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“Preacher 'D'” Comes to Harlem: A Review of Euripides' The Bacchae

2019; Boston University; Volume: 27; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/arn.2019.0008

2327-6436

Helaine L. Smith,

Literary Theory and Cultural Hermeneutics

“Preacher ‘D’” Comes to Harlem: A Review of Euripides’ The Bacchae HELAINE L. SMITH Aristotle says that tragedies are best when the anagnorisis (“recognition”) and the peripeteia (“reversal”) occur simultaneously, and often they do, or in close succession and almost always, for the same character. The Bacchae is an exception. The peripeteia comes first, or at least the first reversal of fortune comes first, and it comes when Pentheus re-enters from the palace, dressed as a Bacchant—forever lost to himself, his dignity, power, and sanity gone and him not knowing it. The pity and terror we feel at that moment are actually the result of the absence of recognition. Then, much later, there is an anagnorisis—for a character we have never seen before who is brought onstage precisely for that purpose, Agave,1 whose recognition is of such magnitude that her reversal of fortune is almost irrelevant. At the end, too, without any anagnorisis to speak of, Cadmus undergoes a change, which, being mythic (transformation into a dragon whose army will ravage far countries) moves us very little, although the play is, in every other way, overwhelming. It is a terrifically hard play to get right, and one comes slowly to think that the Bacchae cannot be updated, so exquisitely dependent as it is upon site and mask, upon ancient arion 27.3 winter 2020 Euripides’ The Bacchae, performed by The Classical Theatre of Harlem in an adaptation by Brian Doerries, directed by Carl Cofield , and starring Jason C. Brown as Dionysus, RJ Foster as Pentheus , Andrea Patterson as Agaue, Brian Demar Jones as Messenger, and Charles Bernard Murray as Cadmus, with Choreography by Tiffany Rea-Fisher, Music by Frederick Kennedy, and Costumes by Lex Liang, at the Richard Rodgers Amphitheater, Marcus Garvey Park, New York City, July 7–28, 2019. Admission free. 180 “preacher ‘d’” comes to harlem Chorus and the outdoors. After I saw Alan Cummings and the National Theatre of Scotland do the show as camp several years ago, and after it resurfaced at the Brooklyn Academy of Music last year as modified kabuki, and when this past summer The Classical Theatre of Harlem, with great cleverness , made Dionysus part preacher, part rock star, I came to think that anything other than the play, exactly as conceived by Euripides, is a reduction of its power and meaning. There is short film clip, made sometime in the 1970s or 1980s, filmed at Dodona in Northern Greece, consisting solely of exchanges between Pentheus and Dionysus. Michael Elliott directs Edward Fox as Pentheus and Terence Stamp as Dionysus in what is the most brilliant rendering of the character of Dionysus and the destruction of Pentheus I have ever seen. The film lasts no longer than thirteen minutes, and contains only Dionysus’ opening (“I have come, Dionysus, son of Zeus, to the land of Thebes . . .”), the initial exchange between the two in which Pentheus remarks upon the hair and skin of Dionysus, their brief further exchange after Dionysus has broken out of his chains, the scene in which Dionysus offers to Pentheus the suggestion of dressing like a Maenad, and then the re-entry of Pentheus, costumed.2 Pentheus speaks not at all in his re-entry; he is robed and veiled, mostly in white. All he does, as Dionysus quietly watches, is walk in a broken step, head bobbing, mind paralyzed. I have never seen a moment in theatre more magnificent or more terrible; it is almost unearthly. This is, I think, the Bacchae as Euripides imagined it. Any sense of what the Bacchic chorus felt like rests entirely on surmise—on static objects like vase paintings and relief sculptures of Maenads in swirling gowns, heads bent in ecstatic trance.3 No recent production has gotten it right. Michael Elliott could have done, for it takes a director who cares more about what the play is than about what clever twist it can be given in staging. But the text can be gotten right, as the Michael Elliott version shows. Helaine L. Smith 181 I wonder, too, whether the ease, the ho-hum attitude, with which our audiences today regard homosexuality, cross-dressing, and fear of being...