Euripides in Modern Guise

Fresh from Joan Littlewood's Oh What a Lovely War, the Harvard Dramatic Club Summer Players launched last night an equally impressive production of a totally different play: Euripides' The Bacchac.

Director Thomas Babe has chosen to do the William Arrowsmith translation in modern dress, with Pentheus of Thebes looking something like a teenage Marshal Ky, and the god Dionysus a blond-haired cigarette-smoking James Dean. The first resemblance is most pointed; Babe interprets the autocratic, highly organized government of Thebes as a garrison--perhaps fascist--state, threatened by the earthly, irrational Dionysiac cult. The interpretation works in that Babe's production is exciting theatre, and in the end faithful to the original as well. Just the same there are points worth questioning.

Certainly Thebes is a violent, rational state; here the parallel with fascism seems valid. But where does such an interpretation leave Dionysus, whose orgiastic cult--according to Philip Vellacott, another translator of The Bacchac--offers "an escape from reason back to the simple joys of a mind and body surrendered to unity with Nature?" The Dionysiac escape is a far cry from democracy, one obvious alternative to fascism. Its closeness to nature and opposition to organized civilization are, in fact, as integral components of Nazism as the military order of Pentheus. The Dionysiac cult is the ancestor of the same Wagnerian heritage that gave illegitimate birth to Hitler. For while fascism may in practice defy the wandering, uncivilized Wagnerian prototype, it derives from it nonetheless.

In this sense Babe's interpretation of The Bacchae fits only incompletely, but it is a fascinating, often startlingly valid job of reapplication. Where it doesn't fit, we still have the original. Babe has not been so carried away with the modern parallel as to seriously distort the play, and in the second half he seems to have kept his modernizing to a minimum. Thus the limitation of the fascist parallel--its lack of a modern alternative into which Dionysus can fit--is never fully exposed, because the interpretation is correctly underplayed.

William Schroeder's uncomplicated set seems wholly appropriate not only to the play but to Babe's rendering of it. Probably no designer has ever done so well by Agassiz's rather stultifying stage. In fact the whole technical side of Babe's production is flawless, with the lighting particularly commendable.

A two-man orchestra consisting of tympany and vibraphone plays an effective, fortunately not over-used score by Michael Tschudin. Tschudin's music contributes significantly to the ectasy of the Bacchae, but the score also gives an over-all continuity to the production.

Where The Bacchae is less than successful, it is because of a few uncomfortable performances. The Bacchae themselves--Asian women who follow Dionysus--are a mixed lot. As Pentheus, Jim Shuman gives an uneven, never quite powerful enough performance; but he does convey the weakness of mind and irritability of Thebes' mortal ruler.

As Babe has directed the part, however, Pentheus is more than irritable--he is mad. So it means very little for him to fall under the spell of Dionysus as he has no rationality to be deprived of. At the start Pentheus should provide a sane, if angered, resistance to the god. In the Agassiz production he can only spit inanities.

Carl Nagin as Dionysus is brilliant within the context of the interpretation. He succeeds in breaking up lines written in the fifth century B. C. with cigarette smoke, a feat that demonstrates Babe's modernizing at its most effective.

Like Spring's Awakening, Babe's last Loeb show, The Bacchae is an ambitious effort, and its merits are the merits of ambition. It perfectly complements the slick professionalism of Oh What a Lovely War, proving that the HDC Summer Players are a versatile lot who deserve to play many Summers yet to come.