☕️producing classical plays in the modern era
My opinion, in short, comes down to a) people should do more of it, but b) they should not be idiots about it.
A lot of modern productions of classical plays are mediocre; a lot of theater in general is mediocre, of course, but I think in productions of ancient drama the mediocrity often comes when the directors/creators work from some kind of received assumption about what classical theater is or should be, rather than actually engaging with the text in front of them.
This is of course how good directing works across the board, but I think it especially needs to be emphasized for ancient drama. Engage with your text!!!
Mediocre or bad productions of classical plays, in my experience, often fall into one of these three categories:
- attempts to just stage them as contemporary dramas and hope it works (most often done with the Euripides Medea)
- laborious historical reconstructions, and their more irritating cousin, lazily fake historical reproductions (if everyone’s in tunics and masks but you’re standing still and chanting the choruses, that isn’t particularly ‘authentic,’ for whatever ridiculous meaning of that word you’re going with)
- self-consciously edgy modernizing takes (see Charles Mee in general, and also every early 2000′s staging in which the Trojan War was blatantly and boringly analogized to the Iraq War).
You can do a good and interesting production that falls into any one of these three categories, but if you’re just staging something that way because it’s how you think a classical play should be staged, you’re probably not going to come up with something very good.
I think all contemporary directors of classical plays should really seriously think about how they’re going to incorporate music and dance into their production, and if they choose to omit either element, that needs to be a considered and deliberate choice that you justify to yourself.
Directors also need to think about the different registers of speech in the text, and not just as simply as ‘characters versus chorus’ (lots of modern directors just don’t seem to know what a monody is?). If the director doesn’t have Greek/Latin knowledge themselves, it’s really worth their time to consult with someone who does in order to sort this out.
Other strong opinions: your production of a tragedy is likely going to live or die by its chorus, so deal with that; also, please give me some variety, I do not need to see the same five plays over and over again, and no, the Iphigenia at Aulis does not count as obscure.
Also: staging plays in Greek or Latin is good and people should do more of it. In general, I also think it’s important to American audiences to get more accustomed to going to see theater in languages that are not their own.
The best productions of ancient drama I have ever seen are the Andrei Serban/Liz Swados productions at La Mama E.T.C, which were first staged in the ‘70′s but have been revived every decade or so since.
