV Guide News. 20 November 2008. Web. 12 March 2009. Phelan, Peggy. Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories. New York: Routledge, 1997. Print. Roach, Joseph. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Print. Ross, Gina. Beyond the Trauma Vortex: The Media’s Role in Healing Fear, Terror, and Violence. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2003. Print. Salamon, Julie. “Mobilizing a Theater of Protest. Again: Artists Try to Recapture Their Role as Catalysts for Debate and Dissent.” New York Times. E-1. 6 February 2003. Print. Salverson, Julie. “Change on Whose Terms: Testimony and an Erotics of Injury.” Theater 31.3 (2001): 119–25. Print. Sands, Emily Glassberg. “Opening the Curtain on Playwright Gender: An Integrated Economic Analysis of Discrimination in American Theater.” Submitted to Princeton University Department of Economics. April 15, 2009. Print. Scott, Joan W. “The Evidence of Experience,” Critical Inquiry. 17.4 (1991): 773–97. Print. Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. Print. Travis, Trysh. The Language of the Heart: A Cultural History of the Recovery Move- ment from Alcoholics Anonymous to Oprah Winfrey. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010. Print. Winn, Steven. “Time to make theater, not war: Bay readings echo classic message –‘Just say no,’” San Francisco Chronicle. A-12. 4 March 2003. Print. Bibliography 155 Chapter 6 Beane, Douglas Carter. Lysistrata Jones. New York: Tams-Witmark, 2012. Print. Brantley, Ben. “Yes, Even Sexting is Off Limits.” New York Times, 14 December 2011. Web. 12 May 2013. Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge, 2000. Print. Dowd, Maureen. “Ghastly Outdated Party.” New York Times. 25 February 2012. Web. 16 March 2013. Flinn, Lewis. Personal interview. 29 July 2013. Goldstein, Joshua S. War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Print. Gray, Kathleen. “Detroit lawmaker calls for sex boycott as Michigan House approves anti-abortion bill.” Detroit Free Press. 13 June 2012. Web. 29 July 2012. Hall, Edith. “The Many Faces of Lysistrata.” Looking at Lysistrata. Ed. David Studdard. London: Bristol Classical Press, 2010. 29–36. Print. Healy, Patrick. “‘Lysistrata Jones’ to Close” New York Times. 3 January 2012. Web. 12 May 2013. Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. New York: Routledge, 2006. Print. Jameson, Fredric. “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture.” Social Text. 1. (1979): 130– 48. Print. Lysistrata Jones. Dir. Dan Knechtges. Perf. Patti Murin. Walter Kerr Theatre. New York. Matinee performance. 7 January 2012. Lysistrata Jones: Original Broadway Cast Recording. Comp. Lewis Flinn. Broadway Records, 2012. CD. Newman, Kathy M. “Holiday Steals: Finding the Revolutionary Spirit at the Mall?” Working-Class Perspectives. 23 December 2013. Web. 28 February 2014. Norris, Vivian. “Texas Women: Stop Having Sex With Men Who Vote Against Your Best Interests.” The Huffington Post. 1 July 2013 Web. 3 July 2003. Parks, Sheri. Fierce Angels: The Strong Black Woman in American Life and Culture. New York: Ballantine, 2010. Powers, Melinda. “Reinforcing or Challenging Stereotypes in Lysistrata Jones?” Association for Theatre in Higher Education Annual Conference. Washington, D.C. 4 August 2012. Conference presentation. Saltz, Rachel. “When the Puppets Called a Sex Strike.” New York Times. 8 February 2011. Web. 27 May 2013. Sayare, Scott. “3 Women’s Rights Leaders Accept Nobel Peace Prize.” New York Times. 10 December 2011. Web. 16 March 2013. Schneider, Rebecca. The Explicit Body in Performance. New York: Routledge, 1997. Print. ——. Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment. New York: Routledge, 2011. Print. Simmons, Brad. Personal interview. 20 July 2013. Smith, Karen. “Sex strike brings peace to Filipino village,” CNN. 19 September 2011. Web. 16 March 2013. Wolitzer, Meg. The Uncoupling. New York: Riverhead, 2011. Print. ——. “The Second Shelf: On the Rules of Literary Fiction for Men and Women.” New York Times. 30 March 2012. Print.