Greek Tragedy on the American Stage: Ancient Drama in the Commercial Theater, 1882-1994 (review)

Karelisa Hartigan’s Greek Tragedy on the American Stage chronicles critical responses to commercial productions of Greek tragedies in the continental United States over the course of roughly a century. Hartigan has amassed a wealth of material on historical situation, choice of plays, popular reception, and accepted staging practices. However, the project is marred by an often superficial notion of cultural history and a limited understanding of how theatre is produced, financed, and publicized, which makes for odd omissions and inconsistencies.

The book is arranged chronologically and covers seven well-defined eras. Within each section, the focus is split between examining a historical moment and offering an extended production history of that era’s most popular Greek tragedies. For example, in a chapter called “Greek Tragedy Comes of Age: 1915–1935” four pages are devoted to that era’s productions of Sophocles’s Electra and five-and-a-half pages to subsequent productions of the same play. We learn little about these decades except that anti-war sentiment fostered an interest in The Trojan Women and that Greek tragedy gained “acceptance as an exciting and viable art form for the contemporary stage” (25). A greater understanding of the impact of the Little Theatre movement and of the new role of drama and theatre in university curriculums might have yielded a more satisfying analysis of why the change occurred. The follow-up production histories offer lists more than discussions. Brooks Atkinson called a 1953 Electra by the touring National Theatre of Greece “dramatically imposing” (30). Howard Taubman praised a 1961 Piraikon Theatron production for being “splendidly orchestrated” (31). In 1992 Steven Winn saw the South-of-Market Theatre’s Electra in San Francisco as “a kind of three-dimensional map of the tragedy” (34). Situating these reviews in the sections on the eras in which they appeared would have provided a better context, even when the plays that they cover did not typify a period.

These reviewers’ quotations above indicate a problem that Hartigan never addresses, namely, that performance is very hard to capture in writing. Throughout the book, critics are quoted as using terms like “brilliant” (57), “regal dignity” (91), “a devastating, frightening, moving performance of a shattered spirit” (120). Hartigan offers little insight of her own except to say that “classical drama arouses the philosophical mood and cultural awareness of the drama critics” (105). She does not consider the question of how such lofty adjectives describing the vanished referents of performance create expectations of a shared moment. Although she acknowledges that how the Greeks staged certain things remains “an unsolved problem in classical staging scholarship” (65), elsewhere she is content to rely on phrases such as “classic costumes and in traditional style” (121) without specifying what is meant by classic or traditional. Her choice of production photos likewise goes unexplained.

The book also fails to offer a satisfactory definition of “commercial” theatre in America, although in the penultimate chapter Hartigan uses the phrase “outside of an academic setting” (131). This leads to a number of contradictory impressions. Hartigan reports in detail on several productions at the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis. Following an extended discussion of that theatre’s 1966–67 Oresteia, she states that after this significant production the trilogy remained unpopular outside of “regional theaters or on college campuses.” But the Guthrie is a regional theatre. She includes productions from many theatres in New York that neither pay their actors nor expect to turn a profit. By conflating non-profit, showcase, waiver, and Broadway theatres and calling them all “commercial,” she undermines her own insistence that there is some difference between commercial and non-commercial productions of Greek tragedies. In fact, in a chapter entitled “Occasional Productions: Greek Tragedies Rarely Brought to the Boards,” she does include a number of college and university-sponsored productions in discussions of otherwise unproduced plays...