Rude Talk in Athens

by Mark Haskell Smith

  Presenting the idea for his play and asking for patronage left Ariphrades feeling slightly humiliated, like a beggar. It didn’t help that two of his usual patrons had decided they couldn’t afford to back his chorus this year. The Peace of Nicias had ended the war, and they were more interested in investing in land and trade outside Attica. At least until the next war broke out.

  Ariphrades arrived at the house of Leogoras. It was an opulent structure. One befitting a man of wealth, the descendant of a noble family whose son, Andocides, was now one of the most famous orators in Athens. There were statues in front of the house and a small pomegranate tree. Ariphrades stopped for a second and sighed. He and Leogoras had one thing in common: Aristophanes had ruthlessly mocked Leogoras in his play Wasps. Ariphrades hoped that the nobleman might have an appetite for revenge.

  The old man was sitting on a bench in the courtyard when a slave escorted Ariphrades in. Leogoras smiled. “Here he is! The man with a reputation for eating delicacies as notorious as mine!”

  Ariphrades couldn’t help but laugh. He felt instantly at ease in Leogoras’s presence. “Thank you for seeing me.”

  Leogoras nodded and smiled. “I should be thanking you. I am an admirer of your plays, and I look forward to watching you shove a radish up Aristophanes’s ass.”

  “That would give me great pleasure.”

  Leogoras rubbed his hands together and motioned for Ariphrades to sit next to him. “So tell me, how will we fuck him?”

  Ariphrades sat and a slave poured them both a cup of wine. He took a sip and began talking. “It’s the story of a poet, one who is so arrogant he snubs Calliope, Erato, and Thalia.”

  “Polyhymnia?”

  “All the Muses. He declares himself so brilliant that he has no need for them.”

  “Sounds like trouble.”

  “They curse him, turning him impotent.”

  Leogoras laughed. “I like it.”

  Ariphrades continued: “Here’s where it gets weird. The freshly impotent poet appeals to Priapus for help.” Ariphrades paused. “And here I imagine will be the first song and dance. The chorus dressed as donkeys and giant phalli.”

  Leogoras clapped his hands together in delight. “Yes!”

  “Priapus agrees to lift the curse and promises the poet he will never have to worry about an erection again.”

  “How?”

  “By turning him into a woman.”

  Leogoras slapped his knee. “Much worse than being impotent!”

  Ariphrades nodded again. “When he goes to his friends for help, they all try to fuck him. I’m working on the song for that now called ‘The Flute Girl Who Wouldn’t Blow.’”

  “Does he live the rest of his days as a woman?”

  “No. He has to lift the spell and turn back into a man.”

  “How?”

  “According to Priapus, he must lick every flute girl in Athens.”

  Leogoras raised his cup to Ariphrades. “And so his quest begins!”

  Ariphrades grinned. “I’m still working out the brothel scenes.”

  Leogoras patted Ariphrades on the thigh and took a sip of wine. He looked at Ariphrades with a serious expression. “They will hate it, you know.”

  “I know.”

  Leogoras smiled. “Then let’s make it the best play they’ve ever hated.”

  In my experience it’s never this easy. The writer might really deliver in the room, the producers and studio executives might be laughing and applauding, they might really “see the movie,” but once the writer leaves the room, the producers and executives put their heads together and try to come up with a reason to say no.

  Of course sometimes they say yes. I once pitched a novel adaptation to Danny DeVito and his production company. As I was telling the story, DeVito kept rubbing his hands together, laughing and chuckling. Making Danny DeVito laugh is really all the encouragement a person needs. Ever. To do anything. When I was finished DeVito said, “Thank you. This is great.”

  And we made a deal.

  But that’s really the exception. A more typical experience is when I pitched what’s called a “take”—the writer’s idea of how to revise an existing script—to Teddy Zee, an executive at Columbia Pictures, and Moshe Diamant, a well-established producer of mediocre action movies like Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning, Simon Sez, and Dragon Eyes. I’ll be honest with you, I’m not proud that I was spending my time concocting plots for Jean-Claude Van Damme vehicles, but a writer’s gotta eat. Besides, my idea about a scallop diver who becomes a reluctant hero was pretty quirky, like if a sous chef was also a highly trained assassin. And it was set in the French Riviera. So there’s that.

  As I presented my story, Teddy listened and nodded while Moshe chatted with someone on his mobile phone. Occasionally Moshe would speak loudly into the phone and Teddy would mouth, “Just keep going,” and make that rolling motion with his fingers. When my spiel was over, Moshe hung up the phone and looked at me. He was silent for a moment, then said, “What about plutonium?”

  “He’s a scallop diver,” I said. I was trying to hide my irritation, but in retrospect I think I probably said it like someone talking to a puppy that just shat on the floor.

  Moshe turned to Teddy, then back to me. He was baffled. “Scallops?”

  He did not see the action movie potential in harvesting delicious shellfish and I did not get that job. Which is probably just as well.

  None of my Hollywood anecdotes—and trust me, I’ve got loads more—are particularly unusual; putting on a dog and pony show has been the burden of writers since writers started writing. Aristophanes had to do it. So did Aeschylus and Euripides and all the other great writers of the classic stage. They would have to pitch their proposed show to a rich dude, who, if he liked it, would then hire the chorus, pay the actors, and generally fund the production. And if the show won a prize, they put his name in big letters on the tripod. That’s how it worked in Athens in the fifth century BCE and that’s how it works in Hollywood in the twenty-first century. I’d like to rant against the way capital influences the arts and to demand writers and artists seize the means of production and control their destiny, but except for a few people, I’m not sure it will ever happen. Not in a world where you need millions of dollars for marketing and what they call “P&A” (prints and advertising)—basically the money spent to get your production noticed. At least with books and plays the writer retains the copyright. That doesn’t happen in movies and television. Which seems wrong to me. Shouldn’t the content creator own the content? But that’s not how it works. Because the people with power—the corporate CEOs, the royal families and religious leaders, the presidents and prime ministers, and the military-industrial complex—know that power comes from controlling the story. That’s how our brains work. We define the world by creating narratives. Simple stories we learn from childhood to keep us alive: sharks are dangerous, fire can burn, oysters are edible but not always. As we get older we start to notice more and more gaps, the things we don’t understand, the unknown unknowns, and our narratives become more complex. Myths remind us of human fallibility and hubris, fairy tales teach us lessons about a world filled with dangers. And when we’re confronted with the ultimate mystery—what happens when we die—our narrative brains fill in the gaps with our imagination. This is how religions are born. God is a fiction designed to give us answers to the things we will never know. Some people find that comforting and that’s okay, but let’s be clear that it is a story. Someone made it up and wrote it down.

  Controlling the story is how people in power stay in power. The president of the United States tells us that there is an imminent threat to our interests, and the next thing you know missiles are launched, bombs are dropped, and thousands of men, women, and children die. The truth, the real story, isn’t revealed until years later when we learn it was all based on lies and disinformation to increase the value of corporations on Wall Street. And even then no one is held accountable. Which is why
an informed populace, who can think critically and see through false narratives, is a threat to the power structure. With corporate media as invested in making profits as they are in finding truth, and social media awash in bizarre and increasingly ludicrous disinformation campaigns, we find ourselves living in a world where it’s hard to tell what the narrative is, much less control it. Ariphrades’s story is a small example of this. His narrative was destroyed. His life story was reframed as one of debauchery and transgression. My hope in writing this book is to give him some of his story back.

  But our need for stories and our telling of stories aren’t necessarily a bad thing. They give us life lessons and teach us how to navigate the world. And much of it happens on a completely subconscious level when we’re children.

  Athos Danellis is one of the last Karagiozis puppeteers in Greece. It’s a kind of shadow theater that was once extremely popular in both Turkey and Greece. Light is rear-projected onto a screen, and the two-dimensional puppets perform in silhouette. The rear projection gives the show a dreamlike quality, making the puppets come alive in your imagination in vivid and slightly weird ways that are more David Lynch than Punch and Judy. Perhaps that’s the power of the shadow.

  Karagiozis is the main character in these stories, a down-on-his-luck trickster who is always scheming to get money and food for himself and his family. Even though he is poor, he is intelligent, mischievous, and a bit of a con man. The trickster is an archetypal character, and you can find one in most folklore, whether it’s Loki in Norse mythology, the coyote in Native American stories, or the kitsune in Japan. He is in many ways emblematic of the Greek people surviving the financial crisis—they are living by their wits.

  Danellis is the founder of the Athens Shadow Theater Company and the Greek Shadow Theater Archives. He also teaches in the theater department at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. His specialty is to perform obscure plays from the Karagiozis repertoire.

  If you’ve made it this far into the book, you know that I am a narrative nerd, a sucker for anything to do with stories, books, and libraries—so when I saw that Danellis was performing an obscure play called The Birth of Kollitiri at the National Library of Greece, I couldn’t resist.

  The library is part of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center (SNFCC) in the Kallithea neighborhood of Athens, a once slightly industrial area not far from the busy port of Piraeus. The complex includes the Greek National Opera, a very long man-made lake, and one of the most beautiful parks I have ever seen. The center was designed by Italian architect Renzo Piano, the same architect responsible for the Whitney Museum in New York City, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, and the Academy of Motion Pictures Museum in Los Angeles. He’s won the Pritzker Prize—a very big deal for architects—and a bunch of other fancy awards. In short, he’s a total pro. And the SNFCC might be his masterpiece.

  The center sits on a hill overlooking the ocean. From the top—what’s called the Lighthouse but looks like a spaceship—you get a 360-degree vista from the bay to the Acropolis and the surrounding city. The gardens have been designed with walking paths, fragrant plantings, and a large grassy area where, on my visit, kids were playing soccer and a yoga class was in progress. The entire park is slanted slightly, which is not that great for soccer players, but it means that wherever you are, you get a magnificent view.

  The shadow puppet show was being presented on the roof of the opera house, on what’s called the Panoramic Steps, which is basically an outdoor amphitheater. The opera house is covered by a massive and audacious canopy contraption that gives the structure its spacecraft look.

  (Photograph courtesy of the author)

  I got a glass of white wine and stood off to the side, watching a steady flow of parents and small children coming to the steps and sitting in front of the shadow puppet stage. It was not a large screen or anything remotely high-tech looking. The stage looked as if it had once been part of some steampunk circus a hundred years ago. Which is not to say that it was without charm.

  The crowd continued to grow—there must’ve been about a hundred people there—and once the sun dipped below the horizon, the show began. It seems counterintuitive, but you need it to be dark to cast a shadow.

  As a voice boomed over the sound system, a small shadow puppet appeared on the screen. Unlike the all-black shadow puppets of Java and Bali, these puppets were drawn so you could see their faces and what they were wearing. Karagiozis was dressed in what I can only call puppety clothes: clunky shoes, knickers, and some kind of old-fashioned tunic. Many of the people he encounters on his journey wear a fez. You don’t see many people wearing a fez in Los Angeles, but seeing it on the puppets reminded me of my grandfather, who was a member of the Abdallah Shriners of Kansas City and often wore a rhinestone-bedazzled fez while enthusiastically drinking Jack Daniel’s, playing a banjo ukulele, and singing goofy songs. From my experience, if you wear a fez, you’re looking for a good time.

  I wish I could say that I was as engrossed as the children watching the escapades of Karagiozis. I wish I could say that I laughed along with them. But it was in Greek.

  After a while I walked around behind the stage and, despite the security people telling me to move along, watched Danellis and his assistant flip the puppets around, manipulating the sticks to make them dance and express themselves. All the while he kept the story going, jumping in and out of various voices like Mel Blanc doing Bugs Bunny, Foghorn Leghorn, and Pepe Le Pew without missing a beat.

  Karagiozis is an old form of theater, from the sixteenth century, and it’s weird to see what are basically paper dolls hopping around in the shadows. It is definitely not a Disney movie, and yet the story resonated, the kids were digging it, you could see it on their faces. And even though I had no idea what was happening in the story, I was moved by the endeavor of one of the last Karagiozis puppeteers in Athens; there was something beautiful about watching old-school storytelling connect with modern children, the power of story cutting through the noise of our plugged-in tech-scrolling attention spans.

  Ariphrades’s head was spinning as he left Leogoras. Not only had the wealthy benefactor guaranteed to fund his chorus, but he was going to hire the best actors and singers available. He wasn’t sure if Leogoras was being so generous to annoy Aristophanes, to grab the best performers before he could get them, but then he didn’t care. Now he could create elaborate effects like Aristophanes and have beautiful costumes like Eupolis; he could afford singers who would make Cratinus’s and Leucon’s heads explode. It was a budget beyond his expectations, and it would give him a good chance in the competition.

  But with Leogoras’s generosity came a newfound sense of anxiety. Ariphrades suddenly felt the burden of expectation, something that he’d managed to avoid in the past when he’d been the upstart, the man of the streets, the underdog snapping at the heels of the more established playwrights. He knew the concept for his play was clever, but now he needed to write it well. Better than well. He needed his words to move the world. More important, he needed a drink.

  Ariphrades turned down an alley and into the open patio of a taverna. Night had fallen, the rosy dusk fading to indigo, and the slaves had put out small oil lamps. Ariphrades nodded at a few men sitting together and found a table by himself. An oenochoe of wine and a squat cup were placed in front of him, and, remembering not to drink too much when he was hungry, he ordered some cheese with barley rusks. He poured himself a glass and toasted his luck. Although maybe it wasn’t luck. What if he had earned Leogoras’s patronage with the brilliance of his idea? His throat was dry and dusty and the wine caught in it and made him cough. Now was not the time to get a big head, now was the time to write like he’d never written before. To really push the boundaries. He coughed again and washed the dust down with a large swallow of wine.

  And then he heard a familiar voice. “It would seem your throat is only accustomed to the most feminine of juices. The wine too strong
?”

  Ariphrades turned to see Aristophanes sitting at a nearby table with Pausanias and Agathon.

  “My throat is dry from talking, not licking.” Ariphrades looked at Aristophanes and raised an eyebrow. “Aren’t you being sued again?”

  Aristophanes grunted. “No one can take a joke anymore.”

  Agathon poured wine for Pausanias and Aristophanes and said, “Except Ariphrades. He does take your barbs with a smile.”

  Aristophanes nodded. But before he could speak, Ariphrades shrugged and said, “I’m not ashamed.”

  “There is a difference between being unashamed and shameless,” Aristophanes said.

  Ariphrades laughed. “I see you’ve been spending time with Socrates.”

  Aristophanes shook his head. “He’s still angry with me. He also couldn’t take a joke and now he’s touched by madness.”

  Pausanias laughed. “At least he didn’t take you to court.”

  “True.”

  Ariphrades nodded. “When the people stop laughing, only then are we truly fucked.”

  Aristophanes smiled and lifted his cup. “I pray it never happens.”

  The men drank from their cups, and then Aristophanes couldn’t resist. “I guess we won’t be seeing a play from you at the next festival.”

  “You will.”

  Aristophanes cocked his head. “You have a sponsor?”

  Ariphrades nodded. “Leogoras has been very generous.”

  Ariphrades watched as the news settled over the next table. Aristophanes looked at Agathon, who smiled wryly, then turned to Ariphrades. “This is going to be fun.”

  * I would green-light that in a heartbeat.