In Memoriam: Mary-Kay Gamel
(submitted by Amy R. Cohen)
This summer, our Society lost a towering figure. Mary-Kay Gamel died June 26, 2024, in Santa Rosa, California.
She was born September 15, 1942, to Blanche Lee Booker and Oscar Young Gamel in Springfield, Massachusetts. She was recognized early on as a precocious child, and she skipped a grade in elementary school on her way to graduating summa cum laude from Classical High School.
She earned her BA from Smith College in 1963 and an MA from Harvard in 1964. The American Academy in Rome Prize sent her to Italy for two years, after which she returned and earned her Ph.D. in comparative literature at UC Berkeley.
She taught for four years at Boston University before she began her remarkable teaching career at UC Santa Cruz, where she had an electrifying effect on the classics program there. In 1975, she was already featured in People Magazine as one of “12 Great U.S. Professors,” having increased enrollment in the program by 20% in two years.
In her early career she worked on Roman epic and elegy, after her dissertation Playfulness and Seriousness in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. She published widely on Ovid and many other topics over the course of her long career, but she is perhaps best known for her work in ancient drama. Dionysus called when a student asked her to translate Medea for a 1985 UCSC production. The work of turning Euripides’ Greek into speakable English, along with the experience of participating in the rehearsal and performance process, changed the focus of her work since she “now understood that every single decision made in a production – mise en scène, casting, blocking, movement, costumes, sound, etc. – is part of the translation.”1 In the years after this quasi conversion experience, Mary-Kay became a passionate, creative, and prolific interpreter of ancient drama.
She was involved in more than 40 productions, translating and directing all the extant ancient playwrights. These include Effie and the Barbarians (1995; her version of Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris, remounted in 2010), Eye on Apollo (1996; her version of Euripides’ Ion, remounted in 2009), and The Buzzzz!!!! (2006; her version of Aristophanes’ Wasps). Gamel’s extraordinary career as a director, a translator, an adapter, and a dramaturg became the model for the adventurous work being done in the halls of colleges and universities. Her work not only gave students a grounding in and love for ancient theatre, it also seeded the American drama world with professionals ready to continue the conversation between the ancient stage and the modern. Her bold adaptations always spoke the social and political issues of their day in clear and direct terms. To name a few: In The Julie Thesmo Show (2000, her version of Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazusae), she addressed what constitutes women’s realms; in Helen of Egypt (2008’s version of Euripides’ Helen), she foregrounded the role of the media and celebrity culture; in Orestes Terrorist (2011, her take on Euripides’ Orestes), she explored exultation in revenge in a ruined world and the gods’ indifference to our troubles. In all of these, she followed through on the idea “that the ancient Greek playwrights did not replicate what previous playwrights had done – they created very different versions, in order to make their audiences respond, think, and feel in new ways about important characters, situations, and problems.”2 This substantial body of work was recognized when she won the 2009 Outreach Prize from the (then) American Philological Association for her theatre productions.
She theorized about the work she did as a practitioner, notably in her 2010 article “Revising ‘Authenticity’ in Staging Ancient Mediterranean Drama”3 and in 2013’s “Can ‘Democratic’ Modern Stagings of Ancient Drama Be ‘Authentic’?”4 Mary-Kay also wrote about how translation and staging are less valued by the academy than other forms of scholarship, and she observed,
Both translation and theatrical production are hybrid activities that bring together very different entities for a specific period of time. In both, authorship is multiple, non-linear, and their products (script and production) are ephemeral. Translations and performances, like children, stick around only for a short time, but while they do they require complete personal involvement, and they bring immense joy.5
Her work for the American Philological Society and then the Society for Classical Studies sought to foster that joy in others and shift conventional attitudes towards the work of performance. She strengthened the Committee on Ancient and Modern Performance, and she directed the 2002 staged reading of The Invention of Love that prompted CAMP’s series of annual productions. She served as Vice President for Outreach, a position in which she encouraged the membership to expand its understanding of what constitutes outreach in our field and to recognize the serious scholarship that outreach entails.
She encouraged and supported those in the field who produce plays and who include performance in their pedagogy and scholarship on ancient drama. Colleague after colleague recounts the encouragement and investment Mary-Kay gave to our endeavors, and we consider her the matriarch of our large and prized academic family.
People cherished her friendship, and she made lifelong connections with those she taught, whether or not they were her students. The consistent theme of remembrances of Mary-Kay has been the joy and comfort people found in the warm and exuberant conviviality that she and her husband Tom Vogler provided in Santa Cruz and Santa Rosa. They offered refuge and fine food and wine to generations of students, colleagues, and friends. The depth of that connection, the richness of her love and friendship are perhaps best glimpsed through this lament by Amy Richlin:6
LAMENT FOR MARY-KAY GAMEL: SUMMER 2024
Amy Richlin
At long last kind Death took her – took the husk of her:
the dancer’s feet the long legs ink-stained hands
the alto voice the blue-grey eyes the sharp ears
the core, the womb, the heart, the guts
Death cut, and she flew free, to join
the kindest smile, the great laugh, all the words,
her voice calling, “Tom?” the dogs –
striding free with them now across the fields of heaven
Her mother went the same way,
once she told me, sitting at the kitchen table,
when my own mother was walking that road of shards;
a glass of wine in her hand, not Lethe yet
I want to go home but home is gone
I want to go back but the way is closed
Now is the time for your tears
CHO: talaina talaina allalai allalai
Not far from Springfield, Mass., the Connecticut River
runs in an oxbow; once she walked beside it,
kicking a stone into the steely water. The trees grow high,
they shine like gold in autumn; did the tall girl
dream, sometimes, of Italy? Could she see
the golden hills of Tuscany, and beyond them
sweet, golden California? Santa Cruz,
the house designed for giants, and the boards
trod by so many who loved her. Always for her
they raised the stakes, she was always raising the stakes, she made
Furies in prom frocks, Electra’s pickup truck
Tecmessa and the little boy walk off up the canyon, away
Thais robed in filth, the young girl raped through a scrim,
the slaves who trick the pimp, the Arab girl
Wine and coffee, lipstick and high heels
a thousand thousand parties, a million dinners,
with friends around the table, with the sons,
the dogs, and Tom, and outside, the meadow,
the rooster crowing the day at four AM,
and, through the woods, the school,
the dream among the redwoods.
Fading now
I want to go home but home is gone
I want to go back but the way is closed
properata retexite fata, call her back
CHO: allalai allalai talaina talaina
If there is heaven she is dancing there:
be with us, Queen of Heaven, in our hearts.
Remember us until we meet again.
July 12, 2024
1 Mary-Kay Gamel, “Translation and/in Performance: My experiments,” in Geraldine Brodie and Emma Cole (eds.) Adapting Translation for the Stage. London and New York: Routledge, 119.
2 Mary-Kay Gamel, “Translation and/in Performance: My experiments,” in Geraldine Brodie and Emma Cole (eds.) Adapting Translation for the Stage. London and New York: Routledge, 133.
3 In Edith Hall and Stephe Harrop (eds), Theorising Performance: Greek Drama, Cultural History and Critical Practice. London: Duckworth, 153–170.
4 In Lorna Hardwick and Stephen Harrison (eds), Classics in the Modern World: A ‘Democratic Turn’? Oxford: Oxford University Press, 183–195.
5 Mary-Kay Gamel, “‘Apollo Knows I Have No Children’: Motherhood, Scholarship, Theater,” Arethusa 34 (2001), 168.
6 Delivered at the Celebration of Life held for Mary-Kay on August 26, 2024. Used with permission of the author.
