P.C.
for the Ages
By Alisa Solomon
The Children of Herakles
By Euripides (translation by Ralph Gladstone)
American Repertory Theatre, Cambridge, MA Jan. 4-25, 2003.
Box Office:
(617) 547-8300
Last Saturday--January 11, 2003--authorities
in Lewiston, Maine deployed police sharpshooters and water cannons
to prevent clashes between hecklers and dozens of white supremacists
protesting what they called an "invasion" by Somali immigrants.
1100 have migrated to Lewiston in the last two years. At an alternative
rally several miles away, an estimated 3400 participants expressed
support for their new African neighbors. Lewiston's mayor--who
in October notoriously urged Somalis to stop moving to the city
and overwhelming its social services--did not attend either demonstration.
In December, Turkey began to position troops
on its southern border to block an influx of Kurdish refugees
anticipated in the wake of a U.S. attack on Iraq.
Worldwide there are currently 15 million
refugees--and that counts only those who have fled their countries,
running from war, persecution, starvation. There are 20 million
more internally displaced persons, those uprooted from their homes
but still within their nation's borders, and thus not recognized
as refugees under international law nor eligible for protections.
Experts predict that the numbers in both categories will keep
getting higher. Meanwhile the capacity of aid organizations to
provide genuine assistance is diminishing. Enduring solutions
must be political. What's more, humanitarian organizations are
becoming morally compromised in many cases--when food shipments
fall into the hands of warlords, for instance. Sometimes--in the
face of genocide, for instance--a stance of impartiality turns
untenable.
This intractable crisis is part of what
makes Euripides' 2400-year-old tragedy, The Children of Herakles,
genuinely p.c.: "permanently contemporary" (to borrow Daniel Barenboim's
phrase about Beethoven). The clash between morality and power
that Euripides illuminates and the questions he provokes about
a community's responsibility toward refugees are precisely what
drew director Peter Sellars to the much overlooked work. In interviews
and promotional materials from the American Repertory Theater
in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where the play is having its American
premiere (!), Sellars has repeatedly and passionately expressed
moral outrage at the world's refugee emergency and extolled the
capacity of the ancient Greek canon to provoke civic debate about
a society's most pressing issues.
In presenting The Children of Herakles
and surrounding it with an impressive series of pre-show talks
by immigration officials, human rights activists, and refugees
who have resettled in the Boston area, as well as a post-show
series of films from war-torn regions currently (or recently)
producing refugees, Sellars is aiming at a noble goal. He wants
nothing less than to make theater matter to democracy by providing
a space where, and a means through which, society's touchiest
questions can be represented and opened for deliberation. It's
an admirably ambitious, even thrilling, enterprise given the debased
state of American theater these days--not to mention the utter
vitiation of our democratic discourse.
There are innumerable instances in the
play that ring disturbingly familiar: a bellicose head of state's
emissary sounding just like George W. Bush as she bullies a rival
with "all the weight of our power"; a girl offering to sacrifice
herself to save her brothers in a chilling, noble speech that
resembles the self-spectacularizing videos of Palestinian suicide
bombers. But it's the overall mood of moral crisis more than the
details of the plot that resonates with today's predicaments.
When the children of the late Herakles, shepherded by his old
comrade Iolaus, seek sanctuary in Athens, Eurystheus, the tyrannical
head of Argos, demands their return. Yet nowadays, of course,
refugees in America (who are vetted overseas and then resettled
here) and asylum seekers (do-it-yourself refugees who somehow
make it to the US on their own and then request safe haven) are
not claimed by their governments. If the US denies them refuge,
it's out of mistrust, callousness, greedy self-protectiveness,
or plain indifference--not because anyone wants them back.
The production of The Children of Herakles
functions as one piece of a larger affair. It is an inventive,
often stunning rendering of the play, which could be discussed
discretely, but I'm reluctant to separate out the "show" from
the wider event. It could be done, too easily, in fact. One could
blithely discuss the beauty of the square of fluorescent bars
that surrounds the sons of Herakles center stage; go into raptures
over the spellbinding traditional songs performed between scenes
by the Kazakhstani master Ulzhan Baibussynova, who accompanies
herself on the two-stringed dombra; impatiently frown upon Sellars'
staging choices, such as the ritualized slo-mo self-sacrifice
of the girl; complain about the energy vacuum in the play's last
20 minutes. The reason one could easily do all this, and more,
without relating Sellars' directorial devisings to the contemporary
questions of refugees, state power, and citizens' obligations
raised in the rest of the evening, is that the director left the
evening's most crucial link woefully weak. The key limitation
is the children of Herakles themselves.
Everywhere Sellars presents The Children
of Herakles (it has already played in France, Germany, and
Italy) he casts, as the program insert describes them, local "refugee
and immigrant youth" as the eponymous brood. So in Cambridge,
some dozen brown adolescent boys in hoodies, Nikes, and baggy
jeans sit silently on stage throughout the play, and are joined
halfway through by a dozen brown pubescent girls in tight dungarees
and tees. But we never hear a word from or about these kids: where
they came from, how they got here, what's up in algebra class
or field hockey practice. They are merely an Artistic Idea. An
abstraction. Props.
True, Euripides doesn't give the children
any words to say, and Sellars is almost totally faithful to the
text. (He reassigns a few lines here and there, "kings" become
"presidents," and Baiboussynova sings to Allah, not Zeus, atop
the altar to Athena she graces so gloriously; otherwise there
are no changes.) But once Sellars takes the step of using real
refugee kids, he can not make them so irrelevant, so undifferentiated,
if he genuinely means to engage his audience in thinking about
their own country's policies. Even without tinkering with Euripides,
he could have featured these kids in the pre-show discussions,
giving one or two a turn each night; he might have extended what
amounts to a very brief break for snacks between the play and
the film (billed as a dinner with opportunities to chat with the
featured experts and cast members) and actually organized tables
with a mixture of spectators, kids, company members, and a moderator,
and supplied ample time for conversation.
That would have required jettisoning the
film series, which might not have been a bad idea. The film doesn't
start until almost four hours into the evening and at least on
the night I attended, few playgoers stayed for it. That night
the film was The Valley, a documentary with impressive
and often graphic footage from the trenches of both sides of the
war in Kosovo, but with absolutely zero analysis, at least in
its first hour. Watching with fatigue, I recalled a remark in
A Bed for the Night, David Reiff's devastating critique
of the humanitarianism industry. He recounts a warning he heard
from a colleague the first time he set out for Bosnia: "You don't
learn anything from the bang-bang." I wasn't learning anything
and left before the film was over. I would have much preferred
hearing about that algebra test or field hockey team, engaging,
that is, the public conversation Sellars so rightly wants to encourage.
But he does not supply it the room or the nudge it needs in order
to happen. The audience stays passive all night long, comfortable
in our familiar role as consumers. And just when we might exchange
a word with a stranger, ask a kid a question, it's time for the
next act.
The kids do have a central action they
make twice in the course of the play, once when the President
of Athens grants them refuge, and again when they are free to
go home: they come out into the house to shake hands with audience
members and thank us for taking them in. It's hokey, yet it's
also the only moment of hot emotion in the production, otherwise
mostly played with spare, unpsychologized declaiming into microphones.
The point seems to be that this gesture is more about us than
about them.
Following Euripides, Sellars draws a direct
connection between the Athenian citizens of the play and the audience
in the theater. The journalist Christopher Lydon, who also moderates
the pre-show discussions, and Heather Benton play the chorus of
citizens, reading from scripts at a table situated in the front
of the house. Sellars seems to want us to really become those
Athenians, emulate them by living up to the democratic ideals
that demand the protection of refugees. Trouble is, that's not
where Euripides leaves the play. Toward the end, he makes a sudden
turn into new political and emotional territory.
Some scholars think Euripides tailored
the play's ending to comment on the executions, without trial,
of five Peloponnesian envoys transiting through Athens a few months
before The Children of Herakles had its premiere, a time
when Athens was at war with the Peloponnesian League. In the final
scene, Alcmene, the aggrieved mother of Herakles, vengefully demands
Eurystheus's head, even though the law forbids the execution of
prisoners of war. The chorus of citizens accedes to Alcmene's
vengeful claim as long as their kings, they say, "are cleared
of all responsibility." How easily ardor overcomes jurisprudence.
Having nobly gone to war to protect refugees, the Athenians now
passively stand by as a prisoner is executed. Euripides rebukes
his Dionysia Festival audience with this irony, cautioning them
against getting too smug about ideals they can so casually let
slide. What's more, Euripides refuses any romanticizing of the
refugees as thoroughly innocent and heroic by making Alcmene's
bloodlust so ugly.
How are we to read this ending in a time
and place where Alcmene's demand is utterly normal? Sellars provides
no answer. Governor George Ryan's laudable commutation of 150
death sentences this week notwithstanding, America doesn't express
much horror at capital punishment; quite the contrary, especially
when the relatives of the victim get to play a role in sentencing.
And when it's enemy combatants who are involved, as our attorney
general insists, who needs a trial?
Sellars grabs for a reference point for
this final scene by dressing Eurystheus in a prisoner's orange
jumpsuit and chains, and placing him behind a voice-distorting
piece of Plexiglass such as those that separate inmates from their
visitors. The modern dress is not what's jarring--Iolaus as well
as Athens' president and Eurystheus' emissary (both played by
women) wear business suits. Indeed, only Alcmene's modified black
burka feels out of place. The gesture toward a huge new set of
issues, however, which aren't really taken up, leeches away the
production's intensity. Drawing a correspondence, after all, isn't
a dramatic argument and the image feels ungrounded, unballasted
by any exploration of all that image calls forth.
The danger here--as with all quick contemporary
reference in classical theater--is that the one-dimensional associations
actually weaken the contemporary power of the play. They become
not a spur to thinking the parallels through but to more cynicism
and resignation as one merely recognizes that the brutality of
today has been with us for 2400 years. That's the last thing Sellars
is after, although Euripides may not be so optimistic.
print version