This is an example of artistic work. Stage Directors today are doing the service of connecting our issues with the great artists of the past. That enables us to own our legacies and respect the wisdom and intelligence of past societies. I believe that the "progress" professions that profess to be the only intelligent people on the planet today and the culmination of all wisdom, do us a disservice. Keith does a good job of reminding us that the great choral musical works of the past were written by geniuses for people who understood more about music then most people do today. I happen to disagree with him about what that means for the present but gentleman can disagree and still be friends and talk, especially on the internet.
Ray Evans Harrell Peter Sellars Returns With an Ancient Message By STEPHEN KINZER CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Jan. 9 - A 2,500-year-old Greek play had its American premiere this week, and its message was as modern as the harrowing stories of refugees who appeared on the same stage. Peter Sellars, the visionary polemicist who mines old texts for messages addressed to today's society, has infused an ancient drama, "The Children of Herakles," with one of the most urgent stories of the modern world. It is the story of refugees, who have become so plentiful that their individual faces easily become obscured. Euripides sought to give them back their faces, and Mr. Sellars is calling on him to prick the modern conscience. To add to the urgency of his message, Mr. Sellars has given nonspeaking roles to actual refugee children from the Boston area and invited experts on immigration to speak before each performance. "When you see an issue opened up in a play that's 2,500 years old, you see it as an enduring issue rather than an issue of the moment," he said. "The questions associated with refugees are eternal. The Greeks used drama to raise them, because drama takes you much deeper than politics. I'm trying to do the same thing." The production Mr. Sellars has mounted at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge is more than just a revival of a very old play, in this case one that had its premiere in 430 B.C. William Allan, a classics professor at Harvard, said the work has been staged only seven times since antiquity. It is another gauntlet Mr. Sellars has thrown down in the path of an America he feels is losing its way. "These are dark times," he said. "There is a certain chill in this country. Artists have to act against it because we're the people paid every day to follow our conscience." For Mr. Sellars this is also a return to the university and the stage where his extraordinary career began. He has routinely been called a wunderkind and enfant terrible. These terms may no longer apply, now that he has turned 45, but he has lost none of the slash-and-burn edge that makes him one of the world's most interesting and controversial directors, with a career marked by critical highs and embarrassing public dismissals. "We truly need the wisdom of the ancients," Mr. Sellars said during a rehearsal, while Ulzhan Baibussynova, an "epic singer" from Kazakhstan whose haunting chants give the play a musical backdrop, warmed up onstage. "The op-ed page is fine, but wouldn't it be better to ask Mozart and Shakespeare and Sophocles to weigh in? Their perspective lets us see things in terms of long-term consequence. To deepen historical perspective is very important in a young country like the United States." Each evening's performance of "The Children of Herakles" begins with the Boston interviewer Christopher Lydon talking to refugees and specialists who deal with their plight. After their hour of conversation, the play is performed. Then there are open discussions and films until after midnight, with ethnic food prepared by local refugees. "Peter thinks Euripides can help the modern world see," Mr. Lydon said. "He loves to make old plays do new things." The production has a preachy aspect, reflecting Mr. Sellars's view that theater should send political messages. It is largely redeemed, however, by the impassioned performance of Jan Triska, one of the Czech Republic's leading actors, who plays Iolaus, a friend of Herakles who has become guardian to his endangered children. Mr. Sellars has presented Don Giovanni snorting cocaine with drug dealers in Spanish Harlem, placed Julius Caesar in a bombed-out Middle Eastern hotel and set Handel's "Orlando" at the Kennedy Space Center and on Mars. The Glyndebourne Festival in England has hired him to direct Mozart's "Idomeneo" this summer, and he has decided to set it during a presumed American invasion of Iraq. "I assume it will be history by the time we stage it in June," he said. The theatrical event Mr. Sellars has staged in Cambridge is unabashedly partisan. Lobby walls are covered with photographs of refugees. The program denounces "a crisis in our refugee program" and warns, "The children of Herakles are still wandering from city to city, their homes lost." On one recent evening a refugee from Guinea named Ibrahima Bah said dissidents in his homeland were repressed "in a Stalin way." When asked how he managed to win asylum in the United States, he replied: "I got an opportunity, not a nice opportunity. The scars on my body. I think it's called bio-data." There followed a lively discussion between an immigration lawyer, Michael Posner, and the general counsel of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, Bo Cooper. "After Sept. 11 the reaction of this administration, this government, has been to say `Refugees are now part of the security problem,' " Mr. Posner said. "Again and again we see people who are clearly eligible for asylum who are left in detention for a year, two years, three years." Mr. Cooper acknowledged that there now was "an increased focus on security" in deciding which refugees qualify for entry into the United States. He said detentions were part of "an immigration policy that is generous on one side, but also has rules." After this prologue, the play: a band of children whose father, Herakles, is dead, must wander the earth because the tyrant who hated Herakles now seeks their blood. They arrive in Athens and appeal for asylum. Being noble, the Athenians embrace their persecuted guests. Then the plot twists, beginning with a demand by the Athenian leader that one of the refugees be sacrificed to the gods. These complications raise difficult questions of how to balance morality and power, ethics and vengeance. "The Children of Herakles" is Mr. Sellars's first full-scale production since being forced out of his job as director of the Adelaide Festival in November 2001. He left behind large deficits and Australian critics who ridiculed him as a "shock jock of the arts" devoted to "politically correct mumbo jumbo." It was an echo of criticism that has led to his departure from several posts, most notably the directorship of the American National Theater at the Kennedy Center in Washington. He took the job in 1984, when he was just 26, staged some irreverent shows, went through $5 million in less than a year and then departed under fire. The American National Theater was dissolved soon afterward. Mr. Sellars, who has had several such awkward breaks in his career, took the Adelaide flameout in style. He dived into his next projects, which range from staging a "docu-opera" about the birth of the nuclear age to directing the Mozart Year scheduled for 2006 in staid Vienna. The opera will be based on the life of the nuclear physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer. Mr. Sellars is collaborating with the composer John Adams and the librettist Alice Goodman, who were also his partners on "Nixon in China" and "The Death of Klinghoffer." "It will be about this question of permanent war," he said, "about the fact that we didn't go back to normal after World War II but put ourselves into a continuous state of war." The Mozart celebration, Mr. Sellars said, will be devoted to the composer's final years, when he promoted democratic ideals in his Masonic lodge while writing "the world's greatest music of forgiveness and reconciliation." Imagining Mozart as a freedom fighter is no stretch for Mr. Sellars. "For me there's nothing offbeat," he admitted. "What passes for normal is very strange to me." _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://scribe.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
