Sex and War on the American Stage: Lysistrata in performance, 1930–2012 by Emily B. Klein (review)

Emily Klein’s book investigates how reimaginings of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata have permitted American artists from 1930 to 2012 “to construct the present in relation to a freshly reconsidered past,” and to “provide instant access to the contemporary zeitgeist while still holding hands with history” (145). In answering her central question of whether Lysistrata is a feminist play, Klein concludes that both the original and its adaptations address the “ways we construct and shore up gender identity,” perhaps even more than “war or feminism” (142). Lysistrata’s openness to reinterpretation and its bawdy humor can undermine its possibly essentialist interpretation of traditional gender roles. Moreover, the play has lasted because “it is so good at seeming venerable while it stirs up trouble” (19). Klein’s carefully researched examination of a variety of understudied adaptations of Lysistrata makes a strong case for the play’s continued relevance both in performance and on the page, as well as for addressing complex questions relating to the cultural performance of gender.

Gilbert Seldes’s commercially successful Broadway version in 1930 discussed in chapter 1 provoked censorship and even police intervention on its cross-country tour for its explicitly bawdy language, physical humor, and revealing costumes. In Klein’s view, however, the production responded less to war or the Depression than to the changing gender roles of the 1920s. The Federal Theatre Project’s 1936 production of the play by the Negro Repertory Company (NRC) in Seattle (chapter 2) was canceled after one performance, probably due to “historically entrenched white anxieties about black sexuality and power” (44), despite an apparently much more circumspect production that lacked stage phalluses or the iconic nude figure of Reconciliation who is shared among warring male parties to ensure peace at the play’s conclusion. The play, inspired by Orson Welles’s successful Voodoo Macbeth in New York, was set in an imaginary African Ebonia, replete with tribal conflict and native costumes. This setting permitted a veiled emphasis on social justice/racial issues beneath the veneer of comedy.

The utterly unbawdy 1955 musical western film The Second Greatest Sex (chapter 3) instead responded to a cultural agenda to domesticate both men returning from combat and women who had stepped out of the domestic sphere to work during World War II. This version provoked the women to strike because their men have spent too much time away while involved in absurd frontier conflicts. They holed up in an abandoned Indian fort until the men surrendered to partial feminization as the “second greatest sex.” Although the film exploited feminine stereotypes summarized in the opening song—“What Good Is a Woman without a Man?”—several secondary female characters offered temporary resistance to their gender roles and engaged in cross-dressing.

The 1977 Lysistrata Numbah! by the group Spiderwoman Theater (chapter 4) interrogated both second-wave and the original play’s feminism. This raunchy, slapstick, and arguably deliberately crude version interwove the original plot with material drawn from personal experience and other contemporary sources. A diverse company that included gay, straight, and ethnically diverse women, the group parodied female stereotypes by parading them and, in Klein’s view, refused to exploit the kind of “female naughtiness” (in contrast to female authority) that earlier productions had celebrated (101). The play’s conclusion offered a different ending for each female character rather than a carnivalesque collective return to heterosexual normality. Lysistrata Numbah!, however, ignored the Vietnam War. The 2003 Lysistrata Project (chapter 5), by contrast, mobilized activists in fifty-nine countries and every US state to perform the play on a single day in order to dissuade the United States from entering the Iraq War. This chapter focuses not on the project itself, but on the aims of its organizers and writers. Chapter 6 addresses Meg Wolitzer’s 2011 novel The Uncoupling, in which a group of women in Stellar Plains, New Jersey, opt out of sex because they lost interest in it; develop...