Divine Fire: Eight Contemporary Plays Inspired by the Greeks (review)

If, as W. H. Auden said, each society fashions ancient Greece in its own image, then the recent anthology Divine Fire: Eight Contemporary Plays Inspired by the Greeks encapsulates a late-twentieth-century vision of Greek mythology. Yet, our scholarly understanding of the impulse that propels writers to return to these classics and revise them remains underdeveloped. The arrival of this anthology necessitates a critical examination of dramatic mythic revision particularly concerning the process by which playwrights shape and adapt mythic material. Even the term "adaptation" is up for grabs, for the individual writers have played fast and loose with the concept, some borrowing nothing more than the characters from the original myth, others inflexibly following the essential plot.

Two distinct patterns of revision emerge from this collection of plays. The first, what I have designated the "contemporary correlative," is a kind of structural update wherein the playwright modernizes the details, setting, and characters, but still follows the outlines of the myth; and second, the "catalytic conversion," another term I've invented to describe the playwright's dependence on the myth as impulse or catalyst. By relying upon the audience's common knowledge of the myth, the writer then uses the story as a springboard to explore certain issues such as desire, abandonment, or sacrifice.

Of the first sort there are three: Troy Women, Phaedra, and Phaedra in Delirium. Karen Hartman's play, Troy Women, a close adaptation of Euripides' masterpiece, is the most powerful play in the collection, possibly because in sticking closely to the original, she captures its tragic weight and nuanced commentary about war. The Trojan women are the only living witnesses for the slain warriors and Hartman recreates their conversations, altering the rhythm of poetry for each character. In this female perspective of war, each woman makes plain her particular reaction to the recent slaughter: Cassandra sardonically appraises her identity as a war prize, while Andromache marvels at her pregnancy in light of her young son's murder. For Hartman, the process of adapting a Greek play was an apprenticeship: "Line by line, image by image, I stepped into the shoes of a great play, and Euripides became my teacher" (21).

In a similar vein, Matthew Maguire uses Racine's Phèdre as his originary text. He transforms the setting to a modern-day capitalist society in order to examine the relationship between power and desire. Theseus, as CEO, is more preoccupied with hostile mergers than killing monsters, and his language suggests the connection between venture capital and sexual promiscuity: "I've . . . blackballed you on the exchange so you have to suck my charity" (133). However, in updating the play to the contemporary moment, Maguire trivializes Faye's (Phaedra's) plight. In Racine's version, Phaedra's desire for her stepson Hippolytus causes her shame because of the constraints imposed by her moral idealism. Maguire's Faye, on the other hand, merely suffers from her unfulfilled desire and makes exaggerated avowals about her passion: "My lips the hardening of a million cries. My breasts the calcification of countless howlings. Can he love me? Yes, yes, yes" (126). The modern context causes one to wonder why she does not go to work herself.

Susan Yankowitz faces a similar predicament in contemporizing a myth; her fascination with the revision process lies in the "license to enter and inhabit other lives, other worlds" (377). Intrigued by the tension between Theseus's lust for women and his son's ascetic denial of the female flesh, in Phaedra in Delirium she has both characters played by the same male actor, indicating that these positions are merely two sides of the same coin. "Inhabiting" the character of Phaedra during the writing process, Yankowitz discovered Phaedra's midlife crisis as the central conflict and makes reference to her laugh lines and loosening skin. The exploration of a modern-day Phaedra's psyche yields nothing more trenchant than her asking Hippolytus the classical equivalent...