Performance, Politics, Pedagogy

Mary-Kay Gamel reminds us, “Roman playwrights wrote for performance, not for reading,” (2013: 466). Yet students at all levels easily forget this when presented with a printed text. Turning the written word into a living performance engages the work of traditional scholarship, putting forward an interpretation demanding audience response. It is a process of making the play meaningful for a specific audience, a process involving the collective interpretation of playwright, actors, and audience.

In October 2014, the Upstream Theater Company in St. Louis performed David Slavitt’s translation of Sophocles’ Antigone. Upstream Theater’s director, Philip Boehm, and his design crew deliberately chose not to mold their production in a way that referred explicitly to contemporary events. Nevertheless, the events of August 2014 and after in Ferguson, Missouri, a suburb just twelve miles from the theater where Antigone was performed, inevitably affected both Boehm’s and his colleagues’ decisions and the way audiences responded to the play.

In the version of Sophocles’ Ajax that Mary-Kay Gamel devised and directed with Jana Adamitis at Christopher Newport University in 2011, Ajax was seen (in silhouette) to slaughter not sheep and cattle but rather human war prisoners. With that change, and by setting The Ajax Project in the modern setting of the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Gamel and her collaborators changed the terms of the play and reframed its issues of honor.