Plato's "Apology' by Quintessence Theatre Group

During a one-day trial in ancient Athens, Socrates was charged with dishonoring the state’s recognized gods and corrupting the youth of the city. The three prosecutors recommended death but as a matter of protocol gave Socrates a choice between execution and exile. Nearly two and a half millennia later, the world has yet to outgrow the concept of heresy, as witness such modern examples as Salman Rushdie, Theo Van Gogh and the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

My personal “Socrates du jour” is the magazine writer Maura Kelly, who recently complained in Marie Claire about the TV sit-com “Mike & Molly,” in which an obese couple meet and fall in love at a food addiction support group. “To be brutally honest,” Kelly wrote, “even in real life, I find it aesthetically displeasing to watch a very, very fat person simply walk across a room.” A few hours after that article went live, thousands of angry comments descended on Marie Claire’s website, most calling for Kelly’s dismissal or worse. Like Socrates, Kelly offered a mild defense of her actions. He outlined some metaphysical and epistemological objections to the wisdom of politicians, artists and craftsmen; Kelly blamed her adolescent eating disorder.

The non-defense defense

Imagine instead that Kelly had responded by claiming her criticisms as a way for readers to achieve self-improvement. Instead of choosing punishment or literary exile, imagine the greater furor if she suggested that her article warranted a raise or promotion. Now you have some idea of how Socrates “defended” himself before the Athenian court. Understanding its implications is the minor genius in Quintessence Theatre Group’s theatrical adaptation of the Apology.

With few exceptions, Western history— especially since the Enlightenment— has held Socrates up as an idealized martyr for individual freedom and political liberalism. But some thinkers, like Nietzsche, argued the opposite: that Socrates, far from embodying a noble contrarian view, espoused disruptive ideas that contributed to the demise of Athens during the Peloponnesian War. If nothing else, Socrates (and Kelly) offered a clear case of Nietzsche’s aphorism that some people reject an argument simply because they don’t like the speaker’s tone.

Can you like this guy?

Quintessence’s illuminating depiction of the Socrates trial brings this sense of parity to the Apology. Sam Tsoutsouvas plays Socrates with a haughty air that, while bereft of self-righteousness, clearly conveys the great philosopher’s view of himself as the wisest man on the planet. Every time you want to like this guy, Tsoutsouvas gives you reason to think he’s a prick.

As Tsoutsouvas captivates us with a blend of arrogance, wit and rhetorical skill, Alexander Burns’s direction speeds the proceedings along with the pace of a TV courtroom drama. For the most part, the Apology reads like a long speech, broken up only occasionally by a dozen or so lines by the accuser Meletus (Sean Bradley) and some rhetorical devices employed by Socrates. Burns’s direction breaks the bulk of the Socrates speech into the three parts of the trial, and through each of these he threads voice-overs of the crowd responding, either for or against. These passages add dramatic heft to the proceedings and also create the historical atmosphere of one man alone in an amphitheatre as he confronts more than 500 of his peers.

Cardboard villain

Burns errs only by portraying the accusing Meletus as a self-righteous simpleton whose charges are groundless. Socrates may have had logic on his side, but as Nietzsche has noted, his accusers possessed their share of logic as well. Why else would nearly 300 Athenians find Socrates guilty and then vote again to put him to death? Only by recognizing the validity of the accusers’ claims can we then argue the point that punishing dissent is an even greater outrage.

Nevertheless, Quintessence’s full and lively depiction offers more than enough substance to both entertain us and provoke us. Two weeks after watching an election season filled with arrogance and outright hatred of opposing views, this young company’s courage in staging such a bold and unusual apologia for freedom deserves high praise indeed.