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University of California Press

Reimagining Greek Tragedy on the American Stage

by Helene P. Foley (Author)
Hardcover Paperback eBook
Price: $34.95 / £30.00
Publication Date: Oct 2012
Edition: 1st Edition
Title Details:
Rights: World
Pages: 396
ISBN: 9780520953659
Series:
Endowments:

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ONE

Greek Tragedy Finds an American Audience

By the end of the nineteenth century, American commercial theater was becoming increasingly entrenched in stereotypical modes of production and a limited repertoire that was largely generated in New York before moving on established circuits to other parts of the country.Although twentieth-century scholarship on early American theater has defended a number of nineteenth-century plays and playwrights, Edgar Allan Poe, commenting as early as 1845 on one of the better new American plays, Mrs. Mowatt's Fashion, reflected a stream of later critical opinion when he remarked: "It is a good play-compared with most American drama it is a very good play"; in the United States "the intellect of an audience can never safely be fatigued by complexity." In any case, two developments began to liberate artists interested in performing a larger range of serious poetic drama from dependence on the theater syndicates that dominated the late nineteenth-century theater world and to invite new audiences to attend Greek tragedy: the growing success of Greek tragedy on college campuses from the 1880s to the 1930s and the establishment of new venues for performance that permitted theatrical experimentation in stagecraft with strong links to Greek theater in the minds of major theorists and practitioners. Outdoor performances across the country, including those in sports stadia and in new amphitheaters often built on college campuses, here complemented the founding of small, innovative regional theaters.

Part 1 of this chapter first considers why nineteenth-century native efforts at presenting Greek tragedy on the professional stage, and especially translations of the original plays, met with an uninspiring reception. It then looks at how a growing number of university productions, along with small touring Anglo-American and American professional groups who primarily performed on college campuses and at other local venues, paved the way for remarkably successful productions in the second decade of the twentieth century. In 1915, the prominent visiting British director H. Granville Barker took advantage of this trend by staging Euripides' Iphigeneia in Tauris and Trojan Women in eastern college stadia.

Part 2 focuses on four U.S. artists/theater groups that began to put a stronger American imprint on the reception of Greek tragedy, and to win audiences for the original plays in translation that were not merely respectful yet skeptical-often the standard critical reaction-but positively enthusiastic. As leader of the American branch of the International Theosophical Society, Katherine Tingley built the earliest important outdoor amphitheater in the country in San Diego, where she staged performances of Aeschylus's Eumenides in 1899-1927 in order to establish a new spiritual and cultura

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About the Book

This book explores the emergence of Greek tragedy on the American stage from the nineteenth century to the present. Despite the gap separating the world of classical Greece from our own, Greek tragedy has provided a fertile source for some of the most innovative American theater. Helene P. Foley shows how plays like Oedipus Rex and Medea have resonated deeply with contemporary concerns and controversies—over war, slavery, race, the status of women, religion, identity, and immigration. Although Greek tragedy was often initially embraced for its melodramatic possibilities, by the twentieth century it became a vehicle not only for major developments in the history of American theater and dance, but also for exploring critical tensions in American cultural and political life. Drawing on a wide range of sources—archival, video, interviews, and reviews—Reimagining Greek Tragedy on the American Stage provides the most comprehensive treatment of the subject available.

About the Author

Helene P. Foley is Professor of Classics at Barnard College, Columbia University, and the 2008 Sather Professor at UC Berkeley. Her many books include Ritual Irony and Female Acts in Greek Tragedy .

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Preface

Introduction

CHAPTER ONE. Greek Tragedy Finds an American Audience
1. Setting the Stage
2. American Theater Makes Greek Tragedy Its Own

CHAPTER TWO. Making Total Theater in America: Choreography and Music
1. Hellenic Influences on the Development of American Modern Dance
2. American Gesamtkunstwerke
3. Musical Theater
4. Visual Choreography in Robert Wilson’s Alcestis

CHAPTER THREE. Democratizing Greek Tragedy
1. Antigone and Politics in the Nineteenth Century: The Boston 1890 Antigone
2. Performance Groups in the 1960s–1970s: Brecht’s Antigone by The Living Theatre
3. The 1980s and Beyond: Peter Sellars’s Persians, Ajax, and Children of Heracles
4. Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound in the United States: From the Threat of Apocalypse to Communal Reconciliation

CHAPTER FOUR. Reenvisioning the Hero: American Oedipus
1. Oedipus as Scapegoat
2. Plagues
3. Theban Cycles
4. Deconstructing Fatality
5. Abandonment

CHAPTER FIVE. Reimagining Medea as American Other
1. Setting the Stage: Nineteenth-Century Medea
2. Medea as Social Critic from the Mid-1930s to the Late 1940s
3. Medea as Ethnic Other from the 1970s to the Present
4. Medea’s Divided Self: Drag and Cross-Dressed Performances

Epilogue

Appendix A. Professional Productions and New Versions of Sophocles’ and Euripides’ Electras
Appendix B. Professional Productions and New Versions of Antigone
Appendix C. Professional Productions and New Versions of Aeschylus’s Persians, Sophocles’ Ajax, and Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound
Appendix D. Professional Productions and New Versions of Oedipus Tyrannus
Appendix E. Professional Productions and New Versions of Euripides’ Medea
Appendix F. Professional Productions and New Versions of Euripides’ Iphigeneia in Aulis and Iphigeneia in Tauris
Appendix G. Other Professional Productions and New Versions

Notes
References
Index

Reviews

“A landmark achievement. Obligatory reading for anyone interested in Greek tragedy, reception studies, the history of the theater, or US cultural history. . . . Essential.”
— Choice
"[A] monumental mosaic of a book."
— The Times Literary Supplement
"Only Helene Foley could have written this book. The combination of meticulous classical scholarship with a lifetime of accumulated experience of the US contemporary arts scene has produced a stylish, exciting, and energising read. Mandatory reading for anyone who loves either Greek or American Theatre.”—Edith Hall, author of Greek Tragedy: Suffering under the Sun

“This eagerly anticipated volume covers enormous ground with great skill and insight. It demonstrates unequivocally that the ancient plays have not simply been central to life within the American academy; they have also routinely been at the forefront of innovation and debate within the American theatre.”—Fiona McIntosh, Director of the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama, University of Oxford.

"A magnificent work, impressive in its scope and learning, yet accessible and engaging—an extraordinary, indeed indispensable contribution to reception studies of Greek tragedy."—Mary Kay Gamel, Professor of Classics, Comparative Literature, and Theater Arts, University of California, Santa Cruz