Friday 7.16: A Comedy

The thing about tragedy is that it's pretty universal. Betrayal, missed opportunities, spiraling depression; all things most everyone can relate to as being things that are not too great for the human soul. Tragedies play on emotion; anguish is the same in every culture; anger crosses language barriers. And that's why seeing Oedipus last week was so moving, even though I had a cursory understanding of the story and could only understand two words in the whole play. [They were "yes" and "no", if you were wondering]. Comedy, however, is different. Most comedies play on language. Things are punny, or not, and only groan-worthy if you know all the nuances of the language. And sure, it's might be funny seeing a bumbling guy being hit over the head with a can of beans, or also, whatever Mr. Bean does, but intellectual comedy is best done with wordplay.

The story of Lysistrata goes as such:

The city states are fighting and it's taking a toll on the women, who never see their husbands. To stop the war, Lysistrata gathers all the women from all the city states and they make a pact to keep celibate until the men stop the war. When the men come back from war expecting a warm welcome from their wives, they instead find themselves shut out and frustrated, they try to physically control the women. This doesn't work, as the women stand up for themselves and rally against the men. Finally, super sexually frustrated, the men decide to stop the war and begin peace talks and there is a giant party to celebrate the rejoining of man and wife.

It's a comedy, full of puns (on the word hard, for instance) and physical hilarity, but a little bit of the hilarity, which the audience around us seemed to thoroughly enjoy was entirely lost on us. It didn't help that we were super tired from getting to Epidaurus because we had to switch tickets to go to Nafplio (my fault entirely, from misjudging the time it took to get to the bus terminal) then only had 3 minutes to eat our epic hotdogs, suck down some drinks, and hike it to the upper tier.

So the first thing we notice as we walk up into the theater is this:

Now you tell me what a car is doing in the middle of ancient Greece. Obviously, the play was going to be a modern re-imagining, which was alright with me but strikes issue with the purists who like seeing the traditional costumes in the traditional theater space. While I would have loved to see that as well (and it was what I expected), the only real issue for me here was that it was much harder to follow the play, considering what I imagined the staging to be when I first read it a few years ago. I actually love seeing interpretations of well known stories, probably stemming from the Amazonian bird version of Midsummer Night's Dream I saw in middle school and I have long since recognized that there are no new story lines, only new takes on what's already been said. And I'm always up for a new take.

Speaking of Amazonian birds, the costumes here were epically fantastic, full of color and poof, a sort of a 1920s flapper nightdress-esque look. There were men playing women (obviously, a la John Travolta in Hairspray <3), women playing women, but, as far as I could tell, no women playing men. This may have been because the men's costumes consisted of black slacks and a black coat thing, making them all look like shirtless Batmen. Whenever they would do something dramatic, bam! All their capes came off and it was just a bunch of shirtless men [one of which had a giant red attachment on the front of his pants].

There were also segments of interpretive dance, which were really weird for me because I couldn't tell how they worked into the story. It was like So You Think You Can Dance meets...well...Lysistrata. And a black dress-white shirt+black tie couple who came in at the beginning and the end and were arguing about something [she threw her underwear at him and called him "Malaka" (wanker), which I had incidentally just learned from Marj] and then finally reconciled in the end. I suppose they were the token "modern" couple that this story applied to, but I couldn't really tell.

The most important thing I took from this was that while physical comedy is funny, and watching the frustrated men chase around the women did render a "hahahaha" from me, it wasn't as hilarious as it could have been. Exaggerations and caricatures aside, watching comedies for me is really about the language and the wordplay, nuances that I can't get here. It was awesome to have watched both a comedy and a tragedy in Epidaurus and it certainly opened my eyes to a world of modern ancient theater of which I could never have dreamed.

Btw. The dudette in the pink cottonball dress. Totally a dude.

Peace and love,
Angela