Jay Hopkins and John Hunter’s The Iliad, The Odyssey, And All of Greek Mythology in 99 Minutes or Less (IOGM from here on out) has to be an incredibly taxing play to perform, as each of the five actors plays a multitude of roles, each demanding its own character. The actor with the fewest number …
Tag: Greek Drama
The Women of Trachis: New Jersey Hospice and Palliative Care Nurses Association, by Theater of War Productions—27 July 2022
Theater of War Productions is one of the most exciting companies in the performance of ancient Greek and Shakespearean plays because they tie each performance to a particular social issue and use the performances as a jumping off point for discussions of the issue. Their recent version of Sophocles’ The Women of Trachis was performed …
Antigone in Ferguson, by Theater of War Productions–9 Aug. 2020
Theater of War’s Antigone in Ferguson adapts the Sophocles play in the context of the Black Lives Matter movement and its specific history in Ferguson, MO following the murder of Michael Brown by police in 2014. Organized and run by members of the Ferguson community working with professional actors and singers from New York and …
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The Persians, by Aeschylus, 25 July 2020
Aeschylus’ The Persians is one of the oldest and most interesting plays in Western history, being unique among surviving ancient Athenian plays in being set entirely outside the Greek speaking world, and in unique among tragedies in being about current events rather than a mythological subject. The play premiered in 472 BCE, just eight years …
Antigone, by Sophocles–1 Mar. 2018
When going to see a theatre production at a college theatre you’ve never been to before, you never know what you’re going to get. College theatre is of notoriously varied quality. Which is why I was so pleased with Juniata College’s production of Antigone, directed by Leigh Hendrix. While there were some performance limitations, the …
Argonautika, by Mary Zimmerman–30 Oct. 2017
Mary Zimmerman’s Argonautika straddles a number of boundaries—between ancient epic and modern drama, between comedy and tragedy, between poetry and theatre. Following the tale of Jason and the Argonauts, this modern adaptation based on the tale recounted in the Greek by Apollonius and in the Latin by Gaius Valerius Flaccus. But this is certainly no …
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The Trojan Women, by Euripides (adapted by Gwendolyn MacEwen)–6 Dec. 2016
Euripides’ The Trojan Women is widely regarded as one of the greatest anti-war plays of all time, and it seems unfortunately timely today. With wars raging in the Middle East, and with the largest refugee crisis since WWII is Syria, Euripides’ lamentation reaches across the millennia to admonish us to this day. This transhistorical element …
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Phillip Zapkin 