I like to take a Greek play

I like to take a Greek play, smash it to ruins, and then, atop the ruins, write a new play. The new play will often take some of the character names of the Greek piece and some of the story—even some of the ruined structure. But it will be set in today's world.

I feel no need to be faithful in any way to the "original." Indeed, I often wonder if what I start with can really be considered an original anyway. The plays of Euripides are based on, or inspired by, earlier works themselves. He, Aeschylus, and Sophocles, like Shakespeare, wrote only adaptations. Only God, once upon a time, ever created anything ex nihilo. The rest of us all rewrite what we have been given.

Then, too, my plays, like all plays, are drawn from a consciousness formed by the world I was born into. Whatever I do will be inescapably informed by the history and culture that I have inherited.

In using this great cultural heritage—as much as I admire and respect it, as much as it nourishes and gives life to me—I admit I feel no obligation to bring faithfully forward into the present any vestige of what the Greeks thought or felt or said or did. Others feel that, I know—and I'm grateful for the work they do, I live off the work they do—but I don't feel the same impulse myself. My impulse is toward utter faithlessness. My impulse is to pillage the Greeks shamelessly, ignorantly, carelessly, without always pausing to understand the people and work I am pillaging, and to use what I steal for my own purposes. If I feel any obligation, it is an obligation toward the present and future, not the past, as I try to remake the world along lines that seem more convivial today.

And so I pick and choose what I want from the Greeks, or from what I carelessly or incorrectly understand to be the Greeks. Sometimes I even pause and try to understand the Greeks correctly, since I know if I see things correctly, I may pick up some useful ideas from that as well as from my incomplete, superficial Greek tourism. I pick and choose what I love most. And there is much to love.

I love, first of all, the explanation the Greeks give of what it is to be a human being, and what causes human beings to do what they do. In most of the Western world for the past century, we have been reductionists. We have said, with Freud, that human beings are fundamentally psychological creatures, formed and impelled by the events of early childhood that occurred within the walls of their earliest homes. The Greeks had a more complex understanding of what it is to be a human being: they thought events were caused by the gods, by fate, by chance, and, yes, by character, too. But their explanations were what historians have recently taken to calling multifactorial explanations. And when we think about people and their actions in this more complex way, it prepares us better to understand ourselves and our world than the reductionist explanations of Freud. We see now that we are formed by history and culture, gender and genetics, politics and economics, race and chance, as well as by psychology.

In keeping with this taste for complexity, the Greeks also felt that the theatrical form ought to be more complex than the one we have become accustomed to since Ibsen; that is, the play as a text placed onstage. Greek theatrical events were a combination of music, movement, and text. And this taste for a more complex theatrical form is something else I like to steal. It has at least the possibility, as a container, to carry a more complex view of the world than nineteenth-century naturalism can.

And then, too, the Greeks love a story that has a son murdering his mother, a father sacrificing his daughter, a brother cooking his nephews and serving them up for dinner to their father. These...