Bakkhai Variations:
Villanova Theatre
Literary Review of other variations of Bakkhai
Introduction
This literary review touches on a few selected takes on Euripides’ classic play Bakkhai (aka Bacchae) beyond the five new ones Villanova Theatre will be featuring this fall. Each section presumes a base knowledge of the story itself. If one does not know the basic structure of the tragedy or needs a refresher, visit the Myth Summary page on this website.
The passages vary in length, which should act more as an indicator of difference and departure from the original text rather than an indication of quality or worthiness. At the end of each review, a breakdown of possible value in consuming this particular version is provided; read this section when deciding if this iteration of Bakkhai may be worth your time. Enjoy!
Revelation in the Courthouse Park, musical by Harry Partch (1960)
This musical/concept album from the 1960s is a melding of Greek tragedy, mid-century musical, and avant-garde instrumentation. The recording goes through the entire story of Bakkhai but mostly forgoes the choral odes for instrumental soundscapes and guttural chanting. The tracks are named simply ‘Chorus’ and ‘Scene’ and are sequentially numbered to clarify the linearity of the narrative. While the songs with vocals often have a Musical Golden Age feel to them, they sometimes break down into atonality when the emotions become too extreme.
A full musical dissection could probably yield a panoply of insight into how Partch translates a tragic sensibility to a 1960s musical audience, but unfortunately such in-depth analysis is not the dramaturg’s area of expertise. Overall, the score contains radical juxtapositions and a willingness to be unironically stilted to the point of feeling somewhat operatic. If one is interested in exploring different musical genres in relation to Greek tragedy and Bakkhai in particular, then giving this musical a listen will prove worthwhile. For more, the entire album is freely available on Spotify and YouTube so those who are so inclined can listen to it in full.
The Bacchae of Euripides: A Communion Rite, adaptation by Wole Soyinka (1973)
Marketing image from UMass Amherst’s 2017 production of Soyinka’s text
This beautiful rendering of the Dionysos myth by Wole Soyinka meditates on ritual’s role in giving a voice to the oppressed. In this version, the chorus is split into two groups: bacchants and slaves. The former flock to the newly arrived deity out of devotion and a desire for ecstatic abandon. The latter, however, are hesitant to follow Dionysos for fear of summoning the wrath of their tyrannical masters. The slaves do eventually identify this new religion as a path to liberation after seeing a demonstration of the wine god’s power, which Soyinka shows much more willingly than Euripides. After Dionysos asks for the slaves to worship him, their leader protests, “You’ll get us all killed. We’ll be wiped out to a man” (238 in Wole Soyinka: Collected Plays 1). In response to this insolence, the god turns to the priests and vestal present and possesses them to worship him. After he casts his spell, the vestals speak “liturgical, lifeless: Welcome the new god. Joyfully” (239). After displaying his divine power, Dionysos’ following increases and stirs Pentheus’ ire.
By expanding and visualizing the new god’s powers, the upheaval to the social order he represents comes into sharper focus. As such, Pentheus’ defiance simultaneously comes from a more rational place and directly connects to white supremacy. Instead of taking issue with women having some harmless fun in the woods for a few days, the Theban king feels threatened by what he perceives to be slave riots and citywide chaos. And in this respect, Pentheus is not wrong. On more than one occasion the jubilant dances of the bacchantes end with an outsider being trampled and beaten. Soyinka’s willingness to depict the darker side of Dionysian revels conveys a somewhat more balanced argument between chaos and order. Pentheus still falls and Dionysos stands triumphant, but the tragedy finds new purchase in foreshadowing the finale’s destruction much earlier in the text.
A few other notable additions come in the seduction scene. In order to convince Pentheus to visit Mt. Cithaeron, Dionysos invokes his dominion over theatre and summons entire shadow plays for the Theban king to see. The first shows a wedding before “an altar to Aphrodite” during which “masks from on high” scrutinize the groom-to-be before it breaks into a raucous dance party (285). This play-within-the-play takes on an especially eerie quality when the Bridegroom and the Father-in-law-to-be begin to squabble and the English dialogue suddenly turns into Ancient Greek. The next scene is also a wedding but much more austere in nature. Dionysos presents a “traditional Christ-figure” before us yet “his halo is an ambiguous thorn-ivy-crown of Dionysos” (286). The solemn ritual shows a procession in which “all are full of wonder, love and forgiveness,” by imbibing magical libations (287). These visions leave Pentheus in a dreamy state and susceptible to Dionysos’ wiles. Another major change is that Pentheus entirely rebuffs being dressed in a woman’s vestments, or so he thinks. After Pentheus’ rejection, Dionysos offers to dress the king “in your royal armour” (289). The doomed mortal buys into this ruse and believes he is striding to Mt. Cithaeron “in the battledress of a worthy king of Thebes” while he is adorned with the fawnskin and ivy crown of a bacchant (289).
After Pentheus’ death, Soyinka includes a truly spectacular visual at the play’s very final moments. After Kadmos, Agave, and the others begin to cry and mourn over the young man’s remains, “The theme music of Dionysos begins, welling up and filling the stage with the god’s presence;” after this aural change to the landscape, “A powerful red glow shines suddenly as if from within the head of Pentheus, rendering it near-luminous. The stage is bathed in it and, instantly, from every office of the impaled head springs red jets, spurting in every direction” (307). All present are aghast and Kadmos believes he has been newly covered in the blood of his grandson. Tereisias, however, “holds out a hand, catches some of the fluid and sniffs. Tastes it,” and gravely reports, “No. It’s wine” (307). This tactile moment seems entirely unique to Soyinka’s adaptation and it serves as another horrifying and awe-inducing example of Dionysos’ power.
Reading or otherwise consuming this particular version would be particularly beneficial to anyone interested in examining ritual spaces, inventive visuals, incorporating various theatrical styles, and finding the universal in the culturally specific. If anyone in the Villanova community is interested, the Falvey Library has a copy of the script on the shelf and this project’s dramaturg has a personal copy they can lend out on request.
A Mouthful of Birds, play by Caryl Churchill and David Lan (1986)
This episodic script deftly pairs the postmodern with the classical. The scenes alternate between the humdrum of late capitalism and Bacchic possession. Whether it be a receptionist who has to constantly cover for her flighty boss or a meat export analyst becoming friends with a pig, these modern tropes of dissatisfaction become intensified when the spirits of the Bakkhai’s characters come rushing into them.
In a way only writers like Churchill and Lan can accomplish, the postmodern tension with commercial middle-class life uses repetition to reach absurd heights. One scene called ‘Excuses’ begins with banal reasons why someone would choose not to leave the house such as “I can’t go swimming this morning, I’ve got a hangover,” which then escalate to “I can’t play tonight, my house has blown down” and “I can’t meet the deadline. The chairman’s been struck by lightning” (8, 9). In a world of increasingly ridiculous proportions, all excuses sound and feel the same, so when one of them “is possessed by Agave” after “Dionysos appears to” her, everything changes. The tone of the piece changes as Agave describes, “I put my foot against its side and tore out its shoulder. I broke open its ribs” (16).
By the end all of the contemporary denizens of the play have been possessed by some member of the Bakkhai dramatis personae, but the modern events start to distort under the pressure of these frenzied intrusions. A spiritual medium named Marcia, for examples, shows how in the world of this play, the spirits of the dead do exist but cannot be tamed by the living like her business suggests.
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At the beginning of the second act, Mouthful of Birds takes a fascinating detour into the true events of Herculine Barbin, an intersex person who struggled with being assigned female at birth in 1838 and then being forcibly reassigned by the French courts in the 1860s. This exploration of sexual and gender ambiguity through the lens of a real historical figure grounds Churchill and Lam’s play in an understanding of Dionysus’ androgyny. This parallel intensifies because during an earlier scene an inmate visibly changes genders by having two performers of different genders magically swapping in and out to confuse the prison guards. In other words, complexifying gender becomes an increasingly central part of the play and connects with Bakkhai when the spirit of Pentheus is dressed as a woman and finally killed at the play’s conclusion.
Whole entire plot arcs have been elided over for the sake of concision, including a deeply dissatisfied marriage and the mental trauma of a woman abused by her father, but these narratives all weave together into a postmodern melange indicative of the other work writers like Churchill and Lan were producing at the time. For anyone interested in intersecting the Dionysus myth with postmodern or even surreal elements, Dionysian possession as escapism from the ennui of capitalism, or complicated gender dynamics, Mouthful of Birds is an excellent read. It is available for free on Drama Online via the Falvey Library.
The Bacchae, translation by Paul Roche (1998)
This translation’s inclusion in this review primarily stands in for a whole slew of literal renderings of the original Ancient Greek. Much of the same thoughts could safely be applied to the Penguin Classics editions, David Greene and/or Richard Lattimore translations, Robert Fagles, and other works of a similar caliber. The dramaturg highlights the Roche iteration because it has clear headings and structural notes such as when a choral ode begins, ends, and what sections are strophe, antistrophe and so on,
which can prove useful for understanding how the Greeks compartmentalized these plays. To clarify, while the spoken language of Roche’s text aims as close as possible to literalness, any and all stage directions are editorial decisions — the extant texts from that period and soon after contain no stage directions.
Another benefit of these literal attempts comes in discovering the inherent poeticism of Greek tragedies. The act of returning to these same stories time and again deserves to be questioned, but the beauty of the verse is evident such as when the chorus of bacchantes sings:
He when the Fates had shaped him
A perfect baby there
His father then unfolded:
An ox-horned crescent god
Swaddled in the twisting
Serpents. That is why
The Maenads catch wild snakes and
Twist them in their hair (399-400 in Euripides: Ten Plays Translated by Paul Roche)
Another example of this inherent beauty comes from the captivating nature of the messenger speeches in these plays. It becomes easier to understand how such lengthy monologues were permissible in these works when reading their narrative flow firsthand.
There is much less to say about this entry overall, since for the most part this text tells the story of The Bacchae as we know it from start to finish with only small editorial alterations along the way. Reading this version and the relevant introductions and prefaces would be advisable for those who want to learn more about the structure and style of the original plays (without learning Ancient Greek) as well as the mythological and historical context that brought this play about. For members of the Villanova community, a three play volume of Paul Roche’s translations of Alcestis, Medea, and The Bacchae are at the Falvey Library and this project’s dramaturg has a personal copy of a ten play version that includes those three and seven more Euripides translations.
Bakkhai, adaptation/translation by Anne Carson (2017)
This particular reinterpretation of Euripides’ opus was Villanova Theatre’s pre-COVID selection for this project, and it was selected over the dozens and hundreds of other options for a reason. Despite being largely faithful to the ethos and story beats of the original, Carson frequently injects her personal poeticism and knack for brutal concision into this script that is rife for both in-depth literary analysis and live performance.
The published text is called “a new version by Anne Carson,” and its avoidance of calling itself a translation or adaptation is fitting since it straddles both modalities quite finely. Many of the lines are one-to-one transfers from Greek to English with some small adjustments for poetry, but other sections are entirely rewritten. Some alterations are modern malapropisms such as Kadmos asking Teiresias, “Should we call a cab?” (19). But Carson’s most liberal frontier for transformation lies in the chorus’ scenes. First, the Canadian poet-scholar plays with formatting in her the choral passages such as the beginning of the 3rd choral ode on page 46:
Productions of this text have found varying inspirations from these inventive indentations and set these sections to fully orchestrated music or had them read like free form poem-chants. Moreover, Carson freely changes the textual content of the chorus’ contributions. A prime example of these additions is during the parados or choral entrance song during which the chorus intones many manifestations of the color green. This incantation begins “O Thebes! garland yourself / in all the green there is,” which begins a long list that includes the “green of youth and green of branches, / green of mint and green of marsh grass, / green of tea leaves, oak and pine,” and so on (16).
With all of this said, Carson’s script follows the relative structure of Euripides’ tragedy in terms of choral positioning and narrative structure. She situated all of the adaptational heavy lifting within the existing story of Dionysos’ revenge on Thebes. This version would prove most beneficial to those who are interested in a contemporary twist without too much deviation from the original and using modern poetry techniques as a way to reimagine classical verse. For anyone interested in reading it, this project’s dramaturg has a pdf that they can distribute for educational purposes only.
Hurricane Diane, adaptation by Madeleine George (2019)
This gem of a play depicts Dionysian revels as a blatant abandonment of women’s prescribed gender roles. Diane, a butch lesbian landscaper from Vermont, rolls into prim New Jersey suburbia in hopes of beginning an ecological revolution. From the onset, she explains that this exterior is just as much of a fabrication as the form the deity takes at the beginning of Euripides’ tragedy. After laying low for over a millennium she is over just watching us ruin the planet: “You don’t know what time it is on the cosmic clock [...] So let me tell you what time it is. It’s eleven fucking forty-five. If I don’t step in now, the glaciers are gonna melt and the permafrost is gonna thaw and fast-forward a hundred years and there won’t be a single human left on the planet to worship me!” (10-11).
Her targets? Four middle class housewives. Carol, Pam, Renee, and Beth. Diane’s plan? “Slide in on the DL,” she explains, “hit ‘em with the landscaping design angle, and then, when I’m all the way in, pull out the stops” (11). The landscape design itself mirrors this ecological mindset and revolves around suitability. Rather than the classist symbol of lawns, she wants to create a permaculture oasis, “a fragrant paradise. Green carpet below, sun-dappled canopy above” filled with “blueberries, thimbleberries, huckleberries” and other indigenous flora (16-7). Diane’s first visit to Carol is unsuccessful, but Diane quickly converts the other three.
The twist, the tragedy, comes in Diane’s failure to convert Carol. After all her friends have left her, embracing their Bacchic spirit — ready to paint the world green —Carol defiantly asks, “Why should I sacrifice even one of my comforts when my comforts are literally all that I have?” (65). The paradox of the ‘kept woman’ relies on them being both trapped by capitalism and unwilling to rebel against it. No matter how much Diane pleads for Carol’s assistance to heal the earth, but when Diane says, “You want annihilation” and “You want chaos and destruction,” all Carol can answer is “yes;” and when Diana says “You want the storm” — the destructive storm at the doorstep of ecological apocalypse — Carol replies, “I am the storm” (66).
This complete unwillingness to cede any ground at all to begin healing the environment we have so grievously wounded leaves Diane and her movement defeated. The deity rages, “If you can’t figure out how to rewrite your own story, then play it out. To the bitter end. Starve as your croplands parch and shrivel. Drown as the oceans swallow the coasts. Burn as the wildfires scorch the fruited plains. And wander this hot and godless earth, knowing it didn’t have to go this way” (67). While Diane is undoubtedly the tragic hero of Hurricane Diane, the victim may in fact be the planet itself. Audience members are meant to feel the impending sense of environmental doom and the weight of the destruction the human race has already wrought. By exploring the intersections of class, patriarchy, and the climate, this play is a fabulous and radical reimagining of the Dionysos figure. The text is unavailable for free, but is being sold by Concord Theatricals online.
Girls, adaptation by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (2019)
An outdoor dance party set in a small town neighboring a pastoral wood, Girls expands upon the connection between Dionysian mysteries and women escaping patriarchal confines. Specifically by focusing on the desire of BIPOC women to get away to “the clurb,” Jacobs-Jenkins manages to place more emphasis on why the bacchantes would be drawn to the mountaintop revels without losing track of the Dionysos/Pentheus dynamic central to Euripides play.
While those unfamiliar to the mysteries might call Deon a DJ, he insists on being called a curator. He scoffs at being called a DJ:
“That’s so pretentious - running around calling yourself a DJ. What discs? Jockeying what? What are you talking about? I’m more of a ‘curator.’ I have a really amazing taste in music and a decent laptop with some extra-nice speakers and if I want to find myself a nice corner of a woods or a park somewhere and set up my laptop and start playing my playlist and if people find themselves wanting to gather around this little patch of grass I’ve found on the outskirts of town, deep in the woods, and up some hill and lose their minds a little bit or a lot of bit for an hour or two or day or several days then that’s all that is.” (from rehearsal draft provided to dramaturg)
In the very park in which his mother died, Deon puts his curatorial powers on display and brings in a cavalcade of girls to “lose their minds a little bit.” Interspersed throughout the proceedings, one of them will start a monologue exclaiming ‘Girl!’ and proceed to tell one of many Greek myths in which a woman was abused or neglected. Beyond Dada’s (read: Kadmos’) children, contemporary analogs to Clytemnestra, Medea, Pandora, and Phaedra are all in attendance. Alongside these overt mythological allusions, some of the girls have completely contemporary problems such as the discomfort those inured with modern life have with being outdoors or wanting to stay in shape. These monologues thread together just a portion of the tapestry illustrating Ancient Greece’s treatment of women and its parallels to today.
Enter Theo, our new Pentheus, who streams vitriolic video livestreams of bigotry onto the internet for other right-wing extremists. This frustrated neophyte bandies about sexist and ableist slurs, calls the cops on a harmless party, and brags about his gun collection to his fan base. His ostensibly earnest rationale for being a party pooper is because “this kind of music turns females into sluts.” Despite everyone around him insisting that these rituals are an important release from the stressors of everyday life, Theo does not relent until Deon performs his fabulous seduction. During this scene, Deon perfectly distills the need for Theo to disguise himself in 21st century language, “Clearly a male presence is triggering in that space.” In contexts built upon feminine solidarity, the intrusion of men can be deeply unsettling or even reharming, and on this pretext, Gaga’s (read: Agave’s) blind, drunken rage takes on a completely new form. Compounding all of this, Gaga has been seeing her sister Meme (read: Semele) in the form of a ghost, so when she sees Theo in drag, she assumes it’s another trick. As Gaga yells at Theo, “You’re lyin’! You’re lyin’! She’s lyin’!” someone else hears the word ‘lion’ and creates a panic that leads to Theo’s death.
The orchestrated chaos Deon manifests brings about this tragic end, and Gaga comes home to proclaim her victory over the mountain lion to Dada. Rather than slowly realizing that she has killed her own son and providing the lengthy and cathartic denouement we expect, another woman sees what Gaga is holding in her hand and just says, “Oooh, giiiiiiiiiiirl,” ending the play. This play is a delightful whirlwind and probably going to continue its development since the only production it has received up to this point was at Yale Rep, but the play explicates compounding issues regarding race and gender in our current political climate in the way only Branden Jacobs-Jenkins can. This script is not available anywhere as it is unpublished. If it is for educational purposes only, the dramaturg may receive permission to send a PDF draft upon request.