Ancient Greeks on War Transcript (039)

RYAN DALY: Hello. This is Ryan Daly, and you are at the Point of Learning with my friend and former colleague Peter Horn. I’m a social studies teacher concerned that the war in Ukraine is slipping from our public awareness, so I’m very interested that Pete will be focusing on the topic of war and its impact on combatants and survivors in his conversation today with playwright Ellen McLaughlin about her work creating new versions of ancient Greek plays. Enjoy the show!

PETER HORN [voiceover]: On today’s show, playwright Ellen McLaughlin, who has breathed new life into ancient Greek texts:

ELLEN McLAUGHLIN: Every Greek play involves a series of ethical questions that are unanswerable, and yet engage us on the deepest level with a reckoning with the self, with society, with the gods, with—they ask the hardest questions, always.

[VO]: We talk about what we inherit from a cluster of playwrights who were veterans of war, writing for war veterans in their audience:

McLAUGHLIN: You can’t lie about that to the people who actually experienced it. They know what happened. So it keeps the playwright honest, and it means that the playwright has a real-world experience of the wars that they’re talking about.

[VO]:Women may or may not have attended ancient plays, but they inspired some of the plays’ most complex and powerful characters:

McLAUGHLIN: As a feminist, when you approach the Greeks, you’re always approaching difficulty. All of these characters—these great, great female characters—are difficult in various ways.

[VO]:And we explore some theological dimensions of a polytheistic religion nobody practices anymore:

McLAUGHLIN: The gods—because they are eternal and profoundly not human—don’t fundamentally understand us, or really have that much interest in us as humans. And that makes sense to me.

[VO]:All that and much more, with Ellen McLaughlin at the Point of Learning. Let’s go!

[VO]: If you own a textbook on the history of theatre, chances are good that there is an iconic photo of Ellen McLaughlin the actor, who originated the role of the Angel in Tony Kushner’s landmark Angels in America, which won successive Tony Awards for each of its two parts in 1993 and 1994. I’m profoundly grateful to Ellen the actor for the performances I’ve been lucky enough to see as an audience member, and for the one I shared as her scene partner in 1999 at the Middlebury Bread Loaf School of English, with her as a resident artist and me as a student who’d managed to win a bit part. But today I’ll be talking with Ellen the playwright, who has been aptly described by her friend Tony Kushner as a “dramatist of courage, intelligence, wit and lyricism.” Her plays have been produced off-Broadway, regionally, and internationally. She is the recipient of the Writer’s Award from the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund—which we’ll talk about, because she cooked up an amazing project—as well as other honors, including the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, the Helen Merrill Award for Playwriting, and grants from the NEA. Plays and operas include: Tongue of a Bird, Iphigenia and Other Daughters, The Persians, Penelope, Ajax in Iraq, Septimus and Clarissa, Blood Moon, and The Oresteia. She has taught in several programs, including the Yale School of Drama, Princeton University, and the Middlebury Bread Loaf School of English. She has taught playwriting at Barnard College since 1995. One last note before we get into it: we spoke at her gorgeous home not far from New York City in late summer, when it seemed like every landscaper in the neighborhood was out getting yards ready for Labor Day celebrations. With some listening equipment, you may detect a leaf-blower or two. On the plus side, the birds outside Ellen’s office window seemed to croon appropriately ancient tunes.

[5:02]

HORN: I called you last spring to gauge your interest in doing a podcast conversation focusing on just one subset of your work, the versions of ancient Greek plays based on, or corresponding to, those famous works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides that many of us read in high school—eight of them, seven tragedies, and then the Aristophanes comedy Lysistrata, are collected on a volume called straightforwardly The Greek Plays. And I just learned that there will be a second collection published sometime in the coming year. Familiar only with your Oedipus, which I used with my own students about ten years ago when I was teaching high school, I found myself reaching for the book in the early days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, because war is the context, if not the subject of so much Greek drama. And then I couldn’t put the volume down. I read it straight through, some plays more than once, in the next several days. The preface that you wrote reminded me of something I hadn’t focused on since my days as a Classics major in college, which is that the audiences for those original plays contained a large number—perhaps a majority—of veterans. All three of the major tragic playwrights were themselves veterans. As you put it. “This fact alone—that the plays were written by veterans, and largely for veterans—makes whatever these playwrights have to say about war particularly worthy of our attention, since we haven't had that kind of dynamic between playwrights and their audiences in theatrical literature since” [The Greek Plays, p. xvii].

McLAUGHLIN: I’ve been thinking about this a lot, because I was asked to give a speech at the University of Pennsylvania, specifically in relationship to a wonderful program that they do there, which is working with veterans and having them read and work on Greek plays. I’ve been wondering why, as a child of two academics, neither of whom served—and somebody who rarely knew people who were active members of the military—why so much of my work has had to do with war. Very little military history within my own family. It’s just not what my legacy has been. But I did have a babysitter when I was growing up, Billy Henshaw, who was one of those kids—he was a kind young man, like maybe 14 or 15 when he was taking care of us every now and then. And a funny kid, and a kid who has a level of integrity and decency that is remarkable. And we loved him. He taught me how to blow into a grass harp, and he taught me a lot of really stupid jokes and, you know, that sort of thing. And then he was drafted and he went to Vietnam. He was there for almost two years and he came back in a wheelchair and he was an entirely different person. He had been—that child had been destroyed in Vietnam.

[VO]: Ellen is about to relate a fairly graphic description of a combat injury. If you would prefer not to hear it just now, skip ahead 60 seconds.

McLAUGLIN: He had been in a firefight and had received a Purple Heart [medal] for what he did, which was to go back into the firefight—he saved several people, but he was also injured when he was doing that. He was strapped onto the top of a jeep in the middle of the firefight. And then the panicky kid who was driving the medical jeep was just trying to get all of these bodies off of the field. And the jeep stalled, and all of the bodies fell off. But he didn’t know that because he was in a live firefight, and he backed over all of the bodies. And that was where Billy’s worst injuries were. He’d broken his back and he would never walk again. And that was the year of the great Moratorium in Washington DC which is where I grew up.

[VO]: So this is the fall of 1969, and the Moratorium had two parts: the massive demonstration and teach-in in October 1969 prompted President Nixon to give the famous speech asking what he called the “silent majority” of U.S. citizens to support his policies in Vietnam. The march in November drew over half a million participants, a sign that the anti-war movement was growing.

[10:16]

McLAUGHLIN: I was 13, and somehow I managed to be with Billy when he went to the White House. I was across the street, and he met with a whole bunch of veterans and they stood around—many of them were wounded [in Vietnam]—they stood around and they talked for a little while, inaudibly to those of us who were watching. And as they were talking, a large—I mean, it was a lot of people [who were there for the Moratorium],but a large, large crowd gathered to watch them. And then they took all of their medals and they threw them over the White House fence. And I remember the look of the medals in the air and that they shone; they glittered, and then fell onto the lawn and just looked like sort of glittery trash. And it was this silent thing. These men had agreed to do this, and it was a private thing, but it was also an act of public—It was a civic act, a public protest. It was something that they were doing for themselves, but they were doing it in front of the world. And it was—I think that my engagement with the notion of What do we owe veterans? and What is the veteran experience? —that engagement with those questions began then. And it’s continued throughout my life. And I don’t know what ever happened to Billy, but I feel that if I were ever to run into him again, I would be able to say, You know, much of what I’ve done in my life has been dedicated to you and what I could understand of the suffering that you experienced. So I think that that’s where I start. I identified that that’s where I start with the Greeks, and what I appreciate so much is that clear-eyed sense that the Greeks have about war—of the horror of it, the exhilaration of it, and the pity of it. And the ravages, not only to the people who are its obvious victims, but to the veterans themselves. I mean, the Greeks are very clear about that, as is evidenced by the fact that, you know, the Greeks who were the ostensibly the “winners” of the Trojan War—it doesn’t go well for the great heroes of that war when they try to go home. And I think that that’s something that Greek warriors understood, and that the veteran poets who wrote the plays really were able to express how difficult it is to make that journey back into the circle of the ordinary human, the civic circle. The Greeks put great value on that because you need those citizens to make the society run properly. And so those warriors who were coming back from the war, traumatized in the way that veterans are—which is inevitable—and only linked to each other … that’s the thing that war does, is that it creates this incredibly intense community of—in their case, brother, and in future wars, brothers and sisters who understand something about each other because they understand something about combat—what it costs. And there is a way in which, you know, civilians just simply don’t—we don't get it. There is this sense that if the society, the democracy is to survive, you have to bring these people back into the fold of a sense of community action and a sense of being engaged with the community, caring about what happens to the people stateside, you know, the people who are back home trying to live their lives. And one of the ways you do that is through the civic act, which is getting everybody to go see a play which deals with these issues. You sit in a theater, in the safety of the community, of the audience, and you watch terrible things happen to people on stage and are able, in that strange alchemy that the theater creates, to empathize with those people without feeling that you yourself are endangered by the terrible things that are happening for them. But every Greek play involves a series of ethical questions that are unanswerable and yet engage us on the deepest level with a reckoning with the self, with society, with the gods, with—they ask the hardest questions, always. And in the darkness of the audience experience, where you’re sitting cheek by jowl with thousands of strangers and you are all having this experience of watching this happen to the others, the actors, the characters up there, in that moment of active compassion—activated compassion—you become part of the larger community of the human. And I think that that was part of the genius of the program that the Greeks were able to effect for returning veterans. And I think the writing of the plays was a part of that project, but I think definitely the attendance at plays was part of that project, to take a soldier and turn that soldier into a citizen of a democracy. But at the same time, because everybody’s been through that experience: I think you could say that pretty much everybody who’s watching those plays—we don’t know a lot about who is in the audience in classic Greek theater. We don’t know, for instance, whether women were allowed to attend at all. But we know that for instance, when Aeschylus’ play The Persians was being produced eight years after the invasion—

HORN: The oldest, the oldest example of a tragedy that we have.

McLAUGHLIN: The oldest play we’ve got.

[17:32]

[VO]: We’re gonna talk a little bit about this extraordinary play, so I just want to set the table real quick. The Persians is the oldest play that survives from Ancient Greece, written by the earliest of big three tragedians, Aeschylus, who definitely served in the Battle of Marathon in 490 BCE—over 2500 years ago—during the first Persian invasion of Greece. As one index of the personal costs of war, his brother died in that battle. Ten years later, Aeschylus almost certainly participated in the Battle of Salamis, in Ellen’s words, “the nearly miraculous defeat, against seemingly impossible odds, of the Persian navy.” This battle provides the context for the play, produced eight years later, which is quite unusual because it’s so recent that many Greek men in the audience likely fought in it. As Ellen notes, tragedies usually dealt with topics like the Trojan War that were so old they had the feel of mythology even to ancient Greek theatergoers. The boldest move, however, was that Aeschylus set the play in the Persian capital, consistently asking his audience of Greek veterans to imagine the perspective and pain of their enemy. 

McLAUGHLIN: Everybody in that audience had experienced the sack of Athens and the unbelievable naval victory of the Battle of Salamis, in which the Athenians actually won against the greatest navy the world had ever seen. But everybody in that theater, whether there were women there or not, had experienced that. And yet they were being asked by Aeschylus to empathize with the Persians, who were their mortal enemies and who very nearly destroyed their civilization completely. They destroyed the city, but the people had been evacuated to the island of Salamis. And yet in the face of that extraordinary near miss, Aeschylus asked them to identify with, to have compassion for their enemy. And I still can’t quite believe the nature of the project of that play, what Aeschylus was doing! It is still just so outrageously unlikely that—you know, because it would’ve been such a cinch to write a triumphalist play about this extraordinary battle—it’s very dramatic, and which the Greeks won. And he does in fact describe that battle, which he was part of. I think we know that he actually experienced it. And it’s the only eyewitness account we have of any battle in the Persian wars, the Messenger’s account [in The Persians] of the naval battle. So it’s kind of extraordinary, because there is a way in which you can’t lie about that to the people who actually experienced it. They know what happened. So it keeps the playwright honest, and it means that the playwright has a real-world experience of the wars that they’re talking about. Whether they’re extrapolating their own experience as veterans and applying it to a myth like the Trojan War, which happens more often than not—or you’re actually talking about a contemporaneous event, which is very rare in tragedy …Of course, it’s commonplace in in comedy, but in tragedy you’re almost always talking about [the past]—you take those [present] experiences, and you create a step back for the audience. And for the playwright, you make a link with a mythical battle of some kind or a mythical story that everybody knows, but you infuse that with all of the blood and the temperature and the details of the wars that everybody has been experiencing. Because it was a time of constant war, and every single male citizen was necessarily conscripted to serve. You don’t get out of serving as a soldier in classical Athens.

HORN: It was your friend Oskar Eustis, now director of the Public Theater [in NYC] who first made this point to me about the relationship between drama and democracy, you know, the Western conceptions of which, starting at the same time … He and I in fact talked about it when we talked several years ago on this show. As soon as I realized what the Persians was, and why it was such a bold move, it was staggering to me as an example—that this is the oldest play, and look at this exercise of imagination that you’re asking people to do. But I think I hadn’t grappled fully with the idea that there’s, you know, a real civic purpose of it, of reintegrating. Whether this was the design or intent, certainly this had to be an effect, which would’ve been very different, because a triumphalist piece, you know, which would’ve been so easy to do—it would’ve been, you know, the Fox News candy of the time—but that would’ve kept people angry.

McLAUGHLIN: There’s a psychologist named Jonathan Shay, who has written extensively about the link between the veteran experience in ancient Greece and his studies of the kinds of therapy that he does with veterans in modern times. He worked for many years with Vietnam veterans, and now he’s working with all of the subsequent war veterans. He has found—and I think this is pretty commonplace at this point—that the most successful therapy to start with for veterans involved group therapy, where they sit around and they actually can talk to each other unguardedly, because they’re not having to translate for people who don’t understand what it was like. And there’s that intense bonding that veterans do with each other, that soldiers do with each other. One of the most important things, of course, is to get a patient to feel like he or she is safe. One of the ways to do that is to put them with people who understand what they’re grappling with. And so I think, on some level, that’s an aspect that has to have been an aspect of ancient Greek theater—because you’re sitting largely with other veterans and you’re watching the work of veterans. But on top of that, you’re watching stories that don’t sugarcoat or glamorize what war is and does to both victims and the victors. And that is, I think, at least as important, because you have to be in a safe space where you are. Your life at this point is not threatened. You’re watching other people, these characters, go through these horrific things, but you’re also in a situation where people are not lying to you. The actors aren’t lying to you. The playwright isn’t lying to you about what that experience really costs. And in that process of that, and igniting that crucial seed of civilization, which is empathy for others—for people who are, for instance, women. You know, watching The Trojan Women, the vast majority of the characters in The Trojan Women, Euripides’ great play, are women. And the women are treated the worst, of course, of all the people in any war situation. I mean, the Greeks were as bad as anybody else in terms of how they treated the women of the civilizations in the cities that they conquered. But to sit in a theater and watch the suffering inflicted on mythical women, knowing that that has a direct correlation with the women that you have been dealing with, suborning, it’s kind of an extraordinary thing! What that asks of a veteran, and how the project of the theater is working on veterans. But it did! And I think that if you can feel empathy for not only women who basically had no power, no voice, no presence in society as significant voices or forces—if you can feel empathy for that, and not only women, but enemy women. If you can feel something like empathy for those people, those characters, it allows you back into the circle of humanity.

DALY: It’s me, Ryan Daly again. Did you know that one of the first books that Ellen McLaughlin read by herself and to herself as a child was an illustrated book of Greek myths? The reason I know is that Pete was so fired up after recording his conversation with Ellen that he gave my young kids an illustrated book of Greek mythology as a gift two days later. Then he explained that I would need to record this ad for him in return. I’m kidding about that! The truth is that I make a monthly contribution to Point of Learning because I value the ideas this show prompts me to think about. [If you want, you can add a sentence here about the yoga episode or another one of your favorites ... or something specific you value about the show in general. Just for the love of God, don’t read aloud what I write in the brackets.] Click the link on the bottom of the show page to learn more about making a one-time donation or a small monthly contribution, like I do. The money helps with very practical expenses, like gas. Pete drove across New York State to visit Ellen and record their conversation in her home, which he does with guests whenever he can. The extra effort he puts into each episode helps make it something you can come back to and enjoy years later. All right, thanks for your consideration, and now back to the show!

[29:36]

HORN: Speaking of The Trojan Women, I mentioned that Russia’s war on Ukraine prompted me to pick up the book, but of course, war is always with us, particularly those of us in the United States. I read recently scholar David Vine’s assertion that since World War II ended in 1945, there have been only two years—1977 and 1979—when American forces weren’t invading, or fighting in some foreign country.

McLAUGHLIN: Really!

HORN: —which brings me to a remarkable project you undertook in the mid-1990s, while war was still raging in the former Yugoslavia, and involved female survivors of war, based on the Trojan Women. Could you share a little bit about what came to be known as the Balkan Theater Project?

[VO]: Before Ellen answers, I realize another note may be in order, especially for younger listeners, that the Bosnian War raged in the early 1990s and killed an estimated 100,000 people. Part of the breakup of the former Yugoslavia, it was then the most devastating conflict in Europe since World War II. The Trojan Women is a drama by Euripides from 415 BCE, an especially scathing indictment of the cruelties of war that treats the suffering of women, the wives and children of Troy’s defeated leaders, especially the Trojan queen Hecuba, her daughter Cassandra, and her daugher-in-law Andromache. (These names will come up in a minute, but there will be no quiz.) Anyway, in 1995, when over 2 million people had been displaced by the Bosnian War, Ellen received a grant from the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund.

McLAUGHLIN: … which was a very enlightened grant. I think it’s still going, where you get a certain amount of money for yourself, but you also get—I think it was $30,000 for three years. And with that money, you conceive a project in which you will work with an underserved community of your choosing and do some sort of hum human rights work as an artist. So as a playwright, I found that I was most concerned, most upset about what was going on in the Bosnian War in 1995. And I decided that what I would like to do would be to put together a reading of a new version of The Trojan Women that I would write specifically for this purpose. And I would multiple-cast it, so there’d be at least two people in every part: we had three Hecubas and three Cassandras and two Andromaches, that sort of thing. And I would multiple-cast it with a group of women who were from all sides of the conflict: so we had Bosnian Muslims, we had Serbs, we had Croatians, we had some Albanians even. And I spent a year working with the psychiatric social worker who had spent time in the former Yugoslavia during the war, and with the American Friends Service Committee, which is a Quaker organization that I’ve been involved with all of my life, since I went to a Quaker school. And we would recruit this wide, diverse group of people and spend two weeks, maybe three weeks putting together a performance of a reading. I wasn’t going to expect them to memorize the work—

HORN: I’m sorry, so these are like refugees in New York City or—

McLAUGHLIN: We were looking for people who had fled the war. And there’s a large population in Astoria, in Queens. So we did a lot of bar crawls in Astoria looking because there are the Serbian-patronized bars and the Croatian-patronized bars. And then we went to sewing circles for Bosnian Muslim women, because they weren’t going to bars. We were just sort of making inroads into the communities. We also put ads in various specific papers. There’s a Serbian New York communication and there’s a Croatian and, you know, so we were doing that sort of thing and meeting lots and lots of people. And we did this with the help of the American Friends Service Committee, which was great. And over the course of about eight months, we actually did put together a very diverse group of people, all of whom were refugees. So these were people who had just gotten to the country. They had experienced war. They had lost family members, most of them. They were trying to learn English, they were trying to find jobs, they were trying to educate their kids, they were trying to find housing. I mean, in every way, their lives were in this massive crisis, which is what it is to be a refugee. And yet, they still volunteered to come and our reading with somebody they’d never met of an ancient Greek play. And it was gonna take two or three weeks of their lives, every night. They were gonna have to come in from Queens to Classic Stage Company on 13th Street on the East Side of Manhattan. And they did it! And these were people who would have crossed the street to avoid each other in any other circumstance. But they were not only rehearsing together this crazy play that I’d written, but they were sharing parts with people. I mean, the three Hecubas the first year were all women who had lived in Sarajevo, amazingly enough—and within blocks of each other—but they had not known each other before. One was a Serb, one was a Croatian, and one was a Bosnian Muslim. The Andromaches: two women, one was a Serb and one was a wounded Bosnian Muslim who had been through the siege in Sarajevo. And it was all so unlikely and so extraordinary that they did this thing. I mean, I lost people because it was too hard sometimes. It was just hard to stay in the room with the dialect of the people that you considered your enemy. This remarkable young woman who had lost her entire family and was in this country all alone was being helped by a Quaker organization in an adjustment. She had lost all 11 members of her family, seen some killed in front of her. And I had her sit next to me through rehearsals because I was worried about her, obviously. And she shook through the entire thing. And we would, we had to take breaks every 20 or 25 minutes because people needed to smoke, so they had to leave the building in order to smoke. And I at that time was a smoker, so I would share a cigarette with her and I’d watch her shaking as she lit her cigarette. I said at one point, “You know, you don’t have to do this. You don’t have to. Feel no obligation to me, because this looks really hard.” And she says, “It is hard, but don’t worry about the shaking. That’s just the animal. The animal is scared. But when I’m in that room, I’m in my country before the war, because that’s what my country sounded like.” It was all these different dialects, all these different kinds of Yugoslavian. “And if I can do this, this will be good for me if I can stay in this.” And she was so brave and extraordinary that I cast her as Andromache opposite this Serbian woman who was the only woman in the whole group who had any experience as an actor and was remarkable in her own right. And what I had them do—all of the cast members—I had them translate their part themselves into their own language, however they defined it, and you know, some people called it “Bosnian” and some people called it “Croatian,” you know. But I had them all translate their part into that language. And some part, about half of it, they would speak in that language chorally and sometimes, and half of it, they would speak the words. The idea being that in an audience, if you only spoke English, you understood the play. If you only spoke Serbo-Croatian, you understood the play, because everything would be spoken at some point by somebody in your language. And I loved the sound of all that language. But towards the end of the process, I had the the groups of the various principal characters in different dressing rooms in Classic Stage Company. And at one point the Andromache dressing room just burst into a lot of yelling, and it was alarming. And I was standing outside the door with Sarilee Khan, who was this wonderful psychiatric social worker who helped me with the first iteration of this. And I said, “Should I go in? Should I break this up?” And she said, “Just let them do this for a while and maybe they’ll work it out. We’ll wait.” And finally the yelling subsided, and it was just weeping. And I went in and I said, “You know, I don’t need to know what happened here, but why don’t you leave the building, go get something to eat, take a break and, you know, come back when you’re ready.” And they left the building together and I thought, I’m never gonna see them again. Because that did happen: people walked away and never came back. But a couple of hours went by, and they came back and they were holding hands when they came back. And what had happened, which wasn’t surprising, was that they were working on their parts. And Svetlana [Jovanovic], the Serb had tried to help Elma [Balic], the Bosnian Muslim with the translation. And Elma had just said, “No, absolutely not. This is my translation.” I mean, that was part of the point that everybody could speak their own translation, that they owned their part to some extent, all of them. And she didn’t want some sort Serbian dialect coming into this thing. She wanted her own version of it. And then she just snapped and she said, “I can’t even sit in the same room with you, because your voice is the voice of the people who killed my family.” And Svetlana said, “I didn’t kill your family. The last time I was in Serbia, I was there to protest Milosevic. You’re gonna have to accept the fact that we’re not all the same Serbs.” And then they’d gone out together, they’d eaten together, and they came back together, and they worked beautifully together. And the night of the show—I realize that stage fright is a unifying force in civilization; if we could just get everybody at the UN to do plays together!—because it, it unified the entire cast. They were so terrified to go out on stage. And I came back to assure everybody it was gonna be fine. And I saw Svetlana, who was a very large person sitting on the floor cradling Elma and singing a Bosnian lullaby to her.

HORN: Oh my goodness!

McLAUGHLIN: And you know, after the play, which went well, I was smoking on the street with Elma, and Svetlana walked past and Elma offered her a cigarette, which is a big deal because, you know, the ritual is that if you accept the cigarette, then the two of you stand there and smoke and you relate to each other during the length of the smoking of the cigarette. That’s sort of the way it goes. And so there was a commitment to smoke together and the offering of the cigarette was a big deal, and to some extent it was done for me, which was, and so they spoke to each other in English and Elma said to Svetlana, “It was an honor to be on the stage with you. You are a great actor.” And again, who’d have seen that, coming?

[VO]: Ellen told another story about the actors assigned to the role of the Trojan Queen Hecuba getting into a tussle about what happened to their character after the end of the Trojan War. So this is real-life people having fled a real war in 1995, arguing about what happened to a mythological queen in a mythological war, because they were so wrapped up in their role.

McLAUGHLIN: “No, no, no! She fell—she threw herself into the ocean!” “No, she was killed on the beach.” And it’s like really great. I mean, I love the fact that [they were] arguing about this—but they argued about everything and there were but again—stage fright—they helped each other out, and they were bonded on stage by playing this character Hecuba. And they ended up sharing an apartment and raising their kids together and they know each other still.

HORN: You’re kidding!

McLAUGHLIN: It was, I think, the hardest thing I’ve ever done, because there was so much riding on it. I just I was so, so nervous about causing any damage because these were exceedingly vulnerable people who couldn’t—I’ve not met more vulnerable people in my life.  But they were also exceedingly brave people and profoundly generous people, all of them. And I’ll never forget it. It was one of the great experiences of my life.

[45:49]

HORN: Well, in terms of the relationship of the plays that you make, your versions, to the ancient originals. You don’t call them translations because you’re not—

McLAUGHLIN: I’m not a classicist.

HORN: —you readily admit you don’t know Greek, but even adaptations doesn’t seem quite right to you. So you settle on versions. And I should say that what you end up with in each case can vary considerably—

McLAUGHLIN: Considerably!

HORN: —in terms of the form of the plays. Like, I could see your Oedipus—I could see it, you know, staged in togas, with mountains ringing this stage. But your Helen, based on the Euripides play involves an upscale Victorian hotel room and a TV and a flyswatter, right?

McLAUGHLIN: Yeah.

HORN: So I wanna ask about your method, how you go about doing this, because you write that generally your process is you read all the translations that you can get your hands on, but then you put them all away when you start to write. But I just wonder, a little more about this please! Because dramatically certain things need to happen, depending on your project, depending on your aim. Like do you have a kind of sketch of the scenes, like: there’s a plague going on; Oedipus demonstrates deep compassion and expertise. …

McLAUGLIN: Each version has been commissioned, and that's crucial. I don’t do these off my own bat, or I haven’t in the past, and each theater’s needs are different. I’ve generally been commissioned and also been paired with a director in that commission. So each of the versions is really different from the other ones. And they’re all responses to particular requests, but they’re also responses to the times that they were written in. And also the plays draw from me very different responses. I find that when I look back on plays, like my version of Oedipus was written in relationship to—for instance, this was in 2004. (My dates are always off.) But I saw the Democratic National Convention, and I saw this speaker who I’d never heard of, this Barack Obama—

HORN: “With the funny-sounding name”!

McLAUGHLIN: —who came on and gave one of the great political speeches of our time. And I thought, That’s who I want as president!

Sen. BARACK OBAMA [2004 clip]: When we send our young men and women into harm’s way, we have a solemn obligation not to fudge the numbers or shade the truth about why they’re going, to care for their families while they’re gone, to tend to the soldiers upon their return. And to never ever go to war without enough troops to win the war, secure the peace and earn the respect of the world.

McLAUGHLIN: That quality of leadership and eloquence and just the sense that you want this man to lead your country or your city: that’s what Oedipus is. Oedipus is the great king, the great articulate hero, and wise hero of his people. And I spent a lot of time with Oedipus because I really had a hard time sort of figuring out the handle to pick him up. And it was Barack Obama’s speech that changed me, because I thought, Oh, okay, it’s a love story between the chorus and the king, and it’s about what happens when that goes wrong. But there is no doubt in my mind that he starts the play as the effective, compassionate leader who comes to his people who are in crisis and says, I am doing all I can possibly do. I just sent to Delphi. My heart bleeds for you. And he comes out to listen to his people at the very beginning of the play. And it is in the process of trying to solve the problem of the plague and solve the problem of the city’s suffering that the entirety of the tragedy plays itself out. But that can only happen when the force that impels the drama is the force of a man trying to do right by his city. And that’s what makes him tragic is that he saves the city twice: first by answering the riddle of the Sphinx, and secondly by exiling himself because he has identified the source of the plague, and he is it. And so he exiles himself from the city to save his city. And for me, the arcing force of that was about the nature of an extraordinary leader and the relationship of him to his people. So that was my way into that. But also my connection with that play had to do with the tsunami that killed such a terrible number of people in Asia. That happened in 2004. […] That sort of filtered into my experience of writing that play because I listened to right-wing evangelistic types talking about how the people who died were in fact being “punished by God.” I found that so hateful, but I also understood it as the attempt to make sense of the scale of the suffering that was involved and the scale of the disaster. And that it was spoken by people who were fearful and attempting to create some logic and also to understand a god who would stand by and let such a thing happen. Oftentimes, what interests me about the plays is the attempt to understand a god, the Greek gods. And one of the reasons that I’m attracted to the Greek plays and the Greek sensibility is that I’m basically a pagan too. I mean, the way that they talk about God makes sense to me. Because when you have a human natural tragedy like the tsunami, I think to attempt to turn that into some sort of vengeance of a god against a people or against nature is obscene. And the Greeks were quite clear about the fact that the gods were not so much a moral force as a force of fate in certain circumstances; and that appealing to the gods was inevitable—because that’s what we do—but more often than not, you would not get any kind of response that was coherent or understandable by humans, and that the gods, because they are eternal and profoundly not human, don’t fundamentally understand us or really have that much interest in us as humans. And that makes sense to me. So that entered into the way that I approached the Oedipus, which is, you know, there are appeals made to God throughout the Oedipus, by the chorus mostly, and there is never an answer. There are appeals made, an attempt to understand why should this be the fate of this great man? And you never get an answer on that. It’s just the way it is, which makes sense to me, because we’ve all known people who have not had the lives that they deserved, if there was a just god or a god that rewarded the deserving. We’ve all known people who have not had that kind of mercy. There is no sense of a merciful god, or a god who gives good people what they deserve and punishes bad people, because the suffering of the innocents is something that has been the question of religion ever since religion began.

[55:46]

HORN: I love the way that you write female characters—

McLAUGHLIN: Well thank you!

HORN: —such as Electra and the, in your words, “prickly and uncomfortable women that Sophocles surrounds her with.” I'll add, since we were talking about Annie yesterday, your depression era of version of Antigone, from your version of that play called Kissing the Floor, which is coming out soon to a bookstore near you in Volume 2 of The Greek Plays! It was a privilege hearing you talk about the struggle of making Annie edgy enough to embody what you saw as the core trait, or a very important trait, of the ancient Antigone. You’ve written beautifully about this, but may I ask about constructing or updating these women as a woman yourself, sometimes, as you put it, “forcing [you] up against [your] own demons”?

McLAUGHLIN. I think that as a feminist, when you approach the Greeks, you’re always approaching difficulty. All of these characters—these great, great female characters—are difficult in various ways. And I think that the unabashed embrace of that is a little bit like the way that I feel about the way that the Greeks write veterans: there are no obvious heroes. You know, the way that we toss around the word hero all the time now. The Greeks didn’t have a relationship to heroes the way that we do. The heroes of the Trojan War—except for Hector, and I think Patroklos you could make up case for as being, you know, extraordinary men of great integrity as well as being heroes—but virtually everybody else on either side is a problematic character in every way. The same goes for if you go to the Greeks to find powerful female characters who are the kinds of women you would want to model yourself after, for instance, you’re not going to find anybody! Because they are all deeply difficult women. And that’s part of what makes them heroic. It was the quality of the suffering of the hero that made the hero heroic. It’s the quality of the suffering of the female characters that makes them heroic; it’s what we do with what we’re up against as human beings. We are privileged as audience members to watch these characters have to grapple with impossible ethical situations, impossible struggles with their fate, with their relationship with their families, their relationship with the gods, their relationship with society. We are lucky enough to be able to sit in an audience and watch them deal with these things, and lucky enough not to be dealing with them directly ourselves—except to the extent that every human being is dealing with those things directly, which is why we’re watching the place to begin with. Because there is some level of recognition of watching these peoplehese characters cope with things that are outsized, but still recognizably human problems. So yeah, you take a character like Clytemnestra, the definition of a “problematic woman”—

[VO]: Clytemnestra, as you may recall, is the Greek queen who was the wife of Agamemnon and mother of Iphigenia, whom the warrior King Agamemnon sacrificed in exchange for favorable sailing winds at the start of the Trojan War. On the very day of Agamemnon’s return from the war, Clytemnestra stabs him to death in the bathtub.

McLAUGHLIN: —and I’ve written her twice now. She always takes over the play because the size of her personal imprint, the character’s reckoning with these truths that she lives with is so mesmerizing. We can’t look away from the way that she has decided her own version of justice and then lives with the consequences of that. No god is telling Clytemnestra to kill her husband! On the contrary, you know? But she has decided that that is the righteous action, that is the necessary action to even the scales after this horrendous, abhorrent crime of human sacrifice of her own daughter, by the child’s father. So, I mean, that makes her remarkable, just as the blinding by Oedipus makes him remarkable. And then she goes on in the plays after that—the play in which her son comes back from exile and kills her; she goes on to dominate that play, though she is technically the victim of that play. She is killed, but then goes on to actually dominate. Aeschylus [the playwright] is not done with her. In the third play of The Orestia, when she’s dead, she comes on and she does a monologue. I mean, he becomes so enamored of that character—the power of that character, and her ability to articulate a particular kind of human experience—that he brings her back after she’s dead in order to reactivate that voice and animate the drama. And I found her similarly—she is one of the great characters. But as a feminist, what do we make of such a character? You know, what do we make of a woman who’s murderous but also a queen? And no mistake, she was running the country before she got married to Agamemnon. He, after killing their child, he runs off to the Trojan War. She runs the country for 10 years while he’s gone. He comes back that day, she kills him. She continues to run the country for another perhaps 10 years before her son comes back. She is the ruler of that country. And you can take issue with how she’s running the country, but she is the queen of that country. She is the most powerful person on the stage, and she’s a leader. She sets up this signal system so that when the war is accomplished, she set up this signal where somebody on a mountain in Troy lights stack of wood and that signals the next person and the next person. The news of the victory of the Greeks travels across the known world because of the system that she sets up. That’s remarkable! I mean, she is a figure of great power, effectiveness, and intelligence. And she talks good too! I mean, so you’re faced with somebody like that and you find that, like every playwright who’s ever worked with these plays—and we are legion—she takes over the play, and is just too good a character to not want to do justice to her. Antigone: she dies for the gesture of covering her brother’s unburied body with dirt. It’s wiped off, she does it again. Does it work? She’s not convinced that it has worked. Did she just lose her life for a gesture that in fact didn’t work? She’s terrified at the end, as she’s about to go to her death, not of death, but of the dead! She thinks, Will they be happy to see me? Will he feel that I did enough? Did she do enough? I think she’s really in some doubt about that. And if she didn’t, what are we saying about that character? She dies for a gesture that may not have in fact even worked, because the Greeks never let you settle into an absolute certainty about anything. And I think that it’s absolutely crucial that there be that moment of doubt.

[1:05:12]

[VO]: Let’s let that sit: the value of doubt, whether about the means and ends of war, or about our most tightly gripped opinions. Thanks so much to Ellen McLaughlin for joining me. Her anti-war play Mercury’s Footpath, based on a tiny fragment of a Euripides text that has somehow survived for more than 2400 years, will be produced at Yale in November, if you’re in the New Haven neighborhood. Many thanks to her husband Rinde Eckert, the multiply-talented creator whose music punctuates the soundtrack for today’s episode. Thanks as always to Shayfer James for intro and outro music, and thanks to you for listening, rating, reviewing, and supporting Point of Learning. Ratings and reviews really do help other people learn about the show, so if you have a minute to click 5 stars or say something brilliant, thanks for your contribution. Point of Learning is researched, written, recorded, edited, mixed, and produced by me. I’m Peter Horn, and I’ll be back at you just as soon as I can with a new episode all about what and how and why we learn. See you then!