Ancient Drama in Performance: Theory and Practice

The Practice Matters to the Understanding

Randolph College is blessed with an architectural treasure: the Mabel K. Whiteside Greek Theatre.  Built in 1939 and 1961 with an eye to recreating the space in which Greek drama was originally performed, it honors the work of Mabel Whiteside and her students, who performed forty Greek plays in the years from 1909 to 1954.

Now the theatre is host to the only regular series of original practices productions of Greek drama in the United States (or perhaps anywhere).  By “original practices” we mean that we replicate as far as possible the conventions and conditions for which the ancient playwrights composed their works.  We perform the plays in English and include women in our casts, but otherwise attempt to perform the dramas as the original casts might have.  We believe that we have a better understanding of ancient drama because we are facing the same challenges, economies, and opportunities that the ancient playwrights faced.  We have, for instance, succeeded in creating and using masks that show how effective the ancient technology was acoustically and artistically. (Didaskalia 7.1 [2007])  The six productions of the new series (Antigone, Iphigeneia at Aulis, Libation Bearers, Bacchae, Clouds, and Sophocles’ Elektra) have each revealed or underscored fresh interpretations of aspects of the plays, including the extreme youth of Iphigeneia, the theatrical daring of Aeschylus, and the unexpected humor in Sophocles.

Ancient Drama in Performance: Theory and Practice will inaugurate a new era in which we mean to share our methods of understanding with other students and scholars of the ancient stage, both Greek and Roman.  We are responding to a growing interest in ancient drama as it is practiced, of which Didaskalia, the Oxford Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama, and numerous recent international conferences on ancient performance are witness.  Inspired by the success of the Blackfriars Conference, which brings together Shakespeare scholars and practitioners to learn from one another within the context of an early modern playing space, we will invite students, scholars, and practitioners of ancient drama to come together in the Greek theatre on the Randolph College campus.

Ancient Drama in Performance will be an opportunity for conference-goers to witness and reflect on an original-practices Greek play that aims to be a living drama rather than a museum piece and also to share and discuss other productive ways of playing Greek drama.  The meeting will coincide with the production of a new translation of Euripides’ Hecuba directed by Amy R. Cohen, and we look forward both to demonstrating the dramatic power of original practices and to learning much from the responses of the conference-goers.  We encourage all scholars of ancient drama to attend, whether or not performance issues have ever been part of their work, and all practitioners of ancient drama to attend, whether or not they use original practices.  For those who do involve performance in their scholarship, the meeting will be an opportunity to use our remarkable theatre to test their own theories about how the ancients practiced drama.  For those who have not made performance a factor, it will be an opportunity to discover the large and small ways that practical questions of theatre inform and enrich the philological and literary study of plays.  We will also share research and scholarship in a context that insists on the play as an experience.

Dear Amy,

Today I just received the announcement regarding the conference and the coming performance of Hecuba. What a good idea! Best wishes as you prepare for what looks like an exciting event.

With best wishes,

Timothy Wutrich
Case Western Reserve University
Cleveland, Ohio

http://faculty2.randolphcollege.edu/ancientdrama/about/