Pity Aristophanes

YOU KNOW THERE'S going to be trouble when the director of a show says to you as you come through the door, "Don't be too harsh." So you walk in and notice the ingenious way white tape has been laid over the flutings of the columns in the Winthrop Junior Common Room, giving them a somewhat classical appearance.

Then you notice the rest of the set--boards with crudely drawn small black stick figures and gruesome masks. The remaining surface of each panel is painted light blue, except for the splotches where white boards shows through. You think to yourself that they are trying to give the impression of a hastily-done, sloppy paint job--until you realize that it is a hastily done, sloppy paint job. So you sit back and wait.

The plot of Lysistrata is one of those simple Greek stories that is hard to forget. The women of Athens and the other Greek city-states, disgusted with the unceasing Peloponnesian War, vow not to have sex with their husbands until the men make peace. In further protest, the women seize the Acropolis for the duration of the war. The original play is rude, even by modern standards, with men walking around with long phalluses and not-so-veiled references to sexual acts.

The production begins wth Dionysus (Kosta Demos) standing on a pedestal in an awkward statuesque pose for what seems an interminable length of time. You think hard--you don't remember any Dionysus in this play. Your memory is better than you thought; director Alfredo Estrada has almost completely rewritten this play, adding and deleting characters at will.

After Dionysus pronounces his name as both deye-yon-i-sis and deye-yo-neye-sis in the first two minutes, you begin to sense the shape of things to come. Later, you will hear Lysistrata pronounced as both li-si-stra-ta and leye-si-stra-ta, but by then the mispronounciation will seem only a minor quibble. Demos' portrayal of Dionysus is pompous, even smug, as it should be, but his pretentious remarks about respecting the sanctity of Aristophanes' play, whether performed in Athens or the Winthrop JCR, rings hollow. Director Estrada didn't, why should we?

Estrada's attempts to update the political and sexual innuendos to the world of Harvard 1979 reek of hackneyed stereotype and cheap shots; while a few of the lines succeed (Man deprived of sex: "Do you know what four years can do to a person? Another man deprived of sex: "Yes, I was a Harvard man, too."), they more often fall flat (Kinesias...Senator Edward Kinesias!). Dionysus delivers many of these awkward lines, which are difficult to digest, but not nearly so difficult as the leering way that he recounts the tale of his "love" for Aryadne. Dionysus's role has nothing to do with the body of the play, except that the production, already a mercifully short hour-and-a-half, would hardly merit an intermission were it any shorter.

The second character to enter is a ner'd (Drew Weinstein)--also not in the Aristophanes version--who says he's going to close the show, he simply cannot permit it to be performed on a stage at Harvard. Why? Who is this cliched creature anyway, and what in this tame, already-too-long play could he possibly be objecting to, except for its poor blocking, missed cues and amateurish deliveries? Your interests are piqued; you figure the play will get more bawdy as the evening goes on. It doesn't.

Dionysus and the nerd wander off together, the latter eventually drawn into the plot as a sexual outlet for Granny (Bernadette Ward), who replaces Aristophanes' female chorus. He periodically peers out from atop the triangular point of the Acropolis, for no apparent reason.

Enter, at last, Lysistrata (Kathleen Sweeney) and her horde of woman cohorts: Kalonike (Darla Christopher), Myrrhine (Nancy Boghossian), Lampito (Sarah Brown), Ismenia (Maureen Fallon) and Calipo (Chuck Marshall). Yes, that was Chuck. A male playing a female part--there must be something behind this. You keep waiting for him to reveal his identity and perhaps foil Lysistrata's master plan. When it becomes apparent that nothing of the sort is going to happen, you begin to wonder if enough women auditioned. But no, the director tells you afterwards, they thought it would be a good joke. Oh.

Few of the women fit their parts, least of all Sweeney, who is not at all the forceful, bravura wonderwoman Aristophanes had in mind for Lysistrata. She seems intent upon getting through her lines as quickly as possible with a minimum of enthusiasm or voice inflection, and in this respect she succeeds. Despite her best efforts, Christopher's speech and actions as Kalonike more closely resemble those of Long Island than of classical Greece while Boghossian's Myrrhine, who has a crucial scene with husband Kinesias (Joe Smith), is far more coy and less brazenly seductive than Aristophanes intended. About the only female character who comes off well is Ward's Granny, who, with her growls and broomsticks, chases after the nerd. Since there is no such character in the original play, she is more free than most of the other characters to give her role an unconstrained interpretation. Her facial expressions are themselves almost worth the price of admission.

The play picks up a bit when the men come on stage. Two members of the chorus of old men, Pinocles (Alan Ruof) and Mastocles (Ray Bertolino), put some expression into their voices, but their parades around the stage seem foolish. Smith, as Kinesias, brings energy to his role, but too often he delivers his lines in singsong yells rather than with the distress of a man in dire need of sexual gratification.

Act two brings more of the same, except it's shorter. The Commissioner (Charles Mills) delivers his lines with the humdrum tedium nearly everyone else seems to have mastered, and his squadron of guards whisper to each other every time they're supposed to move three steps to the right or left. In fact, nearly all the blocking in the play consists of simple pacing up and down the stage. Two steps to the left, deliver a line, four steps to the right, deliver another line, and poof--instant play.

THE PROBLEM WITH Lysistrata is that it's just not ready. The rewritten script, while something of an affront to Aristophanes, could work, given time and proper direction. There's talent on that Winthrop stage, but it has not yet been polished into a presentable production. The actors all have their lines down; now it's time to start working on delivery and blocking. Perhaps they should go back into rehearsal and open again in April.