In ancient Greek mythology, Dionysus is the god of theater, wine and ecstatic pleasure. In other words, my kind of guy. The Bacchae—the final play by the Greek playwright Euripides—tells the story of how the often-temperamental god avenges himself when the city of Thebes refuses to pay him the homage he believes he deserves. I reveled in Alan Cumming’s flamboyant portrayal of the deity in the National Theatre of Scotland’s captivating production of the play at last summer’s Lincoln Center Festival (click here to read my review). And I was eager to see what the avant-garde director JoAnne Akalaitis would do with it for the Shakespeare in the Park production that opened at the Delacorte Theater on Monday night. As it turned out, she hasn’t done nearly enough.
The main job of a director is to develop a vision for a play and get all the people involved in the show—the actors, designers and, in this case, the noted composer Philip Glass—to share that vision and bring it alive on stage. And as the classicist Simon Goldhill points out in his book “How to Stage Greek Tragedy Today,” the degree of difficulty rises when the play is a Greek drama since that gives the director the extra burden of finding a way to pull in the chorus that comments on the action in Greek plays and the gods who populate them so that those elements are also in harmony with the guiding vision. But everyone involved in the Akalaitis production seems to be dancing to his or her own lyre.
Jonathan Groff, who made a name for himself in Spring Awakening and last summer’s park production of Hair, is adorable. But just being cute doesn’t cut it when you’re playing Dionysus. If you’re going to be a god, then you’ve gotta be godly. The idea seems to be to have him portray the character as a rock star—Groff is costumed in torn jeans and a leather jacket—but, as my friend Jesse observed, he desperately needs some Mick Jagger-style swagger, the kind of menace that makes rock stars so divinely seductive.
Similarly Joan Macintoh fails to convey the anguish of Queen Agave who discovers, in true Greek-tragedy style, that she has unknowingly committed an horrendous murder. Anthony Mackie does a little better as Pentheus, the sanctimonious ruler of Thebes. But having found one strong note—how dogmatic the character is—he plays it over and over again. Older actors like George Bartenieff as the patriarch Cadmus and André De Shields as the blind prophet Teiresias do slightly better. But you know something is wrong when bottom-of-the- Playbill characters like the Herdsman (Steven Rishard) and the Messenger (Rocco Sisto) are the standouts. It’s true that their speeches about terrible deeds are vivid in Nicholas Rudall’s translation but the audience the night Jesse and I saw the show just seemed grateful to have actors onstage who expressed some genuine emotion.
One of the show’s draws was supposed to be the original music composed by Glass, who is also Akalaitis’ former husband (click here to read a New York Times story about them). His score turns out to be more melodic than I had expected but it doesn’t seem to have much to do with the show. Nor really does David Neumann’s synchronized choreography for the Chorus—12 women of different ages, ethnicities, shapes and dancing abilities.
The designers go their own way too. John Conklin’s set resembles a miniature sports arena complete with metal bleachers and a wading pool. I got that it's supposed to evoke the amphitheaters in which Greek plays were performed but the Delacorte itself already does that and watching characters run and up down the bleachers or splash in the water for no apparent reason got tired fast. I have no idea what Kaye Voyce is trying to evoke with the costumes. Groff and Mackie are in modern dress, Bartenieff and De Shields are done up like vaudevillians and the all-female Chorus look like refugees from a Vegas version of The King and I.
“How bad was that?” asked the young, Brad Pitt-look-a-like who struck up a conversation with Jesse and me as we walked out of the park. He told us he was an actor and he had the arrogant aura that would have made for a good Dionysus. I’m not sure what the god himself would have thought of the production. There is something almost mystical about seeing any show on a beautiful night in the park. And the ushers were allowing people to carry plastic cups of wine to their seats. But as for the ecstatic pleasure, he would have to look elsewhere.
Good art provokes a conversation between the person who makes it and the person who sees or hears it. Each dialog is unique and so I can’t really tell you what were the best shows of this past year but I can say that the following 10, listed in alphabetical order, really spoke to me.
Adding Machine Because this adaptation of Elmer Rice’s 1923 play about an everyman accountant who snaps after being replaced by an adding machine not only taps into the zeitgeist of our own scary economic times but shows that chamber musicals can produce real show tunes and not just the ersatz arias that make so many of them a chore to sit through.
The Bacchae Because the National Theatre of Scotland’s production of Euripides’s tragedy provided flamboyant proof that a production of classic Greek drama can be simultaneously true to the play’s ancient text and thoroughly entertaining for modern audiences.
Billy Elliot Because this adaptation of the movie about a British miner’s son who dreams of becoming a ballet dancer is one of the most out-and-out entertaining musicals to open on Broadway in years and because, in the tradition of the great Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals like the year's equally splendid revival of South Pacific, it also has something to say.
Black Watch Because the National Theatre of Scotland’s meditation on the war in Iraq was a truly innovative production, superbly acted, marvelously staged and fully reproducible in no medium other than the theater.
A Body of Water Because this mysterious little play about a couple who seem to suffer from joint amnesia ruminates on questions about life and death and love and redemption in such a compelling way that I haven’t been able to get it out of my mind.
Fela! Because newcomer Sahr Ngaujah is phenomenal as Fela Kuti, the Nigerian pop musician and political activist who challenged his country’s corrupt and repressive leaders, and because Afrobeat, the exuberant mix of jazz, funk and traditional African rhythms that Fela helped to create, is irresistible.
Gypsy Because Patti LuPone’s performance as Mama Rose in this classic backstage musical is one of those once-in-a- lifetime performances that people will talk about for years to come and because not only LuPone but her terrific co-stars Laura Benanti and Boyd Gaines stayed with the show right through to the end.
In the Heights Because although it’s not a great show, it’s a really great feel-good show that brings new energy and contemporary sounds to the musical and new audiences to Broadway.
The Seagull Because this production of the Chekhov classic got the mix between the comic and the tragic just right and because the 22-year-old British actress Carey Mulligan gave the most heartbreaking performance of the season.
Top Girls Because Caryl Churchill’s play about what it costs women to succeed was the most soul-nourishing night I had at the theater all year.
Like many kids, I was enchanted by the stories of Greek and Roman mythology. Like, I suspect, only a few, I spent the summer between 7th and 8th grades, reading “The Odyssey” and “The Iliad.” And I’ve never quite shaken my fascination with their original superheroes. I may be the only person living in a Manhattan zip code to admit to not only having seen but actually liking Wolfgang Petersen’s “Troy” with Brad Pitt as the mighty Greek hero Achilles and Eric Bana as his worthy Trojan rival Hector. And yet, it was with no little trepidation that I made my way to the Rose Theater in the Time Warner Center to see the National Theatre of Scotland’s production of Euripides’s The Bacchae, which kicked off this summer’s Lincoln Center Festival 08.
I think it was all those pictures of a golden-skirted Alan Cumming as the god Dionysus that gave me pause. Did I really want to see him do his androgyny thing again? I needn’t have worried. Both he and the production are splendid. And I suspect that Euripides would have liked it all as well. According to the reference books, Greek plays were divided strictly along genre lines—tragedies, comedies, and something call satyr plays that tended to be raunchy. But Euripides seems to have liked to mix them up a bit. And that’s just what this show does.
The Bacchae tells the story of Dionysus, the son of the chief god Zeus and a human woman, who returns to his mother’s homeland, demands that his countryman recognize him as a god and wreaks retribution when they refuse. Despite the life and death subject matter, there’s campy humor (Xanadu fans would feel quite at home), rousing gospel and soul singing by a nine-member chorus of black women dressed in fabulous red gowns, and flamboyant stagecraft (I know you’ve already heard about the opening where an upside-down Cumming descends from the heavens with his naked butt facing the audience). But there’s harrowing tragedy too, most notably in the Italian-born and British-trained actress Paola Dionisotti’s affective portrayal of Agave, the mother who, in typical Greek drama fashion, unknowingly murders her child (click here to hear Cumming and Dionisotti discuss the play and to see excerpts from the original Scottish production).
Anyone with just a passing knowledge of Greek drama knows that dysfunctional families are the ur-theme of western theater. Of course, even the experts have only a passing knowledge of Greek drama because so little of it has survived. The plays grew out of religious rituals and were often one-time only events written to be presented at festivals held to honor Dionysus, the god of wine and ecstatic good times and, eventually the divine patron of the theater.
Only the works of the playwrights Euripides, Sophocles and Aeschylus remain and so we don’t really know how they would compare if we could read or see the works of their peers. But there are indications that they were considered the big dogs of their day. Aeschylus, the eldest of the three, is reported to have won the top honor at Athens’s annual City Dionysia festival 13 times; Sophocles did even better with 18 first prizes. Euripides took home that award just five times but he may have gotten the last laugh. And not just because more of his plays survive than those of the other two. It’s because Euripedes is actually sort of a postmodern kind of guy.
The characters in his plays are more complex, even recognizably neurotic to a 21st century sensibility. His tone tends to be cynically irreverent and almost contemporarily wary of the establishment. The once-again-hot debate over rationalism versus religion is the main subject of The Bacchae, which was first performed posthumously after Euripides died in 406 B.C. at the august age of 74 and which won his final Dionysia honor. But what I most like about him is that judging from such works as Medea, Andromache, Hecuba, Electra, The Trojan Women, Iphigeneia in Tauris and even the characters Agave and the Maenads, or mad women, in The Bacchae, Euripides was comfortable dealing with strong female characters, even if the parts back them were played by men.
And for that reason alone, I don’t know why we don’t see more of his works done, given all the brilliant female actors who have far too few opportunities to really strut their stuff. David Greig’s colloquial script shows that the dialog can be adapted for modern ears. And John Tiffany, the director who created last year’s highly acclaimed Black Watch at St. Ann’s Warehouse, has mounted a 90-minute production that is simultaneously true to the play’s ancient text and thoroughly entertaining for modern audiences even if the only Odyssey they know is the new Honda minivan. But the run ends on July 13 so there are only a few days left if you want to revel in this surprisingly satisfying bacchanal.
In ancient Greek mythology, Dionysus is the god of theater, wine and ecstatic pleasure. In other words, my kind of guy. The Bacchae—the final play by the Greek playwright Euripides—tells the story of how the often-temperamental god avenges himself when the city of Thebes refuses to pay him the homage he believes he deserves. I reveled in Alan Cumming’s flamboyant portrayal of the deity in the National Theatre of Scotland’s captivating production of the play at last summer’s Lincoln Center Festival (click here to read my review). And I was eager to see what the avant-garde director JoAnne Akalaitis would do with it for the Shakespeare in the Park production that opened at the Delacorte Theater on Monday night. As it turned out, she hasn’t done nearly enough. 
