New Wine in Old Wineskins: Topicality in Modern Performance of Athenian Drama

How New is Aristophanes in New Orleans

By Wilfred Major

This paper studies how changes in broad political context permeated two recent adaptations of Aristophanes plays staged at the same institution but separated by a decade in time and tumultuous changes in the New Orleans community in which the performances were embedded. The analysis yields an important example of how national and even global trends can be enmeshed in extremely localized changes in a community, resulting in two similarly engaged but markedly contrasting adaptations of ancient Athenian comedy.

Do Something Addy Man: Herbert Marshall’s Black Alcestis

By Michele Valerie Ronnick

In the fall of 1962 “Do Something Addy Man,” a musical by author Jack Russell, Trinidadian composer George Browne and black choreographer Harold Holness, opened at London’s Theatre Royal Stratford East. The musical marked the return of director Herbert Marshall (1906-1991) to the British stage after ten years spent in India. Marshall who was Sergei Eisenstein’s first English student, had co-founded the Unity Theater in 1931, which grew out of the street theatre performances by the Workers Theatre Movement.

Flippin’ the Oedipus Record: Will Power’s Seven and Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes

By Casey Dué

I propose to show how Will Power’s Seven (first produced in 2006 at the New York Theatre Workshop) reinvents the Seven Against Thebes of Aeschylus for a modern audience, using the lyrical language of hip-hop and taking its characters from the streets of Power’s youth. Seven engages the idea of the family curse of Greek myth (Cameron 1970) and uses it to explore the curse of poverty, domestic violence, addiction, and other seemingly inescapable patterns that are inherited in family systems and urban neighborhoods today.