Amy Pistone (Gonzaga University)
Online Tragedy in a Tragic Time
Through necessity, practitioners of theater have had to reimagine what live (or semi-live) theater looks like in the era of COVID-19. This paper will look specifically at the Reading Greek Tragedy Online project, a series (based out of the Center for Hellenic Studies) that brings together actors and researchers to perform and discuss scenes from Greek tragedy. It will also consider the related Playing Medea competition (organized through Reading Greek Tragedy Online), which invited high school and college students to stage and record their own scenes and enabled an additional level of community engagement with Greek tragedy.
The era of online productions has enabled a much larger and more diverse audience to engage with productions that would otherwise have been accessible to a smaller and more geographically restricted group of people. Reading Greek Tragedy Online has maximized this opportunity by organizing their weekly performances as a series of scene readings (by professional actors based in the US and the UK) with commentary by a classical scholar interspersed between and after the scenes. While there have been some high-profile scholars involved in these productions, this has also provided an opportunity for junior and less well-known scholars to engage in public-facing conversations about these plays. It has also allowed, with the help of host Joel Christensen as interlocutor, for multiple interpretations of the same play to be placed in conversation with one another.
Reading Greek Tragedy Online has created a rich and valuable pedagogical tool for educators at all levels, both in pandemic times and in the future. All productions have been recorded and will be available for use in classes. One (perhaps overlooked) aspect that will make these recordings particularly useful is that they offer a picture of classical tragedy that is diverse across many vectors (race/ethnicity, age, gender, among others). The pedagogical and outreach value of this cannot be overstated.
Finally, the move to an online format has allowed for a tragedy community that is much more global and that spans many of the traditional academic divides (between high school, college, and people who are not part of a particular institution). High school teachers and students have been able to participate in conversations (both synchronous and asynchronous) about a range of tragedies beyond the handful of plays that most often show up on high school reading lists. Actors and other theater practitioners have also been able to collaborate across continents and multiple productions and other programs are in development as a result of the connections that have come out of this program.
This paper will explore the various aspects of the Reading Greek Tragedy Online project and share how the resources it has produced have been (and can be, in the future) used to promote more widespread engagement with the practice and performance of Greek tragedy in classrooms of all levels.