Make Thebes Great Again: The Bacchae of Euripides in the Age of Trump

For the publication of the scripts, photographs, and program notes, see Schechner (1970), unpaginated throughout.

An earlier “re-enactment” of Dionysus in 69 was put on in Austin, TX, in 2009 by the Rude Mechanicals directed by Shawn Sides. For her reflections on the process, see Sides (2015).

For the SITI Company’s production, I used archival footage from the J. Paul Getty Museum and a pre-publication draft of the translation. I extend my gratitude to Ralph Flores and Corey Gordon for facilitating the former and Aaron Poochigian for providing the latter. Reviews include McNulty (2018); Soloski (2018); McMahon (2019), and there are interviews with director Anne Bogart by Isenberg (2018); Preston (2020). I am also grateful to Poochigian and Melissa Sellew for discussing their experience in the audience in private correspondence and to Dan Norman for providing production photographs from the Guthrie Theater. For CTH, I have deployed archival footage (thanks are due to Ryan Patrick Ervin for his facilitation) and my own transcriptions of the script. The performance was reviewed by Solís (2019) and Smith (2020), and there is an interview with director Carl Cofield by Soltes (2019). In addition, I have benefited from personal email correspondence with J. R. Teeter, director of Dionysus in 17 at Bread and Water Theatre (September 4, 2020).

Oedipus is the best-known model: perceived as foreign, though a native-born Theban; acting as husband, while also a son; Zeitlin (1986: 103–6).

For a survey of these and other examples, see Garland 2003: 188–89. And on the censorship of Greek plays in England more broadly, see Macintosh 1995.

Note the title of the Breitbart review, “‘Trump’ Stabbed to Death in Central Park Performance of ‘Julius Caesar’” (Nussbaum 2017). Regarding the anger provoked by this depiction, Gilbert (2017) observes that within the past decade productions of the same play had Caesars resembling Hillary Clinton, Barak Obama, and Dick Cheney. For a survey of correspondences between Trump and other Shakespearean characters, see Green (2021); e.g., also in summer 2017, there was an Off-Broadway one-man show, Trump Lear, by David Carl.

Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are mine from J. Diggle’s 1994 Oxford Classical Text.

The term “metatheater,” was first coined by Abel (1953) for twentieth-century drama. For the Bacchae, see Foley (1985: 205–58); Bierl (1991: 177–218); Segal (1997: 215–71, 369–78); Dobrov (2001: 70–85).

Cf. Pentheus’ response to Teiresias’ theological (if sophistic and opportunistic) arguments for Dionysus’ divinity (266–327). Rather than responding to the substance of the speech, Pentheus insults and intimidates the speaker (343–51).

They were, of course, as the messenger proceeds to describe (689–714), engaged in other strange and even violent behaviors on Cithaeron, if not the inebriated sexuality that Pentheus suspected. For his part, though, the messenger took their actions as clear evidence for the arrival of a genuine divinity.

On the early revivals of ancient drama first attested in colleges at Cambridge, see Kenward (2016). Prior to the 1908 Bacchae, there are, for example, more than 50 documented stagings each of Sophocles’ Oedipus and Euripides’ Medea; for the data, see the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama (APGRD): http://​www.​apgrd.​ox.​ac.​uk/​.​research-collections/​performance-database/​productions. Scholarly and intellectual interest in the Bacchae, however, can be traced earlier at least to the mid-nineteenth century; see the recent analysis of Billings (2018). For an overview of the Bacchae’s popularity in antiquity through the Byzantine period, see Friesen (2015).

According APGRD, in the years between 1908 and 1968, the Bacchae was staged 35 times, in contrast to nearly 150 performances in the following 50 years (1969–2018). Two additional productions of the Bacchae had occurred earlier in the 1960s, on which see Hartigan (1995: 82–3). In 1963, Minos Volanakis directed the play at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh which attempted to connect it with the mood of the 1960s, e.g., the experience of ecstasy through LSD; the second was produced in 1967 at the Library and Museum of Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. Harry Partch’s 1960 musical Revelation in the Courthouse Park was also based on the Bacchae. Dionysus in 69 also marks a transition for ancient drama more broadly, as Edith Hall noted in the 2004 volume Dionysus Since 69: “[m]ore Greek tragedy has been performed in the last thirty years than at any point in history since Greco-Roman antiquity” (2).

Or, “environmental theatre.” For a concise description of its central characteristics, see Schechner (1968); and for analysis of Dionysus in 69, see Isaac (1970); Zeitlin (2004); Fischer-Lichte (2014: 27–47); Jenkins (2015); Lecznar (2020: 151–60).

See Schechner (1985). The anthropological and ethnographic work of Victor Turner was a definitive influence.

See Zeitlin 2004: 55–6. As Isaac (1970: 434) observed, “[s]exual assaults upon individual members of the audience is almost a trademark of Schechner’s work; with Dionysus in 69 it became a necessary part of the action.” This was not well received by all critics. Walter Kerr (1968) described the event as “arrogant, condescending, and self-indulgent” and complains about the discomfort of the experience: “I didn’t want to dance, I wanted to smoke,” but smoking was forbidden. Kerr notes the irony that the offer of freedom from external constraints apparently did not extend to the regulations imposed by the Fire Department (nor was there an intermission wherein he could enjoy a cigarette because “intermissions are bad for orgies”). Fundamentally, then, its liberation was illusory, because the performers are ultimately “in control of the master plan. They are free to do what they wish to do. We are only free to do what they wish us to do or invite us to do.”.

Unsurprisingly, this occasionally attracted unwanted attention, and eventually the practice of performing nude was discontinued, primarily because it resulted in unsafe conditions. In the meantime, though, the production went on tour to college campuses through the Midwest, and on January 27, at the University of Michigan, ten members of the cast were arrested for indecent exposure. According to the New York Times, the audience of approximately 800 included policemen and state legislators, who “have lately been concerned over student activism, including recent poetry readings in the nude” (“10 Nudes in ‘Dionysus’ Arrested at Michigan U,” New York Times, January 28, 1969). These latter-day Pentheuses, thus, re-enacted the drama with an imminence well beyond what Schechner could have planned. And with ten devotees of Dionysus locked up in the Ann Arbor jail, one wonders whether the prison guards passed the night in fear of an impending earthquake!

As Lecznar (2020: 130–60) has recently discussed, moreover, Schechner’s production responded to intellectual debates concerning limitations of knowledge and rationality that were current in the 1960s while also rooted in the views of Nietzsche expressed in The Birth of Tragedy.

After the election of Richard Nixon, the play’s ending was altered so that rather than a campaign rally, Dionysus curses Cadmus: “you will be contracted by the Greek Mafia to make a hit on Richard Nixon, who has decided that Spiro Agnew deserves the job. Nixon is tired of the Presidency and is going to be the first President to commit suicide by assassination” (Schechner 1970).

Played by Lillah McCarthy, appearing in the surviving photographs as distinctly feminine (Sampatakakis 2017: 191–3) and, as Bullen (2021: 59–60) suggests, embodying the ideal of the New Woman.

This line is not part of Poochigian’s translation; it apparently originated as an ad-lib then became a regular feature of the performance.

The function of the mask of Dionysus in the Bacchae has received considerable scholarly attention; e.g., Foley (1985: 246–54); Wiles (2007: 221–31); Billings (2017).

Another distinctive feature of reality TV is its business model: it exploited an amateur, unpaid, labor force in place of professional actors, and built its financial success on self-branding and product placement; see Ouellette (2014: 4–5).

For a survey and discussion of these, see Poniewozik (2019: 60–82).

See, e.g., the “Special Section: The Reality Celebrity of Donald Trump,” in Television & New Media 17.7 (2016): 646–70; Ott and Dickinson (2019: 10–11). According to Haberman, et al. (2017), “Before taking office, Mr. Trump told top aides to think of each presidential day as an episode in a television show in which he vanquishes rivals.”

For analysis of Trump’s 2016 campaign in relation to reality TV, see Andrejevic (2016: 32); Ouellette (2016); Hearn (2016); Ott and Dickinson (2019: 10–11); Grobe (2020: 797–9).

For an assessment of Trump’s support among these Christian constituencies, see Fea (2018); Margolis (2020).

Already in the first modern staging of the Bacchae (1908), the subversive gender politics of casting Dionysus with a female actor was evident, as Lillah McCarthy was a well-known feminist activist; see Bullen (2021).

This bilingualism is a gesture to the Bacchae of Tadashi Suzuki (co-founder of the SITI Company), which was produced in several distinct iterations between 1978 and 2008 in Japan, USA, and Australia, with various bilingual combinations (Ellen Lauren herself played Agave in 1994); see Fischer-Lichte 2014: 159–85. From a different perspective, issues of race and postcolonialism were prominent in the 1973 adaptation by Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka (The Bacchae of Euripides: A Communion Rite); see Fischer-Lichte 2014: 48–71; Lecznar 2020: 161–92.

The text of Euripides simply reads, “but as many as are away, I shall hunt from the mountain, and after binding them in iron nets, I shall quickly stop this wretched Bacchic frenzy” (my trans.).

This while advancing yet another false claim that Hillary Clinton was the first to question Obama’s birthplace in 2008; see Haberman and Rappeport 2016.

“Full Text: Donald Trump Announces a Presidential Bid,” Washington Post, June 16, 2015 (https://​www.​washingtonpost.​com/​news/​post-politics/​wp/​2015/​06/​16/​full-text-donald-trump-announces-a-presidential-bid/​) [accessed April 6, 2020].

Sometimes dubbed “White Rage”; see Ott and Dickinson (2019). On the appeal of Christian nationalism for Trump’s supporters, see Gorski (2017); Whitehead, Perry, and Baker (2018).

“Donald Trump to Howard Stern: It’s Okay to Call My Daughter a ‘Piece of Ass,’” CNN, October 9, 2016 (https://​www.​cnn.​com/​2016/​10/​08/​politics/​trump-on-howard-stern/​) [accessed April 6, 2020].