Contemporary American Rewrites of Ancient Greek Tragedy as Critical Practice: Charles Mee ’ s Agamemnon 2.0 and Ellen McLaughlin ’ s Oedipus Konstantinos Blatanis (Athens) This essay focuses on the distinct yet related efforts of two contemporary American playwrights to re-read and re-historicize ancient Greek tragedy at the turn of the third millennium. Charles Mee ’ s Agamemnon 2.0, presented for the first time in 1994, serves as a comment on America ’ s imperial wars in the Middle East and also tests the limits of recontextualizing the Aeschylean classic in the present moment. In a similar vein, Ellen McLaughlin ’ s Oedipus, which received its first professional production in 2005, criticizes America ’ s hegemony as the sole world power and reviews the phase of intense volatility and insecurity on a national as well as a global scale that the “ war on terror ” and the “ Iraq War ” marked. The two plays are studied in this paper as self-standing works which prove rewriting a critical practice which challenges audiences to reassess the enveloping sociopolitical and historical context by moving well beyond the confines of straightforward transliteration. In most of Theodor Adorno ’ s pioneering treatises on cultural criticism, the reader is warned that it is indeed a grave mistake to fail “ to recognize the extent to which culture and criticism, for better or for worse, are intertwined ” . 1 Liable to generalizations and idealizations, prone to subservience to the existent economic system and even severe complicity with the dominant social order at any historical moment, criticism constitutes, nonetheless, “ an indispensable element of culture ” . 2 Once attention is restricted to the field of theater as a cultural form, this interrelation emerges even more pronounced. The very word “ theater ” signifies the place which facilitates the practice of representation conceived for the service of yet another practice that may be accurately outlined as no other than the act of reviewing, of examining carefully. Etymologically, the words “ theater ” and “ criticism ” stem from two distinct, yet related verbs in the Greek language, θεάομαι , i. e. to look at as well as to examine and κρίνω , i. e. to inspect, to evaluate but also to examine. Thus, it is instructive to ask not whether theater is able to criticize but rather what type of criticism is possible on stage, to what ends and purposes this practice can be devoted, and last but not least how far such ventures actually reach. One of the primary aims of this article is to examine how valuable these questions prove whenever critical attention is dedicated to the practice of rewriting in theater in general, and rewriting the classics in particular. Interest revolves specifically around the interrogations which become valid each time identified instances of ancient Greek tragedy are re-contextualized and re-historicized on the American stage at the turn of the third millennium. On this plane of inquiry, it is useful to remember that ever since Thespis ’ s initiatory, boundary-breaking gesture, every enactment in the theater is in essence a re-enactment, a moment that allows one to assume a distance from what has preceded, hence a critical distance from which one views matters anew. It is also important to highlight that playwrights, Forum Modernes Theater, 29/ 1-2 (2014 [2018]), 56 - 63. Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen theater practitioners as well as theorists, attain this distance in endlessly different ways and for equally diverse purposes. In an overview of the works of the three main tragedians, Michael Walton aptly asks, “ [b] ut what else were Sophocles and Euripides doing than removing that story from Aeschylus ’ 458 BC context, when the fledgling democratic system was seeking to establish itself, and transferring it into the time of the Peloponnesian War fifty years later? ” 3 Valuable for the same reason, yet informative on a totally different moment in the history of Western theater, is Marianne McDonald ’ s comment that, “ this is not Euripides ’ Medea, but Heiner Müller ’ s Medeamaterial 4 [. . .] nevertheless, Euripides is behind it all, and behind him is the myth ” . 5 Equally insightful, while pertinent to yet another aspect of this area of interest, is Hugh Grady ’ s commentary on Aristotle ’ s idealist account of the Athenian tragedy as a product of “ rewriting ” and “ anachronistic [. . .] recontextualization [. . .] developed at a different cultural moment to describe an already antique form ” . 6 In response to these types of reflection on the practice of rewriting, this article pursues intently the following questions: What kind of critique can be expected when a contemporary American playwright undertakes to rewrite a Greek tragedy in an effort to dissect major challenges and severe dilemmas of the present moment? What are the implications of the oft-cited statement that the classics are “ appropriated to serve diverse political causes ” 7 and in what ways are thus audiences engaged? How are these efforts inspired and guided by a cultural form, which, as Olga Taxidou insightfully notes, “ has always been secular and critical, underlying the contradictions and exclusions within the democratic project itself ” ? 8 Furthermore, how do they relate to a genre noted for its ability to accommodate a wide range of “ forms of rationality that are [amply] displayed [but also] critiqued ” ? 9 Ultimately, do these instances of rewriting prove that criticism is a practice which, in Raymond Williams ’ s terms, is defined by “ the specificity of the response ” and not the “ habit or right or duty [of merely passing] judgement ” ? 10 More than any other contemporary American theater work, the numerous, experimental rewrites of Greek tragedy Charles Mee has authored over the course of the past three decades serve to illuminate precisely these questions. Mee launched his multisided “ re-making project ” , driven by the motto that “ the work we do is both received and created, both an adaptation and an original, at the same time. We re-make things as we go ” . 11 Evidently, the playwright ’ s outlook on these issues reflects the positions of dissimilar poststructuralist theorists, from Roland Barthes to Michel Foucault and beyond, who argue that there is no such thing as an original text and insist that “ any text is an intertext ” . 12 Furthermore, the fact that it is primarily the playwright ’ s eagerness to establish a candid critical attitude towards the enveloping, present moment that leads him to return to the original source-texts is evident in his own comment that the Greeks “ had a larger understanding of what makes human beings human ” . 13 To a certain extent, this may be seen as a reaction which results from an idealization, an almost essentialist understanding of the particular cultural form, and yet these words disclose the deep and burning need for an adequate assessment of the very notion of the human at present. It is imperative to stress that in practice, Charles Mee ’ s theater work endorses anything but an essentialist approach of Greek tragedy. A case in point, Agamemnon 2.0 (1994), inspired by the work of Max Ernst and in particular by his technique known as Fatagaga (Fabrication de tableaux Gazométriques Garantis), 14 constitutes an uncon- 57 Contemporary American Rewrites of Ancient Greek Tragedy as Critical Practice: Charles Mee ’ s ventional take on the first part of Aeschylus ’ s prototypical trilogy Oresteia. Like Ernst ’ s work, which allows varying texts, multiple references and incongruous modes of expression to coexist, the play pays tribute to the original classic and at the same moment distances itself from it in radical ways. In concrete terms, the modern one-act piece invites the audience to trace how the different parts succeed each other as formal divisions are dismissed. Specifically, even spectators who are only elementally familiar with the parent text can easily identify what parts correspond to each different choral section and episode in this seamlessly sustained unit. Even if operative on a surface level, this is a critical practice in its own right for it does attract attention to how the very acts of re-visiting, re-reading, re-casting, and re-viewing are indeed creative. On a deeper level, the modern play showcases the close interrelation between the act of viewing and the act of assessing, θεάομαι and κρίνω , as it invites the audience to engage critically with the actuality of war and its specificity in countless yet identified instances of human history. The work aims at a critical practice which brings history and poetry together, and on these grounds it introduces its own chorus made up of the four outstanding figures of the ancient world that epitomize these two fields of human creativity and ingenuity. Agamemnon 2.0 exemplifies Linda Hutcheon ’ s point that rewriting constitutes by definition both “ a creative and an interpretive act ” . 15 In particular, the theorist argues that adapters are “ first interpreters and then creators ” . 16 In this critical vein, the play prescribes that Herodotus, Thucydides, Homer and Hesiod meet around a small campfire to review the myth of the House of Atreus. The work picks up the anti-war theme from the Aeschylean tragedy and re-introduces it by recasting it through the simple yet disarming poetic lines a trembling Hesiod delivers: if you would lead the children of other men to war to shed their blood then you be the first before any man ’ s child is killed kill one of your own and then the ships may sail to Troy 17 Clearly, these are lines which serve to underline the notion that war begins always at home, but they also betray the playwright ’ s own yearning to formulate a critique or at least to envision a route towards a critical stance that would allow one to reflect on what Mee himself defines as, “ the behavior of America in the world and how that came to damage life and politics in America ” . 18 In her significant work on adaptation and appropriation, Julie Sanders recognizes the political commitment in rewriting as “ often inescapable ” 19 and further contends that appropriation is in essence almost synonymous with “ critique ” . 20 Agamemnon 2.0 is an occasion of rewriting that openly undertakes to fulfill this promise and attain such a potential. Written and presented for the first time in 1994, against the background of the U. S.-led war enterprises in the Middle East that to a large extent corroborated the hegemonic role of the world ’ s sole superpower, the play aspires to articulate a comment on the devastating effects of the historical conjuncture as well as on the detriment on the lives of human beings in the targeted areas. In concrete terms, the work inspects what Howard Zinn outlines as yet another instance of “ the classical imperial situation, where the places with natural wealth [become] victims of more powerful nations whose power [comes] from that seized wealth ” . 21 In particular, the play aspires to an antiwar polemic by juxtaposing Agamemnon ’ s agon against the disparate agons of the two women to whom he is related, Clytemnestra and Cassandra respectively. Foucault ’ s no- 58 Konstantinos Blatanis (Athens) tion of critique as the agon one undertakes in order to show that it is impossible as well as unethical to accept as true “ what an authority tells you is true ” 22 proves directly pertinent to the distinct cases of these two female characters. Thus, as the general meets his death convinced that civic order is still possible, Clytemnestra brings him face to face with the reality of his atrocious crime: I only wish we had had a chance to talk to one another I wish you could have told me like a human being what brought you to murder your own sweet child. One day, her tears will catch up with you. How could a person kill another human creature? 23 For her own part, Cassandra, reflecting directly her classical counterpart, already sees that what lies ahead for the “ city upon a hill ” is a bleak future: See what comes here to those who put their trust in earthly power to those who take their happy state for granted Here your country stands in ruin, this masterpiece of the gods, brought down with all her towering beauty. 24 The above quoted two extracts serve also to capture the distinctive way in which poetry and its dynamics are being trusted and celebrated but also reviewed in this work, since a political statement is articulated through an experimental, constantly evolving anti-war poetics. In Agamemnon 2.0, anti-war polemics and anti-war poetics inform each other to such an extent that it is pointless to distinguish between the two tasks. This is precisely what Hesiod ’ s closing lines epitomize: Nothing human is forever; everything perishes; except the human heart that has the capacity to remember and the capacity to say: never again or forever. And so it is that our hearts and nothing else are the final arbiters of what it is to be human. 25 The play emphatically contends that theogony, a genealogy of the birth of the gods, in essence a review of what it is to be human, emerges a pressing necessity for the Western world at the dusk of the twentieth century. It is important to highlight that through this experimentation with concurrently evolving poetics and polemics, the whole effort of rewriting takes the form of what Edward Said outlines as “ the practice of writing in progress and less the movement towards another [work] ” . 26 Specifically, in this case the act of returning to the parent text signifies a forward movement thanks to which the play elaborates on a dynamic, developing assessment of its enveloping political and historical context. Furthermore, through the same process the modern work sheds light anew on the dangers Adorno discerns when he notes that, “ the notion of a ‘ message ’ in art, even when politically radical, already contains an accommodation to world ” 27 and thus shows in practice that the effort to attain political effect well beyond the walls of any given playhouse is never an easy mission. In other words, the task of what Adorno instructively terms “ immanent critique ” is indeed demanding, since it seeks to “ synthesize assessment of the validity of [the artistic] forms with that of politics ” . 28 In its own original way, Agamemnon 2.0 illustrates that audi- 59 Contemporary American Rewrites of Ancient Greek Tragedy as Critical Practice: Charles Mee ’ s ence engagement and the potential for critique are two major and intricately related challenges for political art. It is precisely this identical preoccupation around which Ellen McLaughlin ’ s Oedipus (2005) primarily revolves. McLaughlin, a playwright who has resorted successfully to ancient Greek tragedy on numerous occasions ever since her major breakthrough with Iphigenia and Other Daughters in 1994, admits that she has long been intimidated by the Sophoclean prototype. In 2004, a commission by the Guthrie Theater and a pressing invitation by her collaborator, director Lisa Peterson convinced her to pen a rewriting of Oedipus Rex in an effort “ to grapple with American notions of identity and responsibility in the light of the Iraq War and the ongoing crisis of the Bush presidency ” . 29 Eager not to give in to the “ common practice of simplifying the scale of the play to create an easy contemporary political resonance ” , 30 McLaughlin comes up with a work that remains loyal to the original and at the same time departs productively from it. The playwright explains that her multiple rewrites of Greek tragedy are neither adaptations proper, since she has no knowledge of the language, nor translations as such, and thus she opts for the term “ version ” ; yet, being not totally satisfied with it, she remains open to suggestions. As becomes apparent, the act of rewriting unavoidably engages one in a critical review of one ’ s own ways and methods. Indeed, tragedy as a paradigmatic “ conflictual topos ” 31 emphasizes this type of inspection more intensely than most other cultural forms. This topos is recognized as a source of inspiration and instruction precisely because it does not “ supply tendentious answers ” , 32 and thus the act of returning to it constitutes “ a creative and interpretive ” 33 venture of manifold dimensions. In this vein, Oedipus, a one-act play conceived at the dawn of the twenty-first century, opens with an image of an organic question mark that dominates the stage. In a dim light, “ a naked child is lying in the fetal position [with] his back to the audience ” , 34 who are greeted by an offstage voice that delivers the Sphynx ’ s mythic riddle: Here is the riddle, mortals: What is this thing? It moves on four legs in the morning Two at noon And three at evening. 35 This original stage image underscores the naked vulnerability of the human and serves to introduce in a novel mode Oedipus ’ s agon to see himself in light. Specifically, one of the main questions that the modern play poses is whether this archetypal “ royal hunt ” is possible in present-day America. Tiresias ’ s words, “ the royal hunt is on, but you, sir, are your own prey ” , 36 outline an agon that can hardly scrape into what Tony Kushner, in his foreword to McLaughlin ’ s The Greek Plays, describes as “ our [postmodern] jaded, exhausted sensibilities ” . 37 Indeed, the work sets out to articulate an anti-war political statement and strives to expose the grave consequences of the firmly-established collective attitudes of apathy and amnesia that define the present moment of globalized late capitalism and in which citizens are mired in different places of the Western world. Theorists such as Fredric Jameson argue that the dominant economic policies and central sociocultural phenomena that characterize the phase of globalization 38 are dependent upon the belief that it is safe for anyone to inhabit only the present moment. This is precisely Jocasta ’ s tragic flaw that this rewrite emphasizes and strategically counterpoises to Oedipus ’ s relentless pursuit of the truth, when she is heard pleading: “ This. Just this — now — is all we can lay claim to. This is the only solid ground. Plant your feet on this and be happy. Plant your feet on this and be free ” . 39 60 Konstantinos Blatanis (Athens) It is important to highlight that Oedipus as an entity is perennially trusted across temporal and generic boundaries precisely because thanks to him, audiences are allowed to assess the redemptive power of the incessant struggle for self-knowledge and selfawareness. McLaughlin ’ s work resorts to the reserves of this very power in an effort to address the actuality of America ’ s imperial wars at the turn of the millennium and the ensuing sensibility crisis for its own people. In this case, Oedipus becomes the “ lens ” through which America is invited to review, in the playwright ’ s own words, its “ deep aversion to coming to terms with [its] own past and the consequences of [its] actions ” . 40 The relationship the modern play establishes with the source text is in essence “ dynamic ” , i. e., in Roland Barthes ’ s terms, one “ endowed with responsibility ” . 41 The play undertakes this exact task since on the one hand it courageously questions its own position as both a receiver and a translator, while on the other it also invites the audience to reconsider the conventional and often restrictive ways in which political questions are formulated and pursued at present. Evidently, McLaughlin ’ s Oedipus aspires to recognize itself — along the lines of what Barthes insightfully notes about all Greek tragedies — as the product “ of a specific period, of a definite social condition, and of a contingent moral argument. ” 42 It is in this sense that the play inspects the severe challenges of its enveloping context and also explores its own potential for critique. Similar to what holds true for Mee ’ s Agamemnon 2.0, in this play the act of rewriting allows valuable time and space for an ongoing, constantly evolving examination of issues on these two different levels. In terms analogous to those Peter Campbell discerns for Heiner Müller ’ s work, Oedipus avoids “ simple analogy [aiming at] theatrical landscapes that complicate interpretation [and thus] transfers interpretive power to the audience. ” 43 In effect, these modern plays strive to rekindle the critical faculties of standardly dispersed and heterogeneous audiences whose range of reference and experience is varied and rich but also definitely fragmentary and often inconclusive. Thus, in this respect, they stand in sharp distinction to the parent tragedies which addressed the tightly-knit collectivity of the Greek polis. Indeed, Oedipus ’ s cry “ [n]ow I must find out. I ’ m hungry for that knowledge. [. . .] I will know the truth, whatever it is ” 44 is meant to challenge these distant and dissimilar contemporary spectators in multiple ways and on different levels. Primarily, what is thus highlighted for the intended audience is the acute difficulty of coming to terms with the crimes the empire commits and the devastation it brings to foreign lands in the names of its own citizens. The present article argues that these two plays recognize rewriting as a practice which similar to the one established by the parent texts renders possible “ a historical critique that places both ourselves and the victims within a historico-political trajectory that can be accounted for and that, more importantly, is changeable ” ; 45 hence, the investment in constantly progressing and meaningfully evolving poetics. On the other hand, it is also contended here that rewriting Greek tragedy constitutes a practice which allows contemporary theater to engage critically with its own potential for critique. It is precisely in this way that representation today may aspire to a state beyond the realm of what Adorno incisively terms “ self-satisfied contemplation ” . 46 Effectively enough, the above discussed two plays showcase rewriting Greek tragedy as an ongoing critical practice which endorses anew Adorno ’ s valuable insight that “ [t]he more total society becomes, the greater the reification of the mind and the more paradoxical its effort to escape reification on its own. [. . .] 61 Contemporary American Rewrites of Ancient Greek Tragedy as Critical Practice: Charles Mee ’ s Critical intelligence cannot be equal to this challenge as long as it confines itself to selfsatisfied contemplation ” . 47 Notes 1 Theodor Adorno, “ Cultural Criticism and Society ” , in: Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber, Cambridge, MA 1981, pp. 17 - 34, here p. 21. 2 Ibid. 3 Michael Walton, “ Essence or Perception: Greek Drama for a New Century ” , in: Savas Patsalidis, Elizabeth Sakellaridou (eds.), (Dis)Placing Classical Greek Theatre, Thessaloniki 1999, pp. 329 - 39, here p. 329. 4 Arguably, this is a work which benefits greatly from returning to the material of both the homonymous myth and Euripides ’ s own rendition of it. Thanks to this multilayered endeavor, Müller is able to elaborate further on his exploration of theater as “ process ” , while at the same moment, as Peter Campbell accurately notes, he “ seriously critiques his own culture and the political, social, and dramatic structures that it represents and propagates, while recognizing the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of escaping from those structures ” . Peter Campbell, “ Medea as Material: Heiner Müller, Myth, and Text ” , in: Modern Drama 51.1 (2008), pp. 84 - 103, here p. 86. 5 Marianne McDonald, Ancient Sun, Modern Light: Greek Drama on the Modern Stage, New York 1992, p. 2. 6 Hugh Grady, “ The Modernity of Western Tragedy: Genealogy of a Developing Anachronism ” , in: PMLA 129.4 (2014), pp. 790 - 98, here p. 792. 7 Edith Hall, “ Introduction: Why Greek Tragedy in the Late Twentieth Century? ” , in: Edith Hall, Fiona Macintosh, Amanda Wrigley (eds.), Dionysus since ’ 69. Greek Tragedy at the Dawn of the Third Millennium, Oxford 2004, pp. 1 - 46, here p. 18. 8 Olga Taxidou, Tragedy, Modernity and Mourning, Edinburgh 2004, p. 15. 9 Grady, “ The Modernity of Western Tragedy ” , p. 797. 10 Raymond Williams, Keywords, New York 1976, p. 76. 11 Charles Mee, “ About the Re-making Project ” , http: / / www.charlesmee.org [accessed 7 September 2017]. 12 Roland Barthes, “ Theory of the Text ” , in: Robert Young (ed.), Untying the Text: A Poststructuralist Reader, London 1981, pp. 31 - 47, here p. 39. 13 Charles Mee quoted in Michele Volansky, “ Forces of History: An Introduction to The Berlin Circle ” , in: Theatreforum 14 (1999), pp. 25 - 26, here p. 26. 14 Werner Spies, Max Ernst Collages: The Invention of the Surrealist Universe. New York 1991, p. 65. 15 Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, New York 2006, p. 8. 16 Ibid, p. 18. 17 Charles Mee, Agamemnon 2.0., http: / / www. charlesmee.org [accessed 4 September 2017]. 18 Charles Mee quoted in Erin Mee, ” Mee on Mee: Shattered and Fucked Up and Full of Wreckage: The Words and Works of Charles L. Mee ” , in: The Drama Review 46.3 (2002), pp. 83 - 104, here p. 102. 19 Julie Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation, London 2006, p. 2. 20 Ibid, p. 4. 21 Howard Zinn, A People ’ s History of the United States, New York 2005, p. 569. 22 Michel Foucault, “ What Is Critique? ” , in: The Politics of Truth, trans. Lysa Hochroth, Catherine Porter, Los Angeles 2007, pp. 41 - 81, here p. 46. 23 Charles Mee, Agamemnon 2.0. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid. 26 Edward Said, “ On Originality ” , in: The World, the Text and the Critic, Cambridge, MA 1983, pp. 126 - 39, here p. 136. 27 Theodor Adorno, “ Commitment ” , in: Aesthetics and Politics, trans. Francis McDonagh, London 1980, pp. 177 - 95, here p. 193. 28 Ibid, p. 186. 62 Konstantinos Blatanis (Athens) 29 Ellen McLaughlin, “ Preface ” , in: The Greek Plays, New York 2005, pp. xiii-xviii, here p. xv. 30 Ellen McLaughlin, Oedipus, in: The Greek Plays, pp. 311 - 94, here p. 323. 31 A phrase borrowed from Olga Taxidou, Tragedy, Modernity and Mourning, p. 5. 32 Grady, “ The Modernity of Western Tragedy ” , p. 796. 33 Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, p. 8. 34 McLaughlin, Oedipus, p. 333. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid, p. 349. 37 Tony Kushner, “ Foreword ” , in: The Greek Plays, pp. vii-xi, here p. vii. 38 In Jameson ’ s understanding, globalization signifies in essence a period of wide-spread Americanization of the world. See “ Globalization and Political Strategy ” , in: New Left Review 4 (2000), pp. 49 - 68; “ Future City ” , in: New Left Review 21 (2003), pp. 65 - 79. 39 McLaughlin, Oedipus, p. 376. 40 Ibid, p. 313. 41 Roland Barthes, “ Putting on the Greeks ” , in: Critical Essays, trans. Richard Howard, Evanston, IL 1972, pp. 59 - 66, here p. 65. 42 Ibid. 43 Campbell, “ Medea as Material ” , pp. 84, 86. 44 McLaughlin, Oedipus, p. 382. 45 Taxidou, Tragedy, Modernity and Mourning, p. 16. 46 Adorno, “ Cultural Criticism and Society ” , p. 34. 47 Ibid. 63 Contemporary American Rewrites of Ancient Greek Tragedy as Critical Practice: Charles Mee ’ s