BY MEGO LIEN

In print | Published November 20, 2003

“If you choose to open your mouth and enter the political arena, as a woman you cannot but damage the life of your children.”

So declared actress Olympia Dukakis as she compared the modern woman to Aeschylus’s “Clytemnestra” at Friday’s theater symposium, “Staging Aeschylus Today.” Students and faculty gathered in the Scheuer Room at 1 p.m. to engage in active discussion with renowned thinkers in the fields of classics and theater.

Organized by Edith Hall, Cornell visiting professor in humanities, the symposium comprised two panel discussions, “Translating Persians” and “Performing Agamemnon,” and culminated in a workshop with Peter Meineck, Hall’s colleague and director with the Aquila Theater Company, and Dukakis, who is currently collaborating with Meineck on an American adaptation of “Agamemnon.”

Discussion focused on recent restaging of “The Persians” and of “Agamemnon,” particularly around gender politics, in order to render Greek tragedy more accessible to modern audiences. “Since 1969, there have been more revivals of Greek plays than ever before,” theater professor Erin Mee said.

Hall said the movement “has to do with social reasons, political reasons [and] anti-war and civil rights movements.” She also cited appreciation of the aesthetics and ritual of Greek drama in the open-air theater.

Theater major Joy Mills ’05 said she was “impressed with the caliber of panelists present.” Sitting next to Dukakis, Mee and Meineck were theater department chair Allen Kuharski; Helene Foley, professor of classics at Barnard and Columbia; Elizabeth Scharffenberger, professor of classics at Columbia; and Robert Auletta from the School of Visual Arts in New York City.

“I’ve never seen a panel quite like this,” Mills said, noting in particular Dukakis’s passion and “powerful demeanor” as she and Meineck led the workshop discussion on their adaptation of “Agamemnon.”

“I [also] loved having the classics professors there, since they knew the literature cold and knew the historical context,” Mills said.

Mills said that “theater studies at Swarthmore puts a lot of emphasis on the theater-maker — the person who can do everything as well as know all the theory.” Consequently, “Staging Aeschylus Today” fit well into the agenda of the theater and classics departments.

“I am trying to put classics on the map,” Hall said. “Classics in its new millennium form.” She called Swarthmore “the ideal place” for such a project.

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