How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken

by Daniel Mendelsohn

  This probably sounds more pretentious and gimmicky than it really is. It’s true that a lot went wrong the night I saw the play: the Serbian woman, rather than shedding light on her own experiences as a refugee, lectured the audience rather stridently about the meaning of freedom (she chided us about our lust for large refrigerators); the first part took longer than expected, with the result that the film at the end of the evening began late, and people started disappearing, despite the temptations of a buffet dinner between parts two and three that featured appropriately politicized entrees (“grilled Balkan sausage”); and so on. But a lot about the evening was right. It’s rare to see a production of a Greek drama that so seriously and conscientiously attempts to replicate, in some sense, the deeply political context in which the ancient works were originally performed. Whatever its flaws, Sellars’s Children of Herakles makes you feel that an appropriate staging of Greek tragedy entails more than a couple hours’ emoting followed by an argument about where to have dinner.

  I found myself objecting, at first, to one of the most extreme gestures the director made: that is, having the children of Herakles themselves embodied (they’re not speaking roles) by Boston-area refugee children, who every now and then went up into the audience to shake our hands. But the sense of being somehow implicated in the real lives of the actors, so foreign to contemporary theatrical sensibilities, would not have been that strange to Euripides’ audiences. The choruses in the theater of Dionysos at Athens were chosen from among Athenian citizens, boys and men, who would indeed have been known to the spectators, or at least some of them. Modern drama seeks to create estrangement, and distance, between the artifice onstage and the spectators’ everyday lives; ancient drama relied, in its way, on a sense of communal concern.

  Sellars understands, furthermore, that tragedy doesn’t need a lot to achieve its effects, and his staging is rightly stark: a stepped altar in the middle of the stage surrounded by the huddling male offspring of Herakles, who have taken sanctuary there (the top of the altar was supposed to be occupied by a female Kazakh bard—a nice, if misplaced, Homeric touch—but she was ill the night I attended); a microphone, downstage left, into which the Argive envoy and Athenian king speak, which—not inappropriately, I thought—gives the debates at the opening of the play, where the city’s course of action is decided, the air of a press conference; and, for the chorus (their lines were read by Lydon and another person, a woman) a little conference table at the extreme left of the stage, where they sit primly, occasionally making weary bureaucratic noises about how sorry they felt about the refugees’ plight. This is perfect: it gets just right the tone of this work’s chorus, which like the choruses in many tragedies is stranded between good intentions and a healthy self-protectiveness.

  What robs the play of the impact it could have had is Sellars’s failure to appreciate the subtle gender dynamics in Euripides’ text. One of the reasons that the actions of Euripides’ Macaria and Alcmene are so striking is that they’re the only actions by females in a play otherwise wholly devoted to ostensibly masculine concerns: the governance of the free state, extradition issues, war. Part of Sellars’s updating, however, is to give the roles of the nasty Argive herald—the one whom Eurystheus sends to intimidate the Athenians into giving up the refugees—and of the Athenian king Demophon (here recast as “president” of Athens) to women. Although the parts are well played—the Demophon in particular comes across as a shrewd contemporary elected official, eager to do right but hamstrung by elaborate political obligations—the shift in gender results in a collapse of the playwright’s meanings. In Euripides’ play, the unexpected and electrifying entrance of Macaria and her offer of self-immolation dramatizes the need to sacrifice the “personal” and “domestic”—things that tragic women were understood to represent—to the larger civic good; the unusual and even revolutionary impact of her appearance and subsequent action is underscored, in the original, by her apology for appearing in public in the first place, something no nice Athenian girl would do. But Sellars’s staging makes nonsense of the lines; it’s absurd for this girl to be apologizing for talking to men outside the confines of the house (and for her to be asserting that she knows that a woman’s place is in the home) when the most politically powerful characters in the play are, as they are in this staging, women. And so the end of the play—the old woman’s violent explosion, reminder that the energies that must be sacrificed to establish the collective good always lurk uneasily within the polity, and can erupt—makes no sense, either. The women in this Children of Herakles are very healthy, thank you very much; there is no “repressed” to return.

  Worse still, Sellars stages the sacrifice of Macaria—beautifully, it is true, and bloodily. But it’s not in the play. One of the most famously disturbing things about The Children of Herakles is the irony that, after she makes her bid for immortality—the girl begs to be honored in her family’s and Athens’s memory before she goes off to die—we never hear another word about her. There are all sorts of explanations for this cold treatment of a warm-blooded character (not least, that the manuscript of the play is incomplete), but surely one is precisely that everything that Macaria represents must, in fact, disappear in order for the community to persist. Tragedy loves its self-heroizing females, but like the state whose concerns it so subtly enacted, it always found a way to get rid of those unmanageable “others.” By bringing Macaria back in the second half of the play, and allowing us to weep over the spectacle of the tiny young girl having her throat cut, Sellars reasserts the energies that Euripides shows—ironically or not—being silenced.

  And so, like an earlier generation of classicists who saw little of value in this play except references to contemporary politicking—the speeches were thought to echo fifth-century-B.C. Athenian political debates—Sellars fails to see where the play’s political discourse really lies. Which is to say, in the representation of the two characters who look the least like politicians: a young girl and an old woman. Did Euripides care about refugees? Yes, but only because of what refugee crises tell us about the nature of the state. (“The current event” he cared about was Athens’s summary execution, the year before the play was produced, of some Spartan envoys—clearly the referent for Alcmene’s climactic act of violence.) Peter Sellars, on the other hand, cares about refugees the way a twenty-first-century person cares—he feels for these poor kids, the mute, wide-eyed boys, the brutalized girls, and wants to make you feel for them, too. The result, alas, is a play that sends a message that isn't quite the one the one Euripides was telegraphing to his audience, by means of symbolic structures they knew well. Someone gets sacrificed in this Children of Herakles, but it isn’t just Macaria.

  A similar desire to update a Euripidean classic in terms familiar to today’s audience has, apparently, informed Deborah Warner’s vulgar, loud, and uncomprehending staging of Medea, which went from a limited run at the Brooklyn Academy of Music to its current Broadway run, which has been rapturously received by most critics—mostly because they are rightly impressed by Fiona Shaw’s emotional ferocity. If only it were being put in the service of a reading that did justice to Euripides! For if Sellars’s Euripides ultimately betrays its source because it thinks “our” politics are the play’s politics, Warner’s Euripides fails because it mistakes “our” women for Euripides’ women.

  In an interview two years ago with The Guardian, before their Medea had crossed the Atlantic, Warner and Shaw decried the “misplaced image of Medea as a strong, wilful, witchy woman,” suggesting instead that the key to their heroine was, in fact, her “weakness.” “Audiences can identify with weakness,” Shaw said. “I think the Greek playwrights knew that. That they could entice the audience into an emotional debate about failure and dealing with being a failed person.” This betrays a remarkable failure to understand the nature of Greek tragic drama, which unlike contemporary psychological drama didn’t strive to have audiences “identify” with its characters—if anything, Athenian a
udiences were likely to find the chorus more sympathetic and recognizable than the outsized heroes with their divine pedigrees—and which was relatively uninterested in the wholly modern notion of “dealing” with failure (and, you suppose, finding “closure”). For the Greeks, the allure of so many tragic heroes is, in fact, exactly the opposite of what Warner and Shaw think it is: the heroes’ strength, their grandeur, their power, the attributes of intellect or valor that they must resort to in their staged struggles with a hostile fate—or, as in many plays, like Ajax, their struggles to adapt to post-heroic worlds that have shifted and shrunk beneath them, rendering the heroes outsized, obsolete. (Norma Desmond, the has-been silent film star in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, has something of the grotesque yet somehow admirable grandiosity of the latter type of hero; her famous cri de coeur “I am big. It was the pictures that got small” could, mutatis mutandis, be a line from Sophocles.)

  And indeed, rather than being what Shaw called “very normal” and Warner referred to as “the happy housewife of Corinth,” Euripides’ Medea is deliberately presented as a kind of female reincarnation of one of the most anguished, outsized, titanic dramatic heroes in the ancient canon: Sophocles’ Ajax, the hero of a drama first produced about ten years before Medea. Like Ajax, Medea is first heard, rather uncannily, offstage, groaning over her plight: her abandonment by her husband Jason, who has left her to marry the daughter of Creon, the king of Corinth. Like Ajax, she is characterized by what the classicist Bernard Knox has summarized as “determined resolve, expressed in uncompromising terms,” by a “fearful, terrible…wild” nature, by “passionate intensity”; like Sophoclean heroes, she is motivated above all by an outraged sense of having been treated with disrespect, and curses her enemies while she plans her revenge; like Ajax, she is tormented above all by the thought that her enemies will laugh at her.

  So “strong, willful, and witchy” is, in fact, precisely what Euripides’ Medea is. But not Warner’s Medea, who appears to be stranded somewhere between Sylvia Plath and Mia Farrow—a frazzled woman who can’t figure out how to act until the last minute. (Euripides’ Medea can: from the start, she keeps repeating the terrifying word ktenô, “I will kill.”) Shaw, an impressive actress, chews up the scenery doing an impersonation of a housewife gone amok. When she comes out on the rather bleak stage at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre—apart from a door upstage center, there are just some cinder blocks strewn around covered with tarps, as if a construction project had been halted midway, and a swimming pool (by now de rigueur in contemporary stagings of classical texts; there was one in Mary Zimmerman’s Metamorphoses, too) in the center with a toy boat floating in it—she’s emaciated, hugging herself, haggard, nervously cracking jokes. (She draws a little witch hat in the air above her head at one point.) To reconcile this valium-starved wreck with the text’s many references to Medea’s fame, power, and semidivine status, Warner makes some halfhearted references to Medea as being some kind of “celebrity”: the chorus, here, is a gang of autograph-seeking groupies—“the people who stand outside the Oscars,” as Warner put it. The intention, you imagine, is to throw into the interpretative stew some kind of commentary on “celebrity,” but it’s a stupid point to be making: all the heroes of Greek tragedy are famous.

  This scaled-down, “normal” Medea makes nonsense of the text in other, more damaging ways. Everyone in Euripides’ play who interacts with Medea shows a healthy respect for the woman they know to be capable of terrible deeds. (She once gave the daughters of one of Jason’s enemies a deliberately misleading recipe for rejuvenating their aging father, which involved cutting the old man into tiny pieces. Needless to say, it didn’t work. This was the subject of Euripides’ first drama, produced in 455 B.C., when he was thirty.) She is august, terrifying; the granddaughter of the sun, for heaven’s sake. The Warner/Shaw Medea looks as if she can barely get herself out of bed in the morning, and the result is that when the plot does require her to do those awful things (the murder of Jason’s fiancée and her father, the slaughter of her own children), you wonder how—and why—she managed it. The problem with making Medea into one of those distraught Susan Smith types, pushed by creepy men into moral regions we can’t ever inhabit, is that it substitutes pat psychological nostrums (“Someone pushed to the place where she has no choice”: thus Warner) for something that is much more terrifying—and vital—in the play. Euripides’ Medea is terrifying and grotesque precisely because her motivations aren’t those of a wounded housewife, but those of a heroic temperament following the brutal logic of heroism: to inflict harm on your enemies at all costs.

  You could argue, indeed, that what makes Euripides’ heroine awesome is not that she’s a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown, but that, if anything, she has the capacity to think like a man. Or, perhaps, like a lawyer. Euripides, we know, was very interested in the developing art of rhetoric, an instrument of great importance in the workings of the Athenian state. The patent content of Euripides’ play, the material that seems to be about female suffering, is by now so famous, and so familiar-seeming, that it has obscured the play’s other preoccupations: chief among these is the use and abuse of language. In every scene, Medea is presented as a skilled orator; she knows how to manipulate each of her interlocutors in order to get what she wants, from the chorus (to whom she smoothly suggests that she’s a helpless girl, just like them) to the Corinthian king Creon, whom she successfully manipulates by appealing to his male vanity. Indeed, we’re told from the play’s prologue right on through the rest of the drama that what possesses Medea’s mind is not simply that her husband has left her for a younger woman, but that Jason has broken the oath (an ironclad prenup if ever there was one) that he once made to her. Oaths are crucial throughout the play: its central scene has her administering one to Aegeus, the Athenian king, who happens to be passing through Corinth on this terrible day, and who is made to swear to Medea that he will offer her sanctuary at Athens, should she ever go there. (Among other things, this oath furnishes her with her escape plan: rather than being an emotional wreck, Medea is always calculating, always thinking ahead.)

  For the Greeks, all this had deep political implications. One of the reasons everyday Athenians were suspicious of the Sophists, those deconstructionists of the Greek world (with whom Socrates was mistakenly lumped in the common man’s mind, not least because Aristophanes, in another satirical play, put him there), was that the rhetorical skills they were thought to teach could confound meaning itself—could “make the worse argument seem the better,” and vice versa. In Jason, Euripides created a character who is a parody of sophistry: he’s glibness metastasized, rhetorical expertise gone amok. When he enters and tells Medea that he’s only marrying this young princess for Medea’s own sake, that he’s doing it all for her and the kids, it’s not because he thinks it’s true: it’s because he thinks he can get away with saying it’s true. Language, words—it’s all a game to him. Look, Euripides seems to be saying to his audience, men for whom the ability to make a persuasive speech could be, sometimes literally, a matter of life or death: look what moral corruption your rhetorical skills can lead to. Medea, of course—obsessed from the beginning of the play with oaths, the speech act whose purpose it is to fuse word and deed—is outraged by her husband’s glibness, and spends her one remaining day in Corinth seeking ways to make him see the value of that which he so glibly uses merely as argumentative window dressing: his marriage, his children. That is why she kills the children. (The typically Euripidean irony—one that would likely have unnerved the Athenians—is that this spirited defense of language is mounted by a woman, and a foreigner: a sign, perhaps, of the sorry state public discourse was in.)

  A Medea that was all about the moral disintegration that follows from linguistic collapse probably wouldn’t sell a great many tickets in an age that revels in seeing characters “deal with” being failures, but it’s the play that Euripides wrote. Because Deborah Warner thinks that Medea is a disappointed housewif
e, and the play she inhabits is a drama of a marriage gone sour, all of the political resonances are lost. (When Shaw administers that crucial oath to Aegeus, she shrugs with embarrassment, as if she has no idea how this silly stuff is done, or what it’s all supposed to be about.) At the Brooks Atkinson, her Jason, a very loud man called Jonathan Cake, has been instructed to play that crucial first exchange between Medea and Jason totally straight—as if he believes what he tells Medea. (“He believes his argument that if he marries Creon’s daughter they will get this thing called security,” the director told The Guardian.) But if Jason is earnest—if he really believes what he’s saying, which is that he’s running off with a bimbo and abandoning his children and allowing them to be sent into exile because, hey, it’s good for them!—then the scene, to say nothing of the play, crumbles to pieces. If you take away the mighty conflict over language, over meaning what you say, Medea is just a daytime drama about two nice people who have lost that special spark. But then what do you do with the rest of the play, with its violence and anguished choruses and harrowing narratives of gruesome deaths—and, most of all, with the climactic slaughter—all of which follow only from Medea’s burning mission to put the meaning back in Jason’s empty rhetoric, those disingenuous claims to care for his family, his children, even as he shows nothing but naked self-interest?