P.C. FOR THE AGES
By Alisa Solomon
The Children of Herakles
By Euripides (translation by Ralph Gladstone)
American Repertory Theater, Cambridge,
MA, Jan. 4-25, 2003
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.