It’s All Greek

Helen Shaw: You just heard your Lysistrata adaptation for the first time. How did it go?

Robert Brustein: I was very pleased with the way the actors embraced their characters. I’d written the adaptation with the voices and temperaments of the company in mind and found that in almost all cases I had heard those voices correctly. I have the great fortune of working with a permanent company – a luxury Shakespeare and Molière enjoyed preeminently – so I began to write to Will LeBow’s great capacity for playing pomposity, to Karen McDonald’s gift for playing sardonic sidekicks, to Tommy Derrah’s flair for cranky fulminations, to Remo Airaldi’s marvelous ability to express indignation or to Cherry Jones’s fervent good nature. Anyone who has worked with a company knows how satisfying it is to play to a company’s strengths. In this case, however, the collaboration was total. I submitted one version and the actors proceeded to treat it as plastic material which they shaped to their own objectives.

What challenges did Aristophanes’ script pose?

With this play, one has to find the balance between the farcical medium and the serious message. You can’t ignore the obscenity, but you can’t let it entirely take over either. Aristophanes wrote this play during a 21-year old war among Greek city-states, which was driving him to despair. Lysistrata is a peace play, a desperate peace play – a fantasy about how to bring war-torn nations to the peace table. If it is just an obscene joke, we miss its overarching purpose. At the same time, if it’s sanitized of its bawdiness it loses its physical humor. The spine of the play – that by withholding their sexual favors women will make men so frustrated they will sue for peace – is based on what I think of as functional humor. The comedy derives from the fact that we have bodily functions, that we are born inter faeces et urinam – that we excrete, defecate and copulate.

So, how does the playwright use physical humor to make a political point?

Aristophanes understood that our social pretensions and patriotic affirmations are always being subverted by our physical natures. He looked on the male in heat as an irresistible source of comedy – and he illustrated this by having all his male actors wear phalluses (I specify these as colored balloons that burst in the final scene). Having an erection on display while you’re making an over-inflated speech is funny because it immediately exposes the pomposity of the speaker, revealing how, for all our pretensions, we share with the entire animal kingdom a physical nature. As Lucky says in Waiting for Godot, “in spite of the strides of alimentation and defecation, man wastes and pines.” That we have the capacity to produce not only poetic elegies but also waste material is the basis of comedy.

The comic male has the phallus, but this is a play about women. How does Aristophanes use women to make his point, when women weren’t allowed on the Greek stage?

Aristophanes was always interested in writing about women, generally women in an uproar about something. He wrote an entire play (The Thesmophoriazusae) in which the women chase Euripides across the stage because they think he is slandering them in his plays! Here, though, he sees Lysistrata as a heroic figure: she has a larger vision that the others lack. Lysistrata believes that women can understand death best because they come so close to it themselves in the act of giving birth. Aristophanes imagined women could be an untapped source for peace.

How did you deal with a 2,500 year-old political agenda?

That question gave me pause when we first decided to stage Lysistrata, because Aristophanes (dealing with that endless Peloponnesian War) was implying that war by its very nature was an unacceptable thing. After September 11, I don’t think many of us believe that any more. I’ve interpolated a passage (which may or may not make it to the opening) in which Lysistrata makes it clear she is resisting civil conflicts – those between blood kin – not necessarily wars against, say, nations that invaded your territory or targeted innocent civilians. What Lysistrata is protesting is Greeks fighting Greeks. I also don’t fully accept Aristophanes’ neat resolution which he offered as a rather desperate fantasy. With Andrei Serban, you never know how a play will end, but you can be sure it won’t be neat.

And what note do you want to strike today?

I hope people will think about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, among others. Like the Catholics and Protestants in Ireland, like the Indians and the Pakistanis, the Jews and the Palestinians are people of the same racial root, both of them Semites, who haven’t yet found a way to coexist. I don’t foresee Jewish women withholding their favors (that is to say, any more than usual) from Jewish soldiers in order to make them withdraw from the West Bank. But women will play a strong part, as they have always played a part, in any peace movement. Lysistrata continues to have great relevance today in saying that continued carnage solves nothing, that people have to find the formula with which to live together in peace. This is my last production at the A.R.T. and it just occurred to me talking to you that, like my very first production as an artistic director (Dynamite Tonite with the Yale Repertory Theatre in 1966), it is an anti-war play.

Helen Shaw is a second year dramaturgy student in the A.R.T./M.X.A.T. Institute for Advanced Theatre Training.