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The Persians Revisited
Listen to a song from a production of "The Persians: A Comedy About War With Five Songs"
To the dramatist, all history is allegory. Deconstruct, reconstruct, adapt or poeticize the past, and it will confess some message, moral, or accusation. To that end, artists around the world have resurrected an obscure 2,500-year-old historical play, hoping it will shed light on one of the greatest political controversies of our time.
The oldest extant play and the only surviving Greek tragedy about a contemporaneous (rather than mythological) topic, The Persians was written by Aeschylus in 472 B.C. The play chronicles the 480 B.C. Battle of Salamis, one of the most significant battles in world history: As the turning point in the Persian Empire's downfall, it allowed the Greeks—and therefore the West's first experiment with democracy—to survive. Aeschylus, a veteran of the Persian Wars, also made the unusual choice of recounting the battle from the Persian perspective, creating what's generally seen as an empathetic, rather than triumphalist, narrative of their loss.
Today, the play is unexpectedly trendy. It has been produced about 30 times over the last five years. Why? Consider the plot: a superpower's inexperienced, hubristic leader—who hopes to conquer a minor enemy his father tried unsuccessfully to fell a decade earlier—charges into a doomed military invasion. The invasion is pushed by yes-men advisors and predicated on bad intelligence. And this all takes place in the Middle East. To anti-war theater folk, The Persians strikes the topicality jackpot.
In the days after the 2003 Iraq invasion, National Actors Theatre artistic director Tony Randall canceled his spring season, deciding instead to produce The Persians because of America's "national crisis." Given the woodenness of existing translations, playwright Ellen McLaughlin was summoned and given six days to write a new version. Her poignant adaptation—inspired by the other translations, since she doesn't read Greek—was clearly informed by, although she says not tailored to, anger and bewilderment over America's sudden military action. In place of a homogenous chorus, she created a cabinet of advisors, representing "Army," "State," "Treasury" and other authorities. These advisors proclaim defeat "impossible" and "unthinkable," and present attacking the Greeks as "surely…the right thing because it was the thing we could do."
"It was dynamite," Randall told the Chicago Tribune about why he commissioned the play. "It was written in [the fifth century B.C.], but it was the most anti-Bush play you could find." Randall died in 2004.
Randall's production received international attention, alerting other theater companies to the existence of this buried gem. Around 20 productions of McLaughlin's adaptation have followed. Many other versions of the play have been produced, too. Some have been quite faithful to Aeschylus, including the National Theatre of Greece's 2006 production. A few have made more overt contemporary references, recasting the play as a sort of political cartoon. An Australian playwright's adaptation renamed the characters after members of the Bush family.
Another production, by New York's Waterwell troupe, reconfigured the text as a variety show, adapting portions and themes of the play into skits or songs. For example, in response to the latent Orientalism of the play—as well as the anti-Arab bigotry that followed September 11, 2001—the actors taught the audience to curse the "filthy" Greeks in colorful Farsi slang. According to the production's director, one of these epithets was so vulgar that some of the play's Farsi-fluent theatergoers stormed out in disgust.
Audience members, critics, and political columnists alike have unfailingly described the play's parallels to contemporary events as "uncanny" or "eerie," and those who've opposed the Iraq war have generally appreciated Aeschylus' historical articulation of their objections to the war, such as his heartbreaking catalog of the war dead.
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