In 2003, as the United States prepared to invade Iraq, groups of activists across the world staged readings and performances of a play written for an Athenian festival audience in […]
Every translation of Lysistrata makes a quiet confession somewhere in its footnotes: a joke here doesn’t fully work in English, a pun there had to be replaced with a different […]
Modern readers usually meet Lysistrata on the page, which means they miss almost everything that made it work in the first place. This was not a story meant to be […]
By the time Lysistrata premiered in 411 BCE, Athens and Sparta had already been at war, on and off, for two decades. Imagine a city where an entire generation had […]
Picture a room full of the most powerful men in a city, utterly stuck. Not because an enemy army is at the gates, not because the treasury has run dry, […]
Few characters in world literature have been read as violently in opposite directions as Medea. To some critics and directors, she is one of the earliest and most powerful indictments […]
Greek tragedy generally ran on a kind of moral accounting, however brutal: characters who overreached, who committed hubris against the gods or the natural order, eventually paid for it, often […]
Long before the knife appears, Medea is already a bloodbath — just a rhetorical one. Euripides gives his two leads a series of verbal duels that function like sword fights: […]
There is a moment in Medea where the title character stands alone on stage, knife-logic already decided, and argues with herself out loud about whether to go through with killing […]
Every city needs someone to define itself against. For fifth-century Athens, watching Euripides’ Medea unfold in 431 BCE, that someone walked onto the stage speaking Greek perfectly, dressed like any […]
