Laura Henry interviews Ajax director Sarah Benson and translator Charles Connaghan.
Laura Henry interviews Ajax director Sarah Benson and translator Charles Connaghan
LH: Ajax chronicles a tormented soldier coping with the trauma of war. How do you approach his story?
CC: In Ajax, you’ve got a moral landscape that’s shifting, and people are left behind when the rules change. The character Ajax becomes unnecessary as we draw near to the end of war: if your moral framework becomes obsolete, how do you deal with that? How do you reclaim your humanity?
SB: That’s something everyone can understand. The big question concerns democratic responsibility, how we’re all responsible for creating a continuum between civilians and service people and veterans. That’s been a huge path into the play for me.
CC: In a war, society needs soldiers to perform extreme actions. And then, after the war, society marginalizes them. They often become very isolated.
SB: That’s where the questions arise, about a society that asks soldiers to go out and do these things for us. Then when they return, we won’t re-integrate them. Instead, we say we don’t want these people anywhere near us. So to me, that’s why it’s incredibly important to do the play right now.
LH: What will this Ajax look and sound like?
SB: The design and text are contemporary. But we’ve also been working hard to keep the image systems of the Greek, and a lot of the directness of the Greek in the translation. And that has fed my collaboration with the designers too.
CC: When you classicize the language, you actually put a gap between the audience and the text. Sometimes the cultural context of the original Greek can take a modern audience away from the essence of a scene. Then you have to ask, “Well, how can we translate this for today?” A lot of the solutions have been a combination of working directly with the Greek alongside Sarah’s idea of what she wants to do in the production. It’s a production-specific translation, so as I saw David Zinn’s evolving design, that also helped me further hone the language of the text.
SB: At first Charles created a literal translation from the Greek. Even reading that, I was struck by the raw power of these words, and that has been something that we have kept coming back to as the translation has evolved. We have also talked a lot about the images in the text, as they convey so much of the essence of the piece. If you drop the images that course through the play, it loses its potency. So the language sounds contemporary, but it keeps in place the core of the original Greek.
LH: Why does this play appeal to you?
SB: Ajax makes us consider, in a visceral way, other people. It posits a case for radical inclusion, for embracing people and ideas that we find different and frightening. Ajax’s framework – everything that he’s been surrounded with – has been stripped away. The play asks how we can be who we are, and understand other people whose context is different from ours. Those are always good questions to be asking. And in a more temporal way, we’re coming out of a war right now. We have to deal with questions about how we take care of veterans. How do we integrate them back into our society? Ajax deals with all these issues head on-in a way that was true when Sophocles wrote, as a soldier himself, and is still true today.
CC: You must also ask these questions outside the framework of war. The play makes me ask, why does a postal worker kill his coworker? It confronts us with the trauma of alienation, redundancy, shifting moral standards…economic collapse. It addresses the modern condition.
SB: This is a time when our social landscape is changing radically: economically, culturally, and beyond. Ajax asks important and exciting questions about what to do when that happens.
LH: Who should see this play?
SB: This is a play that is accessible to everyone. I am especially eager for a mixture of civilians, veterans, and active servicepeople to see the play. It’s always important to me that a wide range of people see the shows I do, but it’s especially the case with Ajax.
Laura Henry is a second-year dramaturgy student at the A.R.T./MXAT Institute for Advanced Theater Training at Harvard University.
