"The Persians' at People's Light (2nd review)

After the fall of the Greek city-states of Asia Minor to the Persian Empire in 499 B.C.E., the Athenian playwright Phrynicus produced a tragedy on the subject that reportedly reduced his audience to such transports of woe that he was fined 1,000 drachmas for causing a public disturbance. The play is lost, but seven years later the Persians attacked Greece itself to punish Athens for its support of its besieged brethren, the first of three invasions that culminated in Persia’s defeat at the great naval battle of Salamis in 480.

Aeschylus— who proudly recorded his participation in the Battle of Marathon during these wars on his funeral stele (but made no mention of his career as a playwright), and may have witnessed the final rout of the Persian fleet at Salamis— commemorated the repulse of the great empire with a play devoted not to the Greek victory but to the Persian defeat. The Persians is not only the earliest surviving play and the fountainhead of Western theater, but it is also the first expression of pity in Western literature, for although Homer describes the lamentations of Troy, pity is not his object.

Aeschylus, on the other hand, wants us to feel the magnitude of Persia’s defeat through Persian eyes, and indeed we do. That, of course, is an inverse way of celebrating the Greek triumph as well. But it’s also a profound moment in the moral development of the West. Try to imagine a Broadway play based sympathetically on the fall of Saddam Hussein, and you’ll see how far our own shabby triumphalism has fallen from the grandeur of Aeschylean compassion.

Forcible points, but tragedy is sacrificed

The production of The Persians now at the People’s Light & Theatre is not echte Aeschylus, but an adaptation by Ellen McLaughlin, a playwright and actress best known for originating the role of the Angel in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. Having tried my own hand at Greek adaptations, I know what a tricky business it is. McLaughlin’s is purposive, since she has an eye cocked to our own Middle East imbroglios. But although McLaughlin takes liberties, the result is no travesty, while her own points are forcibly made. What does get sacrificed, however, is tragedy itself.

The story of The Persians is simplicity itself. A chorus of Persian elders appears, expressing fear for the long-departed imperial army. Queen Atossa (Melanye Finister) next appears, strikingly lit and resplendently garbed. She, too, has forebodings, and recounts a distressing dream— the earliest set-piece speech in dramatic literature.

A messenger (Miriam Hyman) arrives with news of the army’s disaster, which is recounted at length. Atossa calls upon her late husband, Darius, to return from the underworld with consolation and advice (in Aeschylus, the request comes from the chorus). Darius indeed appears— in one of the production’s few misjudgments, from a side door that admits daylight— but only to register his own helplessness and woe. Finally, the defeated King Xerxes arrives, to be slighted by the chorus and chastened by Atossa.

Simple, direct, overwhelming grief

The climax of the play is wordless: Atossa takes her son’s head in her hands, as if to twist or shake it, but slowly draws him into an embrace. Mother and son then depart across a backlit stage in a gesture strikingly similar to the one in last year’s Wilma production of Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice, but with the woman this time leading the man. An offstage cry is heard, and the pillars of James F. Pyne Jr.’s simple but highly effective set are blazoned in red. This is the play: a ritual of catastrophe and grief, simple, direct, and overwhelming.

Would that the performers in the play were equal to the excellence of the staging, but they are not much more than adequate. Melanye Finister’s Atossa has her moments, but fails to project much of the horror of her situation, while Steven Novelli’s Darius is querulous where he should be fierce (as Aeschylus makes him). Mark Hairston’s Xerxes is a boy who has sent himself on a man’s errand, and who soothes himself on his mother’s breast. Much of this reflects McLaughlin’s rewriting, as does the lackluster chorus. Tragedy is above all passion, and her text simply wrings too much out of it.

Sneaking coffins into Dover

What is finally interesting about Laughlin’s version of The Persians is that it is now no less of an historical artifact than the 2,500-year-old play on which it is based. Hers was written in 2003 in the wake of America’s invasion of Iraq, at a time when the debacle our war has since become was not yet fully apparent. The chorus of Aeschylus/ McLaughlin rightly takes the lack of news from the front as an omen of defeat, while we, with embedded reporters and film at 11, still indulge in fantasies of “responsible” withdrawal or even victory.

McLaughlin’s messenger reads out the names of the honored dead and describes the manner of their deaths; we sneak our coffins into Dover Air Force Base at night. Her Xerxes comes home to be shunned and disgraced; ours will serve out his term and return to his ranch. (To be sure, he still hasn’t faced his mother.)


To read another review by Anne R. Fabbri, click here.