Comedy of War

After three weeks of rehearsals for Lysistrata, director Andrei Serban discussed his production with A.R.T.’s resident dramaturg Gideon Lester.

G.L.: We know little about the life of Aristophanes, and nothing about the reception of Lysistrata when it was first produced in Athens in 411 B.C. The play has been in constant production for twenty-five centuries, and is one of the world’s oldest surviving comedies. How do you account for its appeal?

A.S.: It’s one of the most powerful anti-war plays in the history of the theatre. It must have had a very strong impact when Aristophanes first wrote it, which is why it survived in the first place. The play works on two levels simultaneously – the most indecent and the most moral. On the surface are all the famous phallic jokes, the doubles entendres and sexual innuendoes, and underneath it is the revolutionary idea that a small group of women can change the course of a war.

G.L.: Does the play function in a similar way today?

A.S.: The situation has changed so much. First, the ancient cosmic vulgarities that were once so powerfully shocking no longer carry the same impact. If we attempt to imitate the spirit of Aristophanes in today’s theatre, many of those jokes seem merely offensive. They’ve lost their focus. In the first week of rehearsal we attempted to reconstruct that coarse, Aristophanic style – or at least what we imagined it to be. The actors delivered the text with as much crudeness and vulgarity as they could, and it made our stomachs cringe. Rather than heightening our interest in the play’s proposition, it just made us tense. The comic force that once seemed so radical is now clichéd and insulting.

G.L.: The value of the play must have been entirely different in ancient Athens, where women didn’t attend the theatre and men played all the roles, male or female. It’s hard to imagine how gender was presented, or parodied, under those conditions.

A.S.: We don’t know whether the women in the play were taken seriously or not. After all, even the theatre was a man’s world, and we can’t guess how the audience might have reacted to Lysistrata’s proposition that a sex strike can end a war. Today her actions seem heroic, as she whips up the indolent women around her into a spirited passion. When I see Cherry Jones rehearse, she makes me think of Joan of Arc or Mother Courage, with a touch of Mae West’s wink. But Lysistrata may not always have been seen as a powerful force for good. The question we’ve had to face in the first weeks of rehearsal is, how do we approach Lysistrata at the start of the twenty-first century? The idea that any community can just decide to end a war is beautifully touching, though in the current political context it seems more symbolic than real. It’s hard to imagine that the women of Bosnia could go to the men and say, “Let’s change all this.” Today women are in the army and go to war themselves, and are blown up alongside men. This is why we decided that we couldn’t simply update the play and perform it in contemporary costumes, because the central idea doesn’t translate to modern times.

G.L.: You describe Lysistrata as a revolutionary play, but the critic Robert Corrigan suggested that Aristophanes was actually a conservative figure, and that the play was politically reactionary.

A.S.: Of course it’s possible to read the it that way, though I’m not interested in criticizing Aristophanes’ politics. But there’s an equal trap in presenting Lysistrata as a feminist dream, tempting though it may be in our inequitable society. Lysistrata’s rallying cry, “The salvation of the whole of Greece depends on us women!” sounds wonderful, but is it applicable nowadays? Feminism has become so complex and the play can seem naïve in contrast, a rarified ideal of social interpretation. We’d rather take a humanistic approach and show these women, hungry for a utopia, who represent something akin to the old wisdom, the value of life. They defend life, they stand for fertility, marital love, the values of family. At least, that’s what Aristophanes seems to imply. The feminine world in the play is the stabilizing force that restores the balance and returns the community to its senses. Sexual love in this play motivates political negotiations, which is a wonderful thought in this time of conflict.

G.L.: Aristophanes wrote the play in the midst of a terrible war, when Athens had been fighting Sparta for more than twenty years. The bloodshed that he describes must have seemed very real to his audience. Do you feel an obligation to make reference to the current international climate in this production?

A.S.: We have to acknowledge the reality of the period we live in, and I imagine we’ll feel the army at the edges of the play, but I don’t want to focus on a specific contemporary situation. We decided not to set the play in the present, but to create a timeless fantasy. The whole world is tense, so we’re making an entertainment on the subject of war, a cabaret performed in a war zone. It’s as if we were entertaining soldiers or citizens with music-hall sketches and burlesque, hoping to create relaxation and laughter without losing the serious questions Lysistrata asks that underpin the play. We have to discover how to present the material gracefully and delicately, without being either hopelessly crude or reducing the play to a drawing-room comedy.

G.L.: In rehearsal you’ve encouraged the actors to switch between a variety of styles: vaudeville, melodrama, commedia dell’arte, Brechtian presentational theatre. Why these shifts in technique?

A.S.: Aristophanes didn’t write the play in a single style. It’s composed of lyric poetry, political speeches, satire, dramatic encounters, songs. It’s wonderfully impure, and the production should feel spontaneous and surprising at every moment. It sounds like a contradiction, but my style is to keep changing styles, to juxtapose realities, to ask questions about what is and isn’t real.

G.L.: Do you always discover the style of performance in rehearsal?

A.S.: Yes. I don’t begin the process with a generalized idea of the play’s meaning and then try to fit the actors’ performances to that idea. I start working on each scene, then look backwards at the discoveries the actors have made over the course of the rehearsal. I discover the play, child-like, with them, and only really understand what it’s all about when we reach opening night.

G.L.: Our impression of ancient Greek theatre is of tightly-plotted tragedies that progress swiftly and directly inexorably towards a climax. Lysistrata, on the other hand, seems anarchic, with a structure that seems more musical than dramatic.

A.S.: That’s true. At times it almost seems constructed like an operetta.

G.L.: You’ve spent much of the past fifteen years directing opera. Has this influenced your approach to the production?

AS: I’m more sensitive to the rhythm and musicality of a scene than before I directed opera, and I listen more acutely to music. It’s been a great adventure learning how Galt MacDermot and Matty Selman’s songs function in this production. Opera has also changed my approach to acting. Modern, naturalistic techniques that work so well in cinema tend to flatten a performance; actors today often tend to talk in a soft, monotonous voice, and understand only the small-scale psychology of a moment. On the contrary an opera like La Bohème may be telling a realistic story, but the people in it express themselves by singing. Their feelings are simple but they have to sing the lines and the experience is incredibly rich. Theatre used to be like that – it certainly was in Aristophanes’ day. Great performances require a state of high inner charge, and the voice takes on another dimension, as if speaking actors are singing and their bodies dancing. We should sing and dance our parts; that I learned from opera.

GL: Your favorite playwrights, Shakespeare, Brecht, Gozzi, Chekhov, the Greeks, all wrote for non-realistic, heightened, operatic styles of theatre.

AS: What interests me in their work is the contradiction, the paradox, the quality of surprise.

G.L.: After the first week of rehearsal for Lysistrata you added a small stage to the center of the set. Why?

A.S.: It emphasizes the atmosphere of a cabaret, as if we’re watching a play within a play, being performed in a canteen, or a coffee house, a waiting room, a meeting place. The neutral space is meant to open the spectators’ imagination.