It’s been exactly 30 years now since I began, with my adaptation of Electra in 1994, my encounter with the ancient Greeks in these versions of their literature and myths. The sister volume, The Greek Plays, published in 2005, includes the first six adaptations I wrote, involving plays by the three great tragedians, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, as well as a version of Aristophanes’s comedy Lysistrata. This volume similarly contains adaptations based on plays by all three tragedians, but also includes a music-theatre piece, Penelope, inspired by Homer’s Odyssey, and a short play, Conversations at the Return of Spring, the source of which is the myth of Demeter and Persephone.
The work included in these volumes makes up a great part of what I have done as a playwright over a long career. But with this second volume of work inspired by the Greeks, I feel I’m bringing a rich conversation that has lasted decades to a close. I can only be grateful for the way these meetings with the dead have sharpened my sensibility, awakened my instincts, and challenged my skills. With every assignment I’ve taken on, the Greeks have taught me crucial lessons about my craft and given me insights into myself I would not have received elsewhere.
Ajax in Iraq, the first play in this volume, was written in 2007-2009 during the bloodiest years of the Iraq War. The Oresteia, the last and most recent play, was finished in 2019 amid the Trump presidency. These have been tumultuous times for the world, terrifying for democracy, and hard to navigate as a citizen, let alone as an artist. But the Greeks have helped me. It has been a comfort to remember that they made their great work as their world buckled and heaved with its own bad times and that what they created endures beyond the politics and crises of their era.
What the Greeks have given me as a writer is courage and size. If you’re dealing with the Greeks, you can’t just make little plays that stay safely within the bounds of what’s easily achievable. I’ve found that liberating. Scary in the right way. There is nothing tidy, nothing settled, at the end of a Greek play. These aren’t nice pieces of literature you savor with your glass of sherry; they bleed all over the floor if you try to bring them inside the house. There’s an exhilaration to the ambition, the chutzpah, of the Greeks. I wanted to engage with that and so I let the Greeks lead me where they did.
I’m always struck by just how disturbing Greek plays are. At the center of each one there is an unthinkable thought, a terrible image that is designed to jolt us into a struggle with the ethical conundrum that the play circles but can never resolve. As a writer in conversation with them, I have found that the only way to encounter these plays authentically and fruitfully is to embrace their difficulties, to head toward the darkness. When students I teach find the ancient plays offputting and hard, I don’t try to convince them otherwise. They are. I advise them to value and pay attention to the aspects of the work that confound and disturb them. These plays were not intended as academic exercises or to be mastered through analysis. They are intended to shock, to defy logic, to move deeply into the psyche and do their work. When writing in response to one of these plays, I have to stop dithering on the surface and just drop down into the cave of it, enter the depths, and see what I can discover there. It takes time, sometimes years, but I will find something, an odd dreamlike fragment that is born of these works but is also passionately and undeniably mine. Once I find that, I can begin.
To write each of these plays, I had to wait for some image to break in me that refused analysis and lifted me away from an intellectual, dutiful stance into creative urgency. Antigone in a 1930s housedress knocking Morse code on a wooden door; Odysseus as a brain-wounded veteran sitting in an armchair looking out to sea, waiting for his own return; the gray ribbon that Mercury ties around the wrists of the dead when he takes us to the Underworld—those were some of the tickets to the rides these plays took me on.
In my preface to the first volume of The Greek Plays, I wrote that I found Greek plays uniquely useful when addressing war, both its majesty and its horrors. But in looking at the plays assembled for this second volume, I realize that what they share has less to do with my continuing desire to address war and its effects than with my personal history over the past years, which has included a reckoning with death and loss—a subject that the Greeks treated in all their literature and about which, as with war, they were exquisitely, searingly eloquent.
