A message from Joshua Rubenstein, Northeast Regional Director for Amnesty International USA.
A Note from Amnesty International
Written nearly 2500 years ago, Prometheus Bound could be an allegory based on today’s headlines. Are we in ancient Greece? Or is Prometheus a defiant dissident in modern-day North Africa? Or China? Perhaps Iran or Belarus?
The play is a brooding commentary on the arbitrary rule of a nervous tyrant. Just like Zeus, dictators exert their will, anxious to quash any whisper of dissent. Dissidents behave as if they were living in a free society. The Soviet physicist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Andrei Sakharov once declared that “A man may hope for nothing, but nonetheless must speak because he cannot remain silent.” And in Burma, the opposition figure Aung San Suu Kyi, who is also a Nobel Laureate and was just released this November after spending 15 of the past 20 years in confinement, made clear that “It is not power that corrupts but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it.”
The example of Prometheus underscores this contemporary lesson. There is a dimension of willed martyrdom in Prometheus, who appears to have foreseen his inevitable punishment. Is that so different from what it can mean to be an activist today in a repressive society? The human rights movement does not attract ordinary, cautious citizens. Given its obvious risks, to defy a regime or a zealous god requires a willingness to suffer the consequences. What normal citizen would willingly face the risk of imprisonment or torture? But there are always such people; they emerge like grass through the cracks in concrete. We saw them in the American South in the struggle to end Jim Crow. In Eastern Europe in the late 1980s. In South Africa under apartheid. In Tunisia and Egypt today.
We congratulate the American Repertory Theater along with Serj Tankian and Steven Sater for this thrilling new production of Prometheus Bound. We are honored for the invitation to join them and encourage audiences to take the lesson of Prometheus to heart.
Joshua Rubenstein
Northeast Regional Director
Amnesty International USA
