Performance as Research, Performance as Pedagogy

This paper considers how the phenomenon of choral projection motivates the disappearance of Electra midway through Aeschylus’ Choephoroi. Electra’s departure can be explained by the Rule of Three Actors (Marshall, 2003, 260, 263 n. 34). But, as I found in a recent production, understanding the plot and character motivations underlying this departure is also crucial to staging this play. Scholars explain this departure on a narrowly pragmatic basis:

I have found that teaching Aristophanes in translation can be difficult. Students crave context, balk at flipping to endnotes, stumble over names that they cannot pronounce, and become frustrated and embarrassed. Teaching Aristophanes in performance might double these problems. Reading or translating these plays slowly allows the time to situate references in their historical contexts, mining valuable insights into Athenian political or cultural history; in performance, untranslatable puns fly by at a rapid clip. Complex political ideologies might be upstaged by slapstick violence.

In the Oresteia, Aeschylus posits a compromise between democracy and the ruling classes by situating elites as civic leaders for ordinary citizens to emulate (Griffith). A major symbol is the house, representing the elite family who dwells within it and, by extension, the order they impose upon the masses. But in Orestes, Euripides divests the house of its symbolism, leaving an empty shell. Whereas Aeschylus inscribes the metaphor of dynastic democracy into the skene, Euripides reduces the house to its purely physical structure.

In Euripides’ Hecuba, Talthybius reports in detail the events surrounding the sacrifice of Polyxena by the Greek troops (518–582). Listening to the account are her mother Hecuba, a chorus of other newly enslaved Trojan women, and, of course, the audience. The audience hears not only a sensitive speech about a terrible situation: we also hear, quite literally, Polyxena’s voice, because the actor who plays Talthybius played Polyxena in the previous scene.

In teaching Plautus, we must overcome obstacles that distance 21^st-century students from their 2^nd-century-bce counterparts, among them violence in the plays. The words on the page, as Goldberg (2004) argues, are just one component of the larger performance. An issue like violence in Plautus (previously treated by, inter alia, Parker 1989 and Stewart 2012) becomes more complex and richer by staging those words.

In teaching Plautus, we must overcome obstacles that distance 21^st-century students from their 2^nd-century-bce counterparts, among them violence in the plays. The words on the page, as Goldberg (2004) argues, are just one component of the larger performance. An issue like violence in Plautus (previously treated by, inter alia, Parker 1989 and Stewart 2012) becomes more complex and richer by staging those words.