How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken

by Daniel Mendelsohn

  Like so many contemporary updatings of Greek dramas (whether tragic or comic), this one actually becomes less relevant as a result of its frantic attempts to introduce contemporary topical references. Here I’m not referring to the way in which Nathan Lane has gussied up both Aristophanes and Shevelove with jokes that neither would have dreamed of; if anything, contemporary productions of Aristophanes demand updatings of this kind, given how notoriously difficult Aristophanic humor is to get across to modern audiences. This is partly because of the extreme topicality of Aristophanes’ references (Euripides is one of the few victims of Aristophanes’ humor whom audiences today will have heard of), and even more because so much of the fun provided by Aristophanes lies in his hilarious manipulation of Greek. But to explain his wild, Grouchoesque verbal play is, of course, to kill the humor; and so Lane has, very sensibly if none too subtly, updated the jokes. There are gags about cell phones (in this version, Dionysus’s slave sidekick, Xanthias, gets a call from Sondheim during the opening dialogue, during which he and his divine master stand before the curtain in dinner jackets, drinking martinis) and about “Viagra, the God of Perseverance,” in-jokes about the theater and about smoking pot, and arch allusions to camp film classics like the Joan Crawford biopic Mommie Dearest. (Dionysus: “Why can’t you give me the respect I deserve?” Xanthias: “Because I’m not one of your fans!”) Hillary Clinton’s It Takes a Village makes an appearance, too—as does pretty much anything that looks as if it might work in a quasi-classical context. (Xanthias remarks en passant that his parents once had a business selling condoms to Trojans.) The friend with whom I attended the first of the two performances I saw was surprised to learn that some of the jokes that got the biggest laughs were, in fact, Aristophanes’. “What’s the quickest way to get to Hades?,” Dionysus asks at the outset of his journey. “Oh, a hemlock and tonic.” Sans tonic, the joke is vintage 405 B.C.

  The visual analog of these seemingly random, hit-or-miss riffs is the eye-poppingly spectacular and yet somehow vacuous staging that Stroman, along with her set designer, Giles Cadle, and her costumer designer, William Ivey Long, have lavished on this retooled Frogs. Given Ms. Stroman’s résumé, it was inevitable, perhaps, that in this version the bouncy eponymous chorus (which in Aristophanes appears very briefly at the beginning and then disappears for the rest of the play) should here take over the stage whenever possible, yo-yo-ing from bungee cords in their tropical-amphibian leotards, writhing across the floorboards, leapfrogging gleefully across each other. But it’s a measure of how extravagantly Stroman has staged her Frogs that the frogs (divided, according to my program, into two types: “Fire Belly Bouncing Frogs” and “A Splash of Frogs”) are the least glitzy ingredient here. Other numbers include an elaborate scene for Hellenically attired men and maidens posing like the figures on Attic vases, a whole host of tweed-clad Shavians with pencils and pads strutting hurriedly up and down as they fawn on their idol, and a fabulous chorus line of “Hellraisers”—statuesque acolytes of Pluto whose brazen helmets erupt in flame at the end of their big number, like giant cigarette lighters.

  Part of the reason these numbers feel so bloated is that the music to which they’re pinned is so weak; this score does not represent Mr. Sondheim at his best. Much has been made of the fact that Sondheim agreed to write six new songs for this revival—he claimed never to have been happy with his 1974 score, which consisted of a handful of numbers—but apart from a couple of songs that show the kind of allusive wit and prosodic cleverness you expect from this composer (there’s a funny one called “Dress Big” for the scene in which puny Dionysus dresses up as his half brother, Herakles), the pickings are disappointingly slim. To my mind, this is especially true of the “sentimental” song that Lane, as Dionysus, gets to sing in Act One about his dead wife, Ariadne, a song that suggests much that is wrong here. Apart from being disappointingly pedestrian (“So I gave her a crown / on the day we were wed / if you look like a goddess / you’ll feel like a goddess, I said…”), the song is an inorganically sentimental intrusion that slows down the show to no apparent point. Or, rather, a point that is only too apparent, which is the modern actor-writer’s inevitable sense that Dionysus should be a real, live, sympathetic, warm-blooded “character.” This is the kind of thing that contemporary audiences warm to, as the author of the Times article suggests:

  But the biggest and most surprising change is what Mr. Lane made of Dionysos: in a feat of reverse apotheosis, he turned a witty but mostly disengaged demigod into a human being. Mr. Lane imbued the character, formerly little more than a vehicle for jokes, with a strain of melancholy and longing, and a powerful wish to change the world through art.

  But of course, the original Dionysus is in fact “engaged”; he just happens to be engaged not with feelings but with something less adorably ingratiating, which is the theater and its politics.

  The real problem here is neither the gags nor the chorus lines: the loose structure of Aristophanic “Old Comedy” (as opposed to situation-driven “New Comedy” of the next century, the ancestor of today’s sitcoms) allows for digressions from the tenuous plot in order to take potshots at any and all available targets; part of the dithery fun of Old Comedy is its zany combination of physical gags and vaudevillian randomness, which at times recalls the Marx Brothers. The problem with the Stroman-Lane Frogs, rather, is that none of the gags, much less any of the production numbers, adds up to the kind of political critique Lane was clearly hoping for. Lane’s desire to have his political satire’s main character be human and sympathetic suggests, if anything, the first and most obvious reason for this revival’s larger failure: caustic Aristophanic comedy is simply the wrong vehicle for this particular star. Some critics complained that this Frogs was too overtly political, but what was striking about Lane’s adaptation was, if anything, how wan the political humor was—how coy, how lacking in bite. There were, it’s true, some political jokes about complacent “frogs,” who here stand in for the kind of people whose “narrow little eyes…match their narrow little points of view”; and there are a couple of jabs at certain politicians—“Words seem to fail them—even the simplest words!”—who “rushed into this war for reasons that are changing every day.” But when you heard these, you kept wondering why Lane couldn’t bring himself to do what Aristophanes loved to do, something that made the political humor personal, which was to name names. Why, you kept wondering, couldn’t he say “Republicans” or “Bush”? Lane, an insecure actor whose palpable craving for audience affection invariably leads him to play comic grotesques as adorable mischief-makers—as witness both The Producers and A Funny Thing, both originally vehicles for Zero Mostel—shouldn’t do political comedy, because he’s afraid to alienate even his targets.

  Lane’s inability to engage incisively the material he’s taken on is most apparent in his handling—or lack thereof—of the play’s most structurally crucial and thematically important element. I refer here to his decision not to meddle with the first of the various updatings which Aristophanes’ comedy underwent in its transformation into the show now playing at Lincoln Center: Burt Shevelove’s transformation of the climactic debate between Aeschylus and Euripides in Aristophanes into a contest between William Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw. Shevelove first had the idea of thus adapting the Greek comedy in 1941, when the young playwright was, apparently, more concerned with the fate of the theater than the fate of the polity. It’s only in that context that you can begin to fathom his choice of his contestants: Shaw representing “prose,” a rubric apparently meant to include incisive intellect and caustic wit (“gravity of thought…levity of expression”); Shakespeare representing “poetry,” under which, rather awkwardly it must be said, are subsumed qualities including beautiful artistry, emotionality, and overwhelming sentiment.

  The conflict, for Shevelove at that time, seemed to be this: Did people want socially edifying, but perhaps the tiniest bit boring, straight drama, or did they want something to catch their em
otions—poetry, even music? Set against Shevelove’s culminating characterization of the difference between Shaw and Shakespeare as that between “intellectual interest” and “romantic rhapsody,” the fact that Shakespeare cinches his victory not by reciting verse but by singing (a song from Cymbeline) supports, if anything, a reading of his Frogs as essentially a sly comment about the theater—more specifically, about competitions between straight plays and musicals. “The theater needs a poet,” Dionysus declares at the end of Shevelove’s text. “A great big poet. A star of poets. That’s what audiences are waiting for. Someone to lift them out of their seats, to get them going.”

  Leaving aside the merits of Shevelove’s rather strained (indeed, false) reductions of the two playwrights, there are other reasons why Shakespeare and Shaw might have made a kind of sense in 1941. It was a time, after all, when public school graduates still had read one or two plays by Shakespeare, and Shaw the controversialist was still alive, an august yet ornery figure, a presence. (In settling on Shaw as the modern counterpart to Euripides, Shevelove might also have had in mind the famous connection between the Irishman and his fellow Fabian Gilbert Murray, the Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford, whose reading of his translation of Euripides’ Bacchae to the Fabian Society in 1901 made a huge impression on Shaw, who went on to model Major Barbara’s Adolphus Cusins on the classicist.) But what must have seemed a fresh adaptation sixty (and even thirty) years ago strikes you now as sadly dated. It would indeed be hard to think of a playwright less performed, and less thought of by mainstream audiences today, than Shaw is. Lane and Stroman cannot have failed to realize that long citations from Saint Joan are likely to fall today on ears innocent of any Shaw at all—and, one suspects, nearly as innocent of the St. Crispin’s Day speech from Henry V, which is also cited in Shevelove’s Frogs. And yet, bizarrely, the creative duo behind the most recent Frogs haven’t touched the Shaw–Shakespeare debate—haven’t bothered to update Shevelove’s updating.

  In light of their professed desire to render the play more relevant, this unwillingness to freshen the Aeschylus–Euripides conflict once more, substituting playwrights who occupy a more vivid place in the imaginations of today’s audiences, is curious. For one thing, it has the unintentional effect of making the theater itself seem irrelevant: one awful irony of the decision to leave Shevelove’s now-stale choices in place is that it makes the climactic contest of this Frogs into precisely what it wasn’t in Aristophanes’ Frogs, or even in Shevelove’s: the property of the “cultural minority.” To the Athenians, Euripides was a modern, and Aeschylus, however august, still someone worth arguing about; by allowing the aesthetic debate to become a spat between two (now) wholly canonical writers, Lane has emptied it of any urgency it might have had.

  The specifically political implications of Lane’s unwillingness (or inability) to find contemporary analogues for Aeschylus and Euripides (or even Shakespeare and Shaw) are more dire. It’s no accident that most of the new political jokes, such as they are, occur in the first part of the play—the part before the onstage debate between the playwrights. You suspect that Lane figured that “politicizing” Frogs meant adding the veiled jabs at Hillary and Dubya and leaving things at that—that the debate about theater in both Aristophanes’ and Shevelove’s versions, in other words, had nothing to do with politics. This, however, results in an awkward and ultimately disastrous structure that fails to graft Lane’s politicizing version onto Shevelove’s “aesthetic” version. All those lavishly sprinkled contemporary references in the first half of the play, when Dionysus and Xanthius are trying to get to Hades, suddenly peter out, and the laughter suddenly dwindles during the much-anticipated climactic contest, with its long stretches of literary references, and quotes from Shakespeare and Shaw, and the talk about art that Lane has attempted to tweak in a vaguely political way—but only very superficially. Shevelove’s version, for instance, comes to a climax when Dionysus abandons his favorite, Shaw, upon realizing that what he needs is a “great big poet” to get people to jump out of their seats. Lane has satisfied himself with altering this line to give it an ostensibly political twist: “I now realize,” his Dionysus says, “a poet is what we need—to touch people’s hearts as well as their minds.”

  The lazy invocation of tired clichés of political speeches at this point suggests, if anything, that Lane’s unwillingness or inability to grapple with the meanings of his source material has resulted in a play that is, if anything, “political” in a way he surely didn’t intend. I had to wonder, as I sat through the grinding last hour of Nathan Lane’s Frogs, just how seriously the adapter was thinking about the issues he professes to be interested in—politics, war, the conduct of the democratic state—when he decided to seal the play’s climactic debate with a call for more “heart” in politics: a call that all too faithfully reproduces the ideology of Aristophanes’ original, as it turns out. It’s obvious that Nathan Lane did some research about Aristophanes and Greek theater—after all, he’s added some explanatory material to the opening, for instance the information that “everything that was of interest to the average Athenian was fodder for the author’s savage wit”—but his research cannot, in the end, have been thorough. For if he’d really done his homework, he’d have understood that the antiwar position of the average Athenian in 405 was hardly concentric with the antiwar views of the well-intentioned liberal audiences cheering Lane’s Frogs on at Lincoln Center. He would have learned, indeed, that in Athens, it was the conservatives who were the peaceniks, and that it was the extreme democrats, under the sway of one demagogue after another, who were the hawks, who again and again disdained peace offers during the thirty bitter years of the Peloponnesian War. Mr. Lane had learned enough that he could add, to his introductory patter, the information that Aristophanes’ Frogs enjoyed a rare repeat performance, but he doesn’t seem to be aware that the likely reason it was so popular among “average Athenians” was that there was, sandwiched into the play, a direct appeal to the audience in which the playwright called for an amnesty for those many citizens who had participated in an antidemocratic coup d’état a few years earlier.

  For the real reason that Frogs cannot, in any version, succeed as the liberal antiwar play that Lane and his cocreators want it to be is that it is a deeply conservative play, by a deeply conservative author: the conservatism is so intricately woven into the structure of the action, indeed—particularly in that final debate—that there’s no way it could work in the way the Lincoln Center production wants it to work. The debate, of course, is the part Lane didn’t even bother to freshen up, because although he was hell-bent on politicizing this old comedy, it never occurred to him that its politics lay in the debate about literature more than anywhere else. As Professor Dover observed, the “average Athenian” would have immediately understood the conflict between Aeschylus and Euripides as a coded debate between two incompatible worldviews:

  Aiskhylos was the poet of the generation which fought off the Persians and created the Athenian empire, Euripides the poet of their own more precarious days. This makes it possible for Aristophanes to assimilate the context between Aiskhylos and Euripides to the familiar antithesis between the valour, virtue and security of the past, sustained by what seemed from a distance to be unanimity in the maintenance of traditional usage and belief, and the insecurity of the present, beset by doubt, ‘unhealthy’ curiosity and ‘irresponsible’ artistic innovations.

  Frogs, then, is a play that—because of the triumph of Aeschylus which is a deep part of its plot (and a deep part of Shevelove’s adaptation, too)—inevitably exalts nostalgia over hardheaded confrontations with the present; that prefers to moon about past triumphs than to expose the causes of present anxieties; that, if anything, endorses the artist who will distract the people from solving their problems rather than force them to do so. If Lane and his collaborators in this superficially rewritten, superficially repoliticized adaptation of that play had thought hard about what it actually meant, t
hey might have chosen another vehicle altogether for their rather woolly attempt to condemn the current political crisis. (Trojan Women, say—but then, you doubt that even Lane would have a go at Hecuba.) They might, at least, have rethought their approval of Aristophanes’ “savage wit” and the way it punctuates the climactic exchanges between the two playwrights: for instance, when Aeschylus smugly boasts that drama ought to provide clean moral models for exemplary civic behavior, and “set…a standard of purity,” and Euripides desperately counters that tragedy must be subversive, that it should show “what really has happened” in order that audiences “come away from seeing a play / in a questioning mood, with ‘where are we at?,’ / and ‘who’s got my this?,’ and ‘who took my that?’”

  You’d have thought that such exchanges about purity and subversiveness in art would have rung some political bells in Mr. Lane’s head; but he merely blithely conforms to his model. What he doesn’t seem to have realized—and what, in the end, makes his play such a mess—is that in siding himself with “Aeschylus” at the end of his own play (with “heart”) he has sided with the people whom, you suspect, he’s voted against—the purity-in-art people, the family values people, the people who always go on about (and promise) the security of the golden past while vociferously despising subversive innovation (and nowhere more, as we know, than in the arts).

  It is indeed odd that he should have ended up producing a play that everywhere values distracting pomp and sentimentality over rigorous intellectual engagement, a play that ends, however naively, with a call for more sentiment about the past and less braininess about the present—with, you might even say, an implicit endorsement of Romantic over Enlightenment ideals and values. Such a play (like its ancient model) could be said to serve the political aims of those real-life politicians who keep calling on us to be satisfied with the safe, grandiose nostrums of the past, rather than trying to see for ourselves what has really happened, and where we are at, and who got our this, and who took our that. In the end, Mr. Lane’s failure to understand his own source material made his adaptation of Frogs not very funny at all; if you think deeply about politics and theater, it’s actually pretty depressing.