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Aristophanes speaking truth to power at the Getty VillaAristophanes speaking truth to power at the Getty Villa By Evaggelos Vallianatos Thursday, the seventeenth of September, was one of the happiest days of my life. My happiness was Aristophanes coming alive at the Getty Villa Theater in Malibu, southern California. Aristophanes, 445-375 BCE, was an Athenian poet and comic dramatist, by far the greatest in the golden age of Greece and in the Western tradition. He grew up during the disastrous Peloponnesian War that wrecked Greece. He hated war and those politicians and arms businessmen who started and stocked its flames for personal profit. Aristophanes wrote 44 plays, 11 of which survived to our day. During a truce between Athens and Sparta in 421 BCE, he wrote “Peace,” the play that captured his genius for political insight and laughter. He denounced the destructiveness and hunger of war and lampooned mercilessly Athenian politicians, especially Cleon, a politician and general who supported the plague of war on the Greeks. Aristophanes accused Pericles, the architect of Athenian greatness, for setting the bonfires of war. “Peace” is a paean to goddess Peace who disappeared from Greece with the spread of war. “Peace” is primarily the story of Trygaeus, a farmer from Athmonum, a village near Athens. Trygaeus flew to Zeus on the back of a dung beetle. Trygaeus was angry with Zeus for allowing the carnage of war decimate Athens. He hoped he would convince Zeus to send Peace back to Greece. Aristophanes anti-war message, his speaking truth to power, is wrapped in a phallic and hilarious language, which finds expression in the acting of Trygaeus and the chorus. The seriousness of the profane play touches the audience even more deeply because comedy breaks down our biases and preconceived notions of propriety. And at the time of Aristophanes, phallic jokes and irreverence towards authority were part of a political tradition of free speech associated with Athenian democracy and the worship of god Dionysos. Sex and bawdy language were at the heart of that tradition. It was this political and funny play of Aristophanes, “Peace,” that unfolded in the theater of the Getty Villa, a beautiful Greek palace-museum on the hills of Malibu near the ocean. Surrounded by Greek columns and Greek treasures, the unquenchable and uninhibited and courageous spirit and story of Aristophanes moved me even closer to the ancient Greeks, enjoying the magic, wisdom, and immortality of Greek culture. Yet “Peace” did not come to us pure and Greek. Aristophanes was censored down to the 1960s in England. Christian audiences find offensive the explicit sexual and political language of Aristophanes. Each time Aristophanes comes to the stage, the censor is kept busy. In the case of the Getty presentation, the censorship and misinterpretation were minimal if not insignificant. Aristophanes attacked the merchants of weapons. We heard nothing about those merchants in the English translation. When Trygaeus reached the heavens, he found Hermes in the place of Zeus who, disgusted with the Greeks civil war, had taken the gods elsewhere. Hermes helped Trygaeus to dig Peace out of a pit she had been imprisoned by the god of war, Ares. The Getty translators made Hermes a homosexual, clearly violating Aristophanes. The Getty “adapted” the anti-war masterpiece of Aristophanes, “Peace,” away from the details of the Peloponnesian War, bringing the play at the level of Americas culture wars. The Getty Villa assigned “Peace” to Culture Clash, a Chicano / Latino performance trio from Los Angeles: Richard Montoya, Ric Salinas, and Herbert Siguenza. In addition, John Fleck, a distinguished actor, played Trygaeus and Amy Hill acted the role of the Chorus leader. These artists did their best in interpreting Aristophanes, adding jokes, biting commentary, and sarcasm on the endless conflicts among the Anglo-Chicano-black Americans. The actors, however, did not hide their faces with masks. Some wore Greek costumes, others modern clothes. Sometimes they added Spanish to their English speech. But their acting was superb, moving around the stage with huge phalluses. The expansion of Aristophanes to include Americas war culture shortened but did not diminish in a significant manner the original play. In fact, it made Aristophanes a contemporary political comedian with a grasp of American politics. In one of these additions, a radio talk show host interviewed Aristophanes. The dialogue was silly. Aristophanes, sporting an enormous phallus under a colorful dress, listened to the radio host babbling about fund raising. The laughter from this anachronistic encounter had little to do with what was said but everything to do with the contrast between the two men. Aristophanes replacing the balloon-phalluses blowing up while the radio host dressed in his modern gear uttering nonsense. This experiment of using Greek theater not merely for the enjoyment and wisdom of ancient comedy or tragedy but also to comment on American politics has a potential for expanding the mind-opening effect of Greek classics in our culture. Done with due respect for the integrity of the original text, the merging of the Greek and American theater would enrich America. The Getty Villa deserves credit for this initiative in spreading Greek culture in the United States. Evaggelos Vallianatos is the author of “This Land is Their Land” and “The Passion of the Greeks.”
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