Lysistrata
Lysistrata
adapted by Ellen McLaughlin
Streaming April 30 & May 1 at 7:30 p.m. and May 2 at 2 p.m.
Make love, not war! In an effort to prevent unnecessary battle, an Athenian housewife encourages all Greek women to refuse love making until the men in their lives lay down their arms and proclaim peace. All hell breaks loose as the men wander the country in agony and unsatisfied. This modern retelling of the classic Greek comedy features larger-than-life puppets created by SoTD faculty and students.
Contains adult content and language.
Directed by Gregory Funaro.
About Streaming
This performance will be streamed via Broadway on Demand. Once you purchase a ticket, you will receive the link to the Broadway on Demand event and a promo code that allows you to access it for free. If you don’t already have one, you will need to set up an account with Broadway on Demand. Follow these instructions.
Program
Click here to download the Lysistrata program.
Excerpts from the Author’s Note
By Ellen McLaughlin
Ellen McLaughlin
This script was written specifically for the March 3, 2003, reading of Lysistrata at Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Harvey Theater. This was one reading among thousands done as part of the Lysistrata Project, which was a worldwide protest against the burgeoning war in Iraq. I was proud to participate in this unprecedented event. This version was born of a collective desire to make a short, snappy version of what can be a pretty creaky ride in some of the more literal translations… The evening was designed as a festive event, involving a broad range of performance, including acrobats, musicians, aerialists, and political cabaret artists. There was an elaborate pre-show involving female acrobats and musicians, while in the lobby and on the street, entertaining the people lined up for tickets, were stilt walkers, musicians, and acrobats…
I…believe this particular brand of ancient comedy has its counterparts in new vaudeville clowns, circus, and cabaret far more than in conventional drama. Whether you choose such an ambitious and complex approach, I do think that having a band onstage to provide transitional music, a few sound effects, and the final climactic and celebratory number is a very good idea…
We were fortunate in having a female clown at BAM, an attractive woman who came out at the beginning of the show and began making absurdly large (two to three foot) colorful phallus balloons. (They would be tied to a circular hoop of another long balloon, thus making a sort of hip belt–with a spectacular accessory–a man could step into and pull up when the time came for his entrance.) Bill Irwin, a seasoned clown, was already onstage introducing the band and making the speech cautioning the audience to turn off their cell phones, etc., when the balloon artist marched in, wearing a marvelous womanly outfit, sat down, placed an air pump between her legs, and began rapidly pumping up long balloons and twisting them efficiently into unmistakable shapes. Bill’s speech began to disintegrate as he became increasingly distracted by the balloon-making activities stage right. (Far more phalluses were made than were used, but this meant that, when the time came, the actors could choose from a wide array of “props” their creator proudly displayed for them.)…this is a sex comedy of a particular sort…Bill blew up a small heart-shaped balloon, which he gave to the balloon mistress at the beginning of the show but which didn’t quite do the trick–she was too fiercely focused on her task to give him much attention. But after the curtain call, as the cast walked out, Bill stayed behind hopefully and she shyly blew up a balloon heart for him and they walked off together arm in arm.
Larger-than-Life
A look at the oversized puppets created in-house for Lysistrata.
When planning for the Spring of 2021, after nearly a year in the coronavirus pandemic, the director and production team of Lysistrata brainstormed ways that we might provide new experiences and learning opportunities to theatre students and connect with our audiences, while maintaining the measures in place to help protect us from spreading the virus. The result is the puppets that you’ll see in this production.
On Phalluses
By Jen-Scott Mobley, SOTD Resident Dramaturg
“Is that a banana in your pocket or are you just glad to see me?”
Vaudevillian performer and notorious early film star, Mae West is generally credited with coining the phrase that has become a classic comic idiom. For generations, film and TV comics have riffed on the joke, inserting various phallic shaped objects (pipe, pencil, gun..) for essentially the same punchline. But long before West was making comic gold from bawdy, body-based comedy, one of the earliest extant comic writers in Western European Drama was playing with the same puns and sight gags in his play Lysistrata, which premiered in Athens in 411 B.C.E..
Aristophanes’ Lysistrata would have been presented as part of the City Dionysia—a festival held annually in late March to celebrate the opening of the sea ports, the arrival spring, the rebirth of trees and flowers as well as to honor the God Dionysus. Dionysus—sometimes called Bacchus—was the god of grape harvest, wine-making and wine, vegetation, and importantly, fertility in all of its implications for the world of nature as well as for humans. As a symbol of fertility, the phallus—an image or representation of the male reproductive organs—was deeply associated with rituals honoring Dionysus as evidenced by many paintings archeologists have found on ancient vases, sculptures and other art.
Indeed, many theatre historians believe that Ancient Greek Comedy presented at the City Dionysia evolved out of religious rituals involving songs and processions in which massive phalluses were promenaded through the streets as part of these Dionysian celebrations. Historians also note that one of the earliest comic forms in Ancient Greece, the satyr play, often contained explicitly sexual material in which the costumes worn by the actors (who were all men) featured short tunics below which protruding phalluses were visible. Aristophanes’ Lysistrata takes a cue from this tradition and, according to historians working from textual and visual primary sources, actors in the Lysistrata would have worn huge phalluses made of leather tied about their waists. Within any translation of the Aristophanes’ text, it is clear that many of the jokes in this play about a “sex strike” to end the war revolved around puns and sight gags having to do sex and the human body, specifically the penis.
Ellen McLaughlin’s post-modern adaptation—and our production—of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata invites audiences to embrace the silliness and the humor that erupts (see what I did there?) from the most primal of comic tropes that has entertained audiences since the earliest of the recorded human experience. Lysistrata reminds us that some comedy transcends time and place especially that which pokes fun at the trials and tribulations of our embodied humanity.
Media
Download a press release about Lysistrata here.
