Hecyra in Performance

Hecyra in Performance

Under the constraints of a pandemic, few would expect that a student production of Terence’s Hecyra on Zoom would yield any insights into Terence’s stagecraft.  Yet a December 2020 Zoom performance of select scenes of Terence’s Hecyra by students in intermediate Latin delivered insights into Terence’s plot construction, blocking in a video environment, and Terence’s unique use of asides and monologues. 

It is a generally accepted truism that Terence is the perfecter of the double plot (Franko 2013). Granted, Hecyrahas two families with strong father figures represented on stage, the play ends with only one (re-)marriage and the reconciliation of two families.  So how does Terence structure Hecyra’s plot?  Slater (1988) suggests that two groups are represented in the script, the male heads of household on stage and the women of these households backstage.  Yet in selecting scenes to be performed it became apparent that Hecyra is a play of “triple threads,” each running through the adulescens Pamphilus: the fathers, the women, and the slaves. 

Although most readings of the play acknowledge the fathers and the women, a third strand must also be acknowledged, that of the slave Parmeno, along with his fellow slaves.  Without these characters, the play would careen from comedy into melodrama. In fact, Parmeno and his cohort frame the play, appearing in the opening and closing scenes and then provide the bridge to humor in Act 3, framing Pamphilus’ melodramatic monologue in Act 3.  Indeed, it is in the scenes in Act 3 that Parmeno moves from the servus callidus to the reluctant servus currens (Knorr 2013).

In staging the play for Zoom, we found that blocking and entrances and exits matter. In the two scenes with the two fathers, the patriarchs should be positioned over Pamphilus and instantaneous exits by Pamphilus escaping the two fathers can be funny.  In addition, costuming helped keep family relationships visible.  And props like the stolen ring still need to be hyper visible for the audience.

Finally, our performance of Hecyra helped us recognize how Terence makes use of asides and monologues in a different way from Plautus.  Plautus’ typical practice is to have the clever slave and his antagonists use asides and monologues to compete for “airtime” and win the audience’s approval (Moore 1998). By contrast, Terence apportions asides and monologues to all the major characters except for Phidippus.  Pamphilus, the only character to have a large number of asides, uses them not to gain the upper hand, but to win the audience’s pity and delight as they watch him maneuver.  The primary monologues belong to the three women—Sostrata, Myrrina, and Bacchis—and to Pamphilus.  These monologues reveal a supportive network among the women, confirm their care and concern for Philumena, and disclose the truth about Philumena’s reasons for returning home to her mother.  In short, the audience can only see through all the men’s charges by paying attention to these monologues.