Playw
Gro Bert
How Greek Tragedy Works is a journey through the hidden meanings and dual nature of Greek tragedy, drawing on its foremost dramatists to bring about a deeper understanding of how and why to engage with these enduring plays.
Brian Kulick dispels the trepidation that many readers feel with regard to classical texts by equipping them with ways in which they can unpack the hidden meanings of these plays. He focuses on three of the key texts of Greek theatre: Aeschylus' Agamemnon, Euripides' The Bacchae, and Sophocles' Electra, and uses them to tease out the core principles of the theatre-making and storytelling impulses. By encouraging us to read between the lines like this, he also enables us to read these and other Greek tragedies as artists' manifestos, equipping us not only to understand tragedy itself, but also to interpret what the great playwrights had to say about the nature of plays and drama.
We learn they had a son Robert, the pride of their lives whose death Robert mystically foreshadowed in a dream which his cousin also mysteriously had. He died during WWI in a play crash in a death which his mother like any devoted mother never could reconcile easily. Sir William Gregory attempted to practice noblesse oblige for the suffering Irish people under his care at a time when it was least appreciated. And his actions Lady Gregory implies were mischaracterized and reshaped to satisfy another agenda.
This production is many things: a historical encomium, a mini-revival of Irish playwrights, an affirmation and revisiting of that vital Irish literary renaissance in the early twentieth century and beyond. Importantly, it is a celebration of a woman who accomplished much for Irish theater and cemented the connections between Ireland and the United States, something which Americans need to be reminded of.
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