Through Greek Tragedy and 21
Century Dramas
Emma Bilderback
Introduction
i. The Theatre of War Project 1
ii. The Fault and Misogyny of the Lens 3
iii. Experiences Shape Created Worlds 5
1 : Aeschylus’s
The Persians
and Rajiv Joseph’s
Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo 9
1.1 Historical Contexts Between Two Eras 13
1.2 Moving Through Life and Death 18
1.3 Humanizing the Opposition 23
2 : Euripides's
Trojan Women
and Danai Gurira’s
Eclipsed
282.1 Different Women, Different Wars 28
2.2 When Women Fight 35
2.3 The Use and Portrayal of Sexual Abuse 36
2.4 Seeking Agency 39
2.5 The Unknowable Aftermath 42
3 :
Antigone (not quite/quiet)
and Postcolonial Violence
443.1 Antigone in Cape Town 44
3.2 Contextualizing the Colonialism 48
3.3 Into the Postcolonial 53
3.4 “She is All of Us” 56
3.5 Protest and Femininity 58
Conclusion
64“Tragedy might be defined as a grief-stricken rage that flows from war.”
—Simon Critchley in Tragedy, The Greeks and Us The Theatre of War Project
The Theater of War Productions is a New York City-based enterprise that focuses on using the ancient texts of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides to spark conversation about modern warfare and its effects on soldiers and other wartime populations. The plays which the 1
company most frequently uses are Sophocles’ Ajax and Philoctetes. Both of these stories are 2
about the plight of the soldier, the soldiers in question being both Ajax and Philoctetes who fought during the Trojan War. While soldiers are a necessary component of war—setting aside the question of the necessity of war itself and the effects of war on soldiers is a worthy
discussion, war can also greatly impact those who do not choose to fight—like women, children, and civilians in a conflict.
Sophie Klein wrote an essay about Theater of War in Contemporary Adaptations of
Greek Tragedy that provides a detailed framework as to how this company uses the previously
mentioned Ajax and Philoctetes to create a framework for conversations about modern issues in the armed forces. Using both the way that the plays are presented and the theory behind them, Klein paints a picture of how Theatre of War impacts a community. Klein elaborates: “the Theatre of War project, in particular, focuses on the impact of war on soldiers and their
1Sophie Klein, “Theatre of War: Ancient Greek Drama as a forum for modern military dialogue,” in Contemporary
Adaptations of Greek Tragedy: Auteurship and Directorial Visions, George Rodosthenous, ed. (London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, an Imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2017), 147.
2 Bryan Doerries, Theater of War: What Greek Tragedies Can Teach Us Today, (New York: Penguin Random House, 2015): 4.
communities.” The zeitgeist of American soldiers is incredibly specific, with specific 3
conflicts—like the Iraq war—and specific issues—like the lack of care for veterans after their service has ended. With Ajax, the violence portrayed lent itself to discussions surrounding combat-related trauma and wartime post-traumatic stress disorder. The performances of the 4
plays (or selections from the plays) are accompanied by a panel of experts in the related subject as well as veterans and those on active duty.
It is worthwhile to note that ‘project’ is the most apt way to describe what occurs at Theater of War, as nothing that they produce amounts to full scale productions, or even full readings of plays. Also, the means of facilitating dialogues through these dramatic readings is not the typical way a theatre company is run, especially a New York City based company. Also, the mission of the company is atypical for the same reason, as the project, seemingly, has an end goal in mind. It is creating its art for a purpose, not just for its own sake. Therefore, the qualifier of ‘project’ will be used frequently when referencing the company.
The Theatre of War project takes Aristotelian lenses and projects them onto all parts of the Greek canon that they present to audiences. While a useful tool for certain kinds of analyses, 5 they do not always fit uniformly. Therefore, the key aspect of using the Theatre of War project as a way to justify how these modern and ancient works are complementary, the main mission of the project, which is to spark conversation around modern issues through the ancient works, will be the means through which all of these plays are explored.
3Sophie Klein, “Theatre of War: Ancient Greek Drama as a forum for modern military dialogue,” in Contemporary
Adaptations of Greek Tragedy: Auteurship and Directorial Visions, George Rodosthenous, ed. (London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, an Imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2017), 149.
4 Ibid, 160. 5Ibid, 153.
Using the format that Theater of War has created—using Greek tragedy as a means to facilitate conversations about issues in modernity—there is plenty of exploration to be had for not only other tragedies in the Greek canon, but contemporary dramas that take place during wartime as well. There are many issues regarding current wartime traumas and their aftereffects, not just post-traumatic stress disorder, but issues regarding sexual violence against women during wartime, xenophobic attitudes and how they impact the lives of civilians, and war-like domestic conflicts. Each chapter of this thesis tackles one of these issues, using both
contemporary and ancient dramas to further analyze these issues that surround times of war and conflict, without an acute focus on the soldiers. Two of the chapters use a comparative literary analysis, juxtaposing an ancient play with a contemporary one, and the final chapter is a performance analysis of a modern adaptation of a Greek tragedy. This is why those stories are often told again and again, and there are other victims of war and conflict that are simply those who fight on behalf of their leaders.
The theory and art of the Theater of War can too be applied to those to fight for their own survival. That is why the plays Antigone by Sophocles, The Persians by Aeschylus, and Trojan
Women by Euripides have been chosen as the foremost Greek examples to prove this thesis.
These stories take place after the conflict is already over or off in the distance, the battle has been won by someone, but not the focus of the stories, and their lives are changed forever. That is the truth of the tragedy, that we are not the same once the tragedy is over. The contemporary
counterparts to these plays are A Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo by Rajiv Joseph and Eclipsed by Danai Guerra. Both of these play look at conflicts that have occurred in our life, the first with
American occupation of the Middle East that continues even to this day. The second play,
Eclipsed, is about a group of Liberian women during the end of the Second Liberian Civil War,
and the violence that is inflicted upon as they hope to survive to the end of the war. The final play is an adaptation of Sophocles’s Antigone that was performed in Cape Town, South Africa in September 2019 titled known as Antigone (not quite/quiet). This adaptation explored ongoing class, racial, and gendered struggles in South Africa since the end of Apartheid.
All of these plays contain tragic elements and themes. Aeschylus and Rajiv Joseph share themes of death, the afterlife, and xenophobia as a way for the audience to key into a different perspective of a conflict their respective audiences would have known well. Euripides and Danai Gurira explore how long wars and seemingly endless conflict affect women, and what women do to survive dire circumstances like ongoing sexual abuse. Antigone (not quite/quiet) explores how even after Apartheid’s violent policies have ended, the people remained divided and racialized and gendered violence continues; the tragedy in Antigone (not quite/quiet) does not end when the lights go out on the stage.
The Fault and Misogyny of the Lens
The Theater of War Productions, and the book of the same name (Theatre of War: What
Ancient Greek Tragedies Can Teach Us Today) by Artistic Director Bryan Doerries, justifies a
very specific line of thought when stating his position for using certain plays as a means for conducting conversations in the 21st century about war. Doerries outline marries the
philosophies of both Aristotle (through The Poetics) and general philosophies of language as described by Fredrich Nietzsche, referencing the essay We Philologists, specifically. Now, given
these ideas spelled out by the head creative of the project, it would be remiss not to mention that both of these philosophers, however they may be products of their time, firmly and acutely believed that women were inferior to men in almost every conceivable way. So, the question 6
that stands here is: can these inherently misogynistic lines of thought be applied to these
women-centered stories? Women are purposefully excluded in these conversations. There is no getting around that idea. But it would be an injustice to continue to exclude women from conversations such as these because the suffering and humanity of women cannot be ignored or thought of as secondary.
In his analysis of Nietzsche in his book Theater of War, Bryan Doerries asserts, in agreement with Nietzsche, that modern scholars cannot know the Greeks, and cannot know whether they are fitted to investigate them. Well, it may be daring to say but Doerries cannot know Nietzsche or whether he is fitted to investigate him, but he chooses to anyway. Just as this thesis investigates the Greeks, whether or know they are intimately known is not really relevant to the larger point at hand. All we have are interpretations, and they may vary widely for any number of reasons, but that does not mean they should be dismissed. Nietzsche also asserts, as retold by Doerries, that a philologist “must be a man”, though this quote is never elaborated on or justified in its use. This is where the creeping vapors of the old misogynist lines of thought 7 taint modern interpretations of work. If a writer is going to connect two philosophers by their ways of thinking, it feels intellectually dishonest to ignore how these thinkers viewed and wrote about women. Not all Greek tragedy, as demonstrated, is about men, or representative of men. It
6 This is evidenced by the language that Aristotle uses in his Politics treatise, and several of Nietzsche’s works, including Ecce Homo and the referenced We Philologists.
7 Bryan Doerries, Theater of War: What Greek Tragedies Can Teach Us Today, (New York: Penguin Random House, 2015): 21.
seems about as useful a way to look at old Greek plays as excluding all people who are not white from the conversation (meaning it is not useful and, in fact, quite harmful).
This thesis speaks heavily on the experiences of women specifically, so it felt necessary to discuss these views, however controversial they might feel. Even more so, this thesis speaks on women characters as if they are played by women, not operating under the knowledge that the ancient Greek tragedies had women played by young men or boys. When Troy’s Hecuba or Persia’s Atossa are written about, they are spoken about as women—not women played by men. Nietzsche’s views on women are well documented, as are those views in direct relation to Aristotle’s views as we understand them now. It is important because philosophical writings do not exist in a vacuum, they are molded by the individual based on a myriad of experiences, so misogyny cannot be dismissed as a relic of the past or different ways of thinking.
That being said, the essay written by Sophie Klein looks at the creation of the Theater of War void of much theory, simply looking at the practice of the company. The practice of using the plays to justify real and modern conversations about wartime traumas, as stated previously, is a good and useful method textual and performance analysis. Using art as a lens for real-world problems can have a cathartic effect on the audience, and understanding that the problems facing certain populations are not isolated to them is an important aspect of self-discovery. This is especially true for victims of trauma, where feelings of isolation are common. And while 8
Klein’s view of the Theater of War is the main focus for these comments and analyses, ignoring the deeper roots of where these initial analyses of Aristotle and Neitzsche by Doerries would be a disservice to the role of women in wartime, or women in general. It is not a conversation that the
8Romeo Vitelli, “When the Trauma Doesn't End,” Psychology Today (Sussex Publishers, May 29, 2013), https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/media-spotlight/201305/when-the-trauma-doesnt-end)
Theater of War Productions seems to have (outside of using Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar
Named Desire as a vehicle for conversation about domestic violence, but that is not a
revolutionary view on that particular play) according to their website where all of their project and conversations are listed. The lens that Klein does acknowledge in her essay is the
Aristotelian that Doerries so closely employs in his analysis. But, just as with Aeschylus, the lens hardly works for plays not written by Sophocles. The ‘pity and fear’ aspect of The Poetics that Doerries holds so tightly can only be applied to various circumstances within Euripides's play, not the story as a whole. However, conceding that device can certainly be used for Gurira’s
Eclipsed, as the suffering of the Liberian women is constant, and the violence inflicted upon
them is sporadic on the part of the CO (an unseen male commanding officer that sexual abuses all the women).
Experiences Shape Created Worlds
It is tempting from a cultural standpoint to pinpoint ancient Greece as the Fatherland of eventual Eurocentricity, but when analyzing these works is important to make the distinction between what is present and was projected. To impose contemporary theories and ideas onto the classics is to recontextualize them. Edith Hall compares The Persians to orientalism, but for simplicity's sake, there was no “Orient” at the time Aeschylus was writing. The concept of “the East” and “the West” as understood culturally now is a colonialist line of thinking, which has further evolved into the ideas of the “Third World” or the “Global South” which are terms meant to describe intense economic disparity, but have colonialist and imperialist overtones (China is considered a part of the Global South, but Australia is not, just as an example of the arbitrary
nature of the phrase). Racial and ethnic portrayals in war dramas play a heavy role in all of the plays being examined here, from ancient Xerxes and Atossa, to Hecuba, to the African Antigone, to the Liberian women of Eclipsed and the Iraqis in Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo. The race, nationality, and ethnic groups that all of these people belong to directly inform their experiences in the world. This is true not just for the characters, but frequently for the actors that portray them, and the playwrights. Danai Gurira’s experience as a black American woman influences her views of other black women worldwide and manifests itself in Eclipsed in an attempt to portray honest experiences, however uncomfortable it might make the audience. Aeschylus fought in the Persian Wars, and therefore The Persians is influenced by his experience in combat.
The current globalized society does not necessarily feel compatible with ancient works, where the world was objectively smaller for the Greeks. The Persians was extraordinary because it empathized with something that definitively was not Greek. Euripides wrote women characters with a passion and complexity that was unlike his predecessors, and Trojan Women is a prime example of that understanding (Medea and The Bacchae are others concerning women, but less sympathetic overall). The globalized world that we live in certainly influences the nature of this thesis, and its attempt to pay fair homage to writers and experiences that are not discussed in as great a length as other kinds of stories and their writers, not simply because of a lack of
representation, but because these stories are of quality outright, and deserve better and more frequent analysis.
Aeschylus’
The Persians
and Rajiv Joseph’s
Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo
To begin, there is The Persians. The earliest play still in existence was a perspective on what would have been considered current events in Ancient Athens. The Persians Wars were over, the Greeks had one, but the trauma of war still lingered for the Greeks. Enter Aeschylus, a playwright who had also been a soldier during the wars. He does something extraordinary, not just writing a lay based on real events, but those events are told from the perspective of what was indeed the enemy of the Greeks. Presented by a chorus of old Persian men and the mother of Xerxes, Atossa, Aeschylus creates a scene riddled with anxiety about the safe return of her son and the end of the narcissistic conflict. Xerxes, in his arrogance and attempt to follow in his father Darius’s footsteps, suffers a great defeat at the hands of the Greeks, and is forced to return to Susa, Persia. There, he laments his loss and arrogance. The editors of the chosen translation elaborate further on Aeschylus’s choices:
Aeschylus was almost certainly at the battle of Salamis he describes so vividly in Persians, which was performed only eight years after the event, when Athenians’ memories were still fresh. The most interesting thing about the play, however, is not its documentation of real events, but its transformation of those events into a true Greek tragedy, of history into myth. Thus, for example, the ghost of the previous Persian king, Darius, whom the chorus invokes as a king ‘‘who brought no evil’’ despite the Persian disaster at Marathon, appears as a kind of idealized god-king, the legendary hero of an earlier and better time. Aeschylus is creating not merely an account of how but also an explanation of why Xerxes’ attempt to subjugate the Greeks came to grief...Scholars have debated whether Aeschylus’
choice of telling this tale entirely from the point of view of the defeated Persians creates sympathy for the enemy’s suffering, or whether it is designed to honor the Greeks’ defeat of a supposedly invincible enemy. The two need not, of course, be entirely exclusive. In any case, we should note that the play defines the Greeks as everything the Persians are not, while at the same time it sounds a warning about the fate that could be theirs should they succumb, as the Persians did, to overweening ambition. 9
This common analysis of The Persians—that the opposition of a well-known event is humanized by the playwright—will serve as the basis of the comparison between this and the chosen
contemporary counterpart, Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, as the two share thematic
similarities, as well as various literary devices, supposedly to evoke a certain reaction from the audience. While Joseph’s play is not an adaptation of nor evocative of Aeschylus
Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo by Rajiv Joseph premiered on Broadway in 2011. The
story is centered around the Tiger, two American soldiers, and an Iraqi translator. The story takes place in 2003, right at the very beginning of the United States’ occupation of Iraq and other parts of the Middle East following the events of 9/11. The Tiger is the first character we meet, played by a man (originated by the late Robin Williams). He speaks of his grievances of being shot, 10
9Aeschylus, “The Persians,” in The Complete Aeschylus: Volume II: Persians and Other Plays: 2 (Greek Tragedy in
New Translations), Peter Burian and Alan Shapiro ed., (Oxford University Press: 1981) Kindle Edition.
10Robin Williams being the Tiger through Joseph’s world premiere and Broadway premiere signals that the Tiger is supposed to be the most relatable character on the stage. This is not an analysis of the performance, but the casting choice here is transparent; a comedic icon with a recognizable voice does not do a role like this without a purpose to the story. Allowing the Tiger to be the audience’s way into the show is most effective when such a recognizable presence inhibits it.
trapped, and shipped to the Baghdad Zoo, and now that the war has begun, there is no one to feed him and he is hungry. This moment was based on a real occurrence during the Operation. 11 At the same time, two American soldiers, Tom and Kev, are in the zoo showing off some of the loot from the recent raid of the home of Uday Hussein, including a gold-plated gun and solid gold toilet seat. The soldiers pick on the Tiger, and the Tiger eats Tom’s hand. Although the Tiger emphasizes it is not out of malice, and the surviving soldier shoots him dead. While Tom recovers, Kev and the Iraqi translator, Musa, raid a civilian home looking for weapons. While the couple in the home argue with Musa and Kev about what they are doing there—as they are confused—Kev is haunted by the ghost of the Tiger he shot, confused by how the Tiger can speak to him, though the Tiger just wants to ask him what is going on. Kev has a mental breakdown in the home and tries to shoot the Tiger again—frightening Musa and the Iraqi couple. Kev is sent to the medic. While in recovery, Tom comes to visit him, showing off his new prosthetic hand. The Tiger returns, causing Kev to have another psychological break. This time Kev cuts off his own hand and attempts to give it to the Tiger, who insists he does not want it. Kev dies from his injuries. Meanwhile, Musa reckons with the demons from his past,
including the sadistic Uday Hussein, for whom Musa worked for as a gardener before the US invaded. Although Uday is dead, his crimes, including the rape and attack of Musa’s sister, haunts Musa. He wonders if working for the Americans was the right thing to do. Tom drives Musa out into the desert to find where he had hidden his golden toilet seat now that he has to return to the US for good, but when they cannot find it, Tom grows violently impatient with Musa and an old leper woman. When Musa realizes Tom has been abusing and misleading him,
11 “U.S. Soldier Kills Tiger in Baghdad Zoo,” New York Times, September 21, 2003,
Musa takes the gold-plated gun and shoots Tom. Musa leaves, taking the car and the golden toilet seat. As Tom is dying, the ghost of Kev reappears, but calmer, and with the sudden ability to speak Arabic. The ghost of Kev tries to comfort his dying colleague. Musa tries to reckon with his actions, never having killed a person before. The ghost of Uday taunts him, saying killing the enemy is the right thing to do. Musa appears to want to kill himself until the ghost of the Tiger appears to Musa, proclaiming him to be the one he was looking for, that Musa is God, though Musa seems to reject this. The Tiger beckons the audience to listen, says he is hungry, and the play ends. 12
Neither of these plays give one side of a conflict. While on paper, it may seem that Aeschylus does, the context in which it was performed, and the audience for whom it was performed, make it a two-sided endeavor, as the Greeks deeply knew their side of the story already. Joseph’s play, thought it features American soldiers, the story is not about them. It is really Musa’s and the Tiger’s story—Tom and Kev are simply passing through it. The Tiger is meant to be the liaison for the audience—it is the character the audience understands the most. And Musa is the most sympathetic character in Joseph’s piece—a victim of the world around him, simply trying to survive, though it is ambiguous if he does at the end. Although, the audience would be familiar with stories like Tom and Kev’s already, as an American audience would, instinctively, attempt to sympathize with other American characters on stage. But given that the way the soldiers are written, they are both unsympathetic, selfish, and violent. The Tiger is violent too, but he is self-aware in his violence and intuitively knows that the purpose of his violence is for his own survival; because he is so hungry.
The oft repeated ‘alternate perspective’ in this chapter will refer to a perspective that is typically seen as one that is opposite to the assumed position of the writer and intended audience; meaning Aeschylus was a Greek, writing for other Greeks, but his subjects and sympathies in The Persians lie with everything that is not Greek. Similarly, Rajiv Joseph is an American, writing for an American audience, but his least sympathetic characters are the other Americans, and the story is truly about a tiger and an Iraqi trying to navigate his war-torn country.
Historical Contexts Between Two Eras
These two plays are an uncommon pair at first, but underneath the surface, there is plenty that they have in common. The Persians is widely agreed to the oldest play that we have still in existence, dating to 472 BC, about 150 years before Aristotle’s Poetics. This is important to remember because all of the tragedians knew each other and lived all relatively around the same period. While Aristotle is a fine source on the nature of tragedy, the context with which The
Poetics exist is removed from having experienced the works firsthand. It is with the same
authority that some living writers have about Oscar Wilde, meaning that, no one today actually experienced the height of The Importance of Being Earnest in its original London run. That is not to say, however, that The Poetics is not important or that those who use an Aristotelian lens are wrong. But the time difference between the tragedians and Aristotle is great and needs to be taken into account when applying the theories of The Poetics to Greek tragedies that are not
Oedipus Rex, as Aristotle explores. For example, the Aristotelian lens of tragedy does not
necessarily fit into the conventions presented in Aeschylus’ The Persians: the single character the audience interacts the most with is Atossa, the mother of Xerxes and the wife of Darius. She
is not a tragic hero, and she does not have a fatal flaw. If the existence of the hamartia is to be argued in the presence of The Persians, it would be through Xerxes, but his flaw is not fatal to himself. A key term that would definitively apply to The Persians is Aristotle’s version of
catharsis through pity and fear. The revolution of The Persians is the humanization of what is
considered to Greece’s combative enemies, the titular Persians. The fear and pity that could be expected to be experienced stems from not only the mere presence of a military foe presented to the Greek audience, but the pity that would theoretically develop as the audience was told of the trials and tribulations of the Persians, and especially the lamentations of Atossa.
The subtitle of Rajiv Joseph’s Bengal Tiger At The Baghdad Zoo refers to the play as a tragicomedy. As the name suggests, it is a play intentionally written with both tragic and comic elements to it. Though the story weighs heavy, the comedy is but a brief breath of fresh air in a consistent downward spiral until all named characters are dead or implied to be. Theatre in the 21st century, especially American theatre, does have some tragic elements in its writing. But it is not necessarily the kind of tragedy that would be given an Aristotelian moniker, nor is it in line with what could be considered a great Shakespearean tragedy (except perhaps the adage where everyone you are supposed to care about dies). Bengal Tiger falls into a type of absurdism that is prevalent within the confines of American realism, like that of Edward Albee or Tony Kushner, as opposed to Tennessee Williams or Arthur Miller. It may be more accurate to say that Bengal
Tiger is a war drama with absurdist elements, rather than comedic elements. The tragedy of Bengal Tiger is not just the suffering of the soldiers, though that is a key element of the play
itself, it is a direct look into the suffering of those who are not on what some might call “our side”. The inclusion of Musa, the Iraqi translator, the Iraqi married couple that has a violent
altercation with Kev, and the anthropomorphic eponymous Tiger are what sets this play apart from other war stories that also take place during the post-9/11 Middle Eastern occupations, such as Black Watch by Gregory Burke, or BASETRACK LIVE by the En Garde Arts theater company. This alternate perspective is what draws parallels to Aeschylus’ The Persians.
The Persians is unique among the canon of Greek tragedians for a few reasons. It
presents an alternate perspective of a conflict won by the Greeks, and it was a current event recounted. Many surviving tragedies are about Greeks that were even more ancient than the ones studied in modernity. Oedipus, Heracles, and the heroes of the Trojan War were as mythic and allegorical to Sophocles and Euripides as they are to Edith Hall’s own translation of The
Persians or Anne Carson’s works on the Greek poet Sappho; both of whom are still writing
about antiquity well into the 21st century. The Persian Wars were the conflicts that gave us the legends of Marathon and Thermopylae, and there are no records of the Persian view of the conflict over the years, neither from Darius nor his son Xerxes. Aeschylus’ play is the only insight we have into how the Persians might have felt many years after losing the conflict, but there is certainly heavy dramatic license taken, so how much is true is unclear. But the spirit of the piece is one of empathy on the part of Aeschylus. The images he creates are those of a mournful and worried mother, and the group of old men as the chorus who sing their songs of war and lament for their leader.
The similarities between the work of Rajiv Joseph and Aeschylus are mostly thematic. Both pieces have taken a conflict well known in their specific zeitgeists and reframed them for the sake of the audience. The Persians Wars fought in Greece were decades long conflicts instigated by Darius in an effort to colonize the Greeks.
Bengal Tiger takes place during Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003, after the deaths of the
sons of the dictator Saddam Hussein and after the dictator himself had been removed from his position. One of the sons, Uday, is a character in the story. The titular Tiger plays a Greek chorus type role, directly speaking to the audience and philosophizing his place in the zoo and in the universe. Other than the Tiger, there are two American soldiers called Tom and Kev, their translator, a native Iraqi named Musa, a fictionalized Uday Hussein, and four unnamed Iraqi citizens. The citizens interact with the soldiers in various ways, frequently confronted with violence from the Americans. There is an interesting dichotomy at play within Bengal Tiger in that those whom the audience (Americans) are supposed to identify with (other Americans) are needlessly violent and mostly irredeemable. On the other hand, those who would be seen as the enemy in the conflict (the Iraqis) are mostly frightened and harmless (with the exception of Uday, who in real life was ruthless and violent). Musa, the Iraqi translator, is the only character that attempts to garner sympathy from the audience. We learn of his life before the invasion, where he was a gardener, simply wanting to create something beautiful. The Tiger haunts the production, as he is shot and killed in the first scene. This is not a 1:1 comparison between more than two thousand years of dramatic writing. The question here is: what does unite the two works? War being the first and most obvious theme and setting, it would more fall into the backdrop of the works, rather than the motivator. Themes of the afterlife and themes of
xenophobia are also unifiers. To borrow from Stanislavsky, what are the given circumstances of each work if boiled down? In The Persians, the war is raging on, and no one on stage seems to know when it will end, but they sing of their victories. In Bengal Tiger, there is also a war
raging, as it has just begun, and two soldiers discuss the results of a looting, which to the triumphant parties is its own victory.
Attilio Favorini’s essay discussing The Persians is a conversation about memory in an Ancient Greek context. Recalling that Aeschylus wrote this play before Herodotus wrote his
Histories, Favorini makes a compelling argument for Aeschylus’s play being a type of proto
history for the Greeks:
First, the Greek discourse needs to be thought of in terms of performance. Whether in the form of historical drama, in the presentations of oral memorialists, or in recited histories such as that of Herodotus, Greek historical discourse was spoken rather than written, and the borders among its historical performance genres were essentially porous. Second, at the time Aeschylus was writing The Persians no clear line divided the realm of history from that of memory. Thus, adducing the terms memory and history from the discourse of contemporary historiography may connote [a paradox] foreign to the Greeks, which the reader should resist. 13
The last point that he makes is a difficult one to employ, simply because the way any reader looks at the world feels natural to them, and it is easy to project modern ways of thinking on historical events, however it can be extremely fallacious. But through the Theatre of War project, those fallacies turn into fruitful conversation about subjects like trauma for soldiers and how can a community help combat domestic violence. Therefore, there is no reason that we, as 21st 14
13 Attilio Favorini, “History, Collective Memory, and Aeschylus’ ‘The Persians’”, Theatre Journal 55, no. 1 (2003): 100.
14Sophie Klein, “Theatre of War: Ancient Greek Drama as a forum for modern military dialogue,” in Contemporary
Adaptations of Greek Tragedy: Auteurship and Directorial Visions, George Rodosthenous, ed. (London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, an Imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2017), 160.
century readers, should view these ancient stories in a vacuum. Art, especially the performing arts, evolve with the times that they live in, and if they live a long time, more context gets added to them.
Moving Through Life and Death
Death and the afterlife is a notable theme connecting both The Persians and Bengal
Tiger. Simon Critchley notes that “tragedy is full of ghosts, ancient and modern, and the line
separating the living from the dead is continually blurred.” In 15 The Persians, Darius is
summoned back to earth by his still-living wife, Atossa in a scene that calls into question the hubris of the young, still-living Xerxes. The way that Darius is summoned reflects on the dogmas for the period, and Darius tells as much:
DARIUS (speaking in iambic verse): Most Faithful of the faithful, comrades of my youth,
Persians grown honorably grey, what trouble oppresses my people?
The earth ceiling groans— hammered, scratched open.
(to ATOSSA) And seeing you, who shared my bed, here huddled now beside my tomb, I sense fear. Yes, I drank the sweetenings that you poured down.
(to CHORUS) And you who stand before my tomb wail dirges and dolefully chant out soulraising spells to summon me.
There is no easy exit:
Gods in the underrealms have always been better at taking than letting go. Yet, now that I am one of them and powerful, I come.
Be quick, for I would have
no blame for moments spent beneath the sun. What new strange evils weigh down my Persians? 16
Here we see that being summoned from beyond the grave is a burden to the dead. Darius is worried and a bit irritated at being called from his eternal rest, wondering why his wife and other Persian lamenters are present. The ritual of bringing forth the dead is implied in the line “Yes, I drank the sweetenings you poured down,” telling that the offering of libations is part of how Darius is once again present among the living. Further note of his irritation:
DARIUS (speaking in trochaic verse): Because you chanted spells persuading me to leave the buried world, I come.
Tell everything, not rambling on, but make the story brief.
Speak and be done. I frighten you?
Then reverence exceeds its bounds. Let reverence go. 17
Darius wants to know why he is being summoned, and the behavior of the chorus especially annoys him. But Atossa laments with him and tells him that Xerxes had continued his original
16 Peter Burian and Alan Shapiro. The Complete Aeschylus: Volume II: Persians and Other Plays: 2 (Greek Tragedy
in New Translations) (pp. 65-67). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition. 17 Ibid.
campaign into Greece and failed to conquer Athens. The afterlife is presented in Greek way, as it is most likely that Darius, Atossa, Xerxes and the other Persians (the chorus and Messenger) would have practiced Zoroastrianism at the time. Darius rebukes the hubris of his son Xerxes in his campaign against the Greeks but urges Atossa to comfort Xerxes in his time of need and loss.
Similarly, the presence of the afterlife in Bengal Tiger is extremely prominent, so far as for the Tiger to monologue about how surprised he is that there is an afterlife, because he is an atheist, and was certain there would be nothing:
TIGER: I don’t know why I’m so scared. You figure getting killed might be the last bad thing that can happen. The worst thing. I’ll tell you right now: it’s not the worst thing. See, all my life, I’ve been plagued, as most tigers are, by this existential quandary: Why am I here? But now ... I’m dead, I’m a ghost ... and it’s: Why aren’t I gone? I figured everything just ended. I figured the Leos ... just ended. The suicidal polar bear ... bones and dust. It’s alarming, this life after death. The fact is, tigers are atheists. All of us. Unabashed. So, why am I still kicking around? Why me? Why here? It doesn’t seem fair. A dead cat consigned to this burning city doesn’t seem just. But here I am. 18
The Tiger, like Darius, is thoroughly irritated by the idea of not moving on or remaining in the world beyond living humans. And—like Darius—the Tiger attempts to interact with those who are onstage post-mortem. Remembering that Bengal Tiger takes place in our real world during a real conflict, the effect of the Tiger’s presence on the soldier who interacts with him feels like a dramatic overreaction to everyone, even the Tiger. But it echoes the very real symptoms of a
soldier’s post-traumatic stress disorder, and the soldier eventually dies from these symptoms via a strange and borderline absurd suicide:
KEV: Eat it, take it. Eat my fucking hand, I don’t want it! TIGER: I don’t want your hand. I want your help.
KEV: I’ll get a new one like Tommy. Fucking Robocop and everything. See? I can still do what I want. I can do whatever ... whatever I want and no faggot-ass tiger is gonna ... is gonna ... Yeah.
Kev dies, and crumples in a heap on the bed. Tiger goes to Kev, looks him over.
TIGER: (realizing) Shit. I bite off the one kid’s hand. And then I drive this one to suicide.
Tiger shakes his head. Looks at the topiary head and then starts to walk out, defeated. TIGER: (to audience) I am digging myself into one hell of a fucking hole. 19
Unlike The Persians, Joseph’s play has multiple characters arriving from an afterlife. Kev, who unintentionally kills himself in his psychotic break with the Tiger, comes back to haunt his fellow soldier, Tom, after Tom was shot and dying. Kev’s return from beyond death is more alight with spirituality and mysticism than the Tiger’s. Kev’s personality while he was alive was violent, brash, angry, and impulsive; while dead he is more deeply in thought, can suddenly speak and translate Arabic (Kev is traditionally played by a white American), and comforts his dying friend.
These scenes with the return of the dead have a type of spiritual significance to them while also signifying larger change within the individuals. The return of Darius at the behest of
Atossa allows her to console and comfort her son in his defeated return from Greece. The return of Kev after his suicide allows for an emotional connection between the two soldiers as they find solidarity in their violent deaths. Indeed, the contexts for these spiritual encounters is vastly different--key being that Darius was summoned, and all the hauntings in Joseph’s play are
unwanted, rejected, and frightening to those who experience them. These moments are connected in the sense that often those who are faced with violence and uncertainty look toward those who have lived through it before. In his exploration of death in Bengal Tiger, Stefano Muneroni uses Jacques Derrida’s concept of translation to justify the presence of the spirits of the dead: “The characters in the play, in fact, become translators after they die; their bodies operate as channels to convey both the pains and the joys of literary and cultural translation.” Of course, in this 20 instance, he is specifically referring to postmortem Kev and the dying Tom. This contains both a literal language translation in his instance of having learned Arabic beyond the grave (“I kind of picked it up in death” and no further explanation) , and the instance of providing the cultural 21 translation for Tom’s transition into death with the presence of the leper woman, as she has been slowly dying since she was a teenager. Death acts as its own separate culture in the world of the play, which is especially striking given the stark contrasts between the real, physical cultures that are present in the world of the play (the culture of the American Armed Forces and the culture of the subjugated Iraqis). With the Tiger, Uday, and Kev all being present and stocked with
violence and philosophy, the dead have their own type of wisdom to impart to the living. It is the same for Darius among Atossa and the Chorus. Atossa seeks the knowledge of her dead husband
20 Stefano Muneroni, “Translational Eschatology, Death, and the Absence of God in Rajiv Joseph’s Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo,” International Journal of Comparative Literature and Translation Studies 1, no. 2 (July 31, 2013): 3.
in her own fraught incredulity about the battle losses of her son. Darius is able to provide that knowledge, comfort, wisdom, and critique for all that has transpired in the name of Xerxes in his death. The act of the dead being present is a link to the past. Hindsight is often tragic, especially when it concerns violence and death, and those who have moved beyond this mortal coil would certainly have the most tragic hindsight.
Humanizing the Opposition
One of the extraordinary things about the existence of Aeschylus’ The Persians is the subject matter. Not war in general, but the perspective of a war that was not only fresh in the Athenian’s memory, but presented from the perspective of the animus parties. There is a striking sense of empathy present in the context of the story from the playwright. Aeschylus, like many Athenians during the period, was a citizen soldier, and that played an enormous role in the writing and subject matter presented by him. Other plays, like Agamemnon, Prometheus Bound, and Seven Against Thebes all call forth Aeschylus’ knowledge if Greek warfare and Athenian philosophy regarding it.
Likewise, while Rajiv Joseph was not himself a soldier, he seems to call upon similar themes presented by Aeschylus. Like The Persians, Bengal Tiger understands the attitude and climate of the conflicts it presents, even only six years after the play takes place. There is a deliberate attempt to humanize and sympathize with the “Other” in the play, which are the Iraqis, including Musa. Musa’s story is told in great detail, with his life previous to working for the United States government and the traumas related to that being deeply explored.
Both of these plays and the way they present their characters and subjects seem an effort, whether intentional or not, to combat xenophobic tendencies. But a fair question can be asked as to whether or not xenophobia as we understand it in the 21st-century, which definitively exists in
Bengal Tiger, can exist in the works of antiquity. Benjamin Isaac asks this very question in his
book The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity and he puts quite succinctly:
Xenophobia and ethnic hatred can exist in any complex society, but imperial states by their very nature are confronted continuously with a variety of peoples which form part of the empire, and settle in urban centers. 22
Although later, Isaac does exempt Aeschylus by name from hostile writing regarding the
Persians, along with Herodotus. In fact, Isaac goes so far as to say these writing were written out of respect for the military power’s might. As observed by Isaac: “The Persians are not belittled, 23 nor are they described in derogatory stereotypical terms, and there is certainly no trace of
proto-racism in the sources of this period.” But as those who fought against the Persians started 24 to pass on, other generations, Isaac claims, started to position Greece against Persia as a natural enemy. Calling out Euripides as one of the writers who began to perpetuate an “Asia versus Europe” mentality that would remain pervasive.
It would be difficult to say how those who were not Greek were viewed in drama prior to
The Persians, as this play is the earliest that we have from the region. Harking back to Favorini’s
understanding of collective memory for the Greeks, once history was developed as we
22 Benjamin Isaac, "Ethnic Prejudice, Proto-Racism, and Imperialism in Antiquity" in The Invention of Racism in
Classical Antiquity, (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2004): 507. 23 Ibid, 509.
understand it, the collective memory of the Persian Wars became collective trauma, and the reaction to that trauma is the proto-racism and xenophobia that Isaac addresses.
There is a facile arguement that Aeschylus wrote The Persians as a self-congratulation for the Greeks in their victory against a mighty power. But a close reading of the play does not support that interpretation. The Greeks are spoken of, indeed, but they are not celebrated. In fact, there seems to be a passive neutrality towards the land that this foreboding empire was trying to colonize for themselves. The failure of the campaign is accepted by the ghostly Darius as hubris, and Xerxes enters, chanting of doom:
XERXES (chanting): No! Nonono!
Heartsick have I confronted hateful doom. No warning signs, not one, foretold me
some undying Lust for human flesh would stamp savagely on Persia’s clans. 25
Though mentioning the Greeks, he speaks of them only in the context of his deep sorrow. He understands that he has failed his empire, and it carries what feels like genuine shame about the events that unfolded during the fateful Battle of Salamis. He mourns and laments with his chorus of old Persian men. Atossa is absent, not having the strength to face her defeated son after her conversation with Darius. These deliberate choices on the part of Aeschylus project a deep understanding of war and the loss and pain that it causes for all sides of the conflict.
25 Peter Burian and Alan Shapiro, The Complete Aeschylus: Volume II: Persians and Other Plays: 2 (Greek Tragedy
In the same vein, there is the portrayal of the Iraqis in Bengal Tiger. With the exception of Musa and Uday, all other Iraqi characters speak only Arabic, and no translation is provided for the audience (in the referenced version, which is the Actor’s Version, translations of the Arabic are provided). Though this could be a practical example of Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt, the presence of the real-time translations by both Musa and, later, Kev allow for the audience to see the otherwise “Othered” characters as simply frightened and non-threatening. There are only two American characters in the play, and they are the soldiers. The seemingly deliberate choice to make both soldiers virtually irredeemable is an extension of the Verfremdungseffekt, as the play is intended for American audiences. However, there are three actors speaking American English: the Tiger is easily the most, to use a contemporary colloquialism, relatable character presented to the intended audience. The manner in which the Tiger speaks and addresses the audience is clearly a tactic used to let the audience into the world of the play, and understand it through the Tiger, rather than either of the soldiers or Musa, who, while not necessarily relatable to the intended audience—being a foreigner from a perceived enemy country—could certainly be considered the most sympathetic character in the play.
The intention to make all non-American characters (with the exception of Uday Hussein) both non-threatening and distanced from the audience feels the way a Greek might have felt about The Persians when it first premiered. Both plays recount real-life events, though the respective audiences may or may not have experienced them firsthand—given the length of the American conflict in the Middle East and the amount of American veterans. Uday Hussein was killed by American soldiers and the Persians lost the Battle of Salamis. These are key moments that happen prior to the start of their plays that help the audience key into the world of the play,
understanding while the words may be fabricated, the inspirations for them certainly are not. Xerxes did survive the Battle of Salamis; an American soldier did shoot a tiger while in the Baghdad zoo.
While the effects of the Persians wars and the subsequent xenophobia that may have existed can only be theorized, there is definitive proof, even into now, that the xenophobia linked with the 21st century conflicts in the Middle East has real world and unfortunately lasting
effects. This kind of xenophobia is so pervasive and specific that it earned its own separate connotation: Islamophobia. Aeschylus may not have intended to come off as progressive by ancient European standards by not making a wartime enemy a violent antagonist in his work, but Rajiv Joseph’s intention is crystal clear. By instead antagonizing the American brethren, Joseph allows a space for understanding the side of war that is not seen on American news when Americans are involved. The performance of civilian trauma and suffering at the hands of Americans is not a comfortable conversation, but it is a necessary one. Joseph and Aeschylus share and understanding that it not just the side you are on that suffers during wartime. Though, unlike Aeschylus, Joseph does not treat the war he represents as an inevitability and seems to thoroughly despise it.
War seems to be as old as civilization itself. Soldiers are what makes wars possible. But they are not the only party that accumulates traumas related to the conflicts. It is important to remember that the consequences of violent conflict have lasting effects on families and civilians. In Bengal Tiger, we never meet Kev or Tom’s family. This is perhaps intentional for the tone of the piece, but what of Kev’s parents upon learning their son killed himself (intentionally or not)? They would be an emotional casualty as much as the Iraqi couple that Kev terrorized prior to his
hospitalization. Atossa is a deep emotional casualty to the Persian Wars, having lost her husband and fearing for her son. She laments and laments until she physically cannot anymore, then exeunts to attempt to put on a brave face for the return of her son, but the audience never sees her again. All these things seemingly disavow war overall, but the contexts of which these wars exist are so vastly different, we can hardly compare the purpose of the conflicts themselves. But humans’ reactions to it, that seems to remain universal.
Euripides's
Trojan Women
and Danai Gurira’s
Eclipsed
Different Women, Different WarsThe way that war is written about in antiquity seems to change drastically depending on the subject. Both of these plays explore how war impacts women specifically, using similar means of facilitating discussion as resented by the Theater of War project, keeping in mind the fault and inherent misogyny that is present in the base analyses by both Aristotle and Nietzsche, as discussed in the Introduction. The way to combat the exclusion of women in conversations is to include them and know why the experiences of women are important. Both Eclipsed by Danai Gurira and Trojan Women by Euripides focus their stories on how war and the aftermath take physical and psychological tolls on women. Euripides's Trojan Women is the classic tragedy of the aftermath of the Trojan War, when only the wives and mothers are left of Troy with their Greek captors, waiting to hear what their lives will become now that their city and kingdom have been taken from them. The second play is Danai Gurira’s Eclipsed, a drama centered around the end of the Second Liberian Civil War in Africa (in 2003) and focused on a group of women trying to survive on the side of the Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD) rebel camp.
In Eclipsed, the Second Liberian Civil War is at the end of its course, but the violence continues for the four women who live in the Commanding Officer’s (CO’s) camp. Two of the women, who, while named within the play as Helena and Bessie, are only ever referred to each other as Wife No. 1 or Wife No. 3 on stage. The third woman is only named and referred to as The Girl, and the fourth is referred to on stage as Wife No. 2, though she is named Maima. There is fifth woman, named Rita, visits the subjugated wives and works for the Liberian Women
Initiative for Peace, with hopes of ending the conflict. The denotation of ‘wives’ is a euphemism for the sexual slavery all of the wives are subjugated to by the CO. At the beginning of the play, Helena and Bessie do their best to hide and take care of The Girl, but once she is discovered by the CO, she is taken and becomes Wife No. 4. When presented with an opportunity to regain some of her agency with Maima, The Girl seriously considered it, insofar as she learns how to hold and shoot a gun. Agency in this context means not being a sexual slave but having to actively participate in the violence. Toward the end of the play comes the end of the Civil War, and Rita returning to take the women somewhere safe, but Maima and The Girl are not at the camp when this happens. The play ends with the The Girl grappling with the choices she has made to ensure her own safety, with the audience unsure of what choice she will make going forward. 26
Euripides's Trojan Women is similarly a story about how women deal with war, and its aftermath. The first woman is Hecuba, once Queen of the Trojans, wife to Priam, mother to sons Hector and Paris, and daughters Cassandra and Polyxena. Hecuba’s search for Polyxena drives the plot forward initially, as she knows that her husband and all of her sons are dead but keep hope that her daughters might still be alive. Previous to meeting the Trojan Queen, the audience is presented with a scene between Athena and Poseidon, deciding to effectively leave the lost women behind with no divine guidance. They are on their own. As Hecuba searches for her youngest daughter, she finds herself with other women of Troy who have survived the battle but lost the war. Among these is her other daughter, Cassandra, a priestess of Apollo, cursed with clairvoyance that will never be believed. Hecuba learns that her daughter is to become a
concubine of Agamemnon, while Hecuba herself now belongs to the King of Ithaca, Odysseus. After Cassandra is taken, Hecuba finds her daughter-in-law, Andromache, the wife of the dead Prince Hector, and their son Astyanax. Hecuba learns from Andromache that her other daughter, Polyxena, had been sacrificed by the Greeks in honor of their dead Achilles. At the same time, the Greek guard Talthybius informs Andromache that her son cannot live while under capture of the Greeks, as he is a prince of Troy, and so Astyanax is taken by the guard and thrown to his death. Hecuba then encounters Helen of Sparta (also known as Helen of Troy, but Hecuba knows she is no Trojan). Helen asserts that she has suffered too, and that her husband Menelaus plans to kill her for leaving and causing the war. Helen wants to seduce her husband to change his mind, but Hecuba begs him to hold fast and keep to his word. Menelaus is a weak man, as falls to his wife’s charms. The play ends with Hecuba burying her grandson and lamenting on how Troy is all she’s ever known, and now her entire family is dead, and she is a slave. 27
There is only one man in Trojan Women, the Greek messenger Thalthybius, and no men on stage in Eclipsed (though the presence of the unseen CO is arguably its own character). The biggest differences between the two stories are time and place, but the other characteristics that they share include showing the way drama treats war after it is over, and how war has treated women for millennia. The women are the united front in both stories, and it is all too clear how war and the men that insist the need for it, even after the men have died, wreak havoc on the lives of the women who lived there. The lives of the protagonists of each play vary wildly in terms of class and participation within the conflict, and yet they both hold the strength of those around them. In Eclipsed, The Girl, who seems to have experienced much violence in her life
27 Euripides, “The Trojan Women,” in Euripides III, ed. David Grene and Richmond Lattimore, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958).
before the events of the play, holds her resolve until she is raped by the CO, after which her spirit begins to falter. It is Maima who offers her a chance to grab her life back. Though, like Hecuba, The Girl wonders if there even is a real choice. Hecuba knows the rules of war as a woman and as a former Queen, and she wonders if killing herself is better than living as a slave under the rule of Odysseus.
Often in war, unwitting parties become subject to acts of violence in a conflict they had no say in. When women and children are subjected to its violence, an entire culture can suffer. Women are often the unspoken victims of violence beyond that of combat during wartime. It was not until 1998 that rape was explicitly written into international law as a war crime by the United Nations. 28
As noted, there are plenty of plays and conversations about the needs of the soldiers, but what about the needs of everyone else? What happens when the war is over? What happens when the conflict doesn’t seem to end? Two plays in particular deal with how war and how women deal with surviving the violence and its aftermath. None of the women in either play, save for one in each, have any direct control over the violence that ravages around them nor the situation that befell them. In her essay The Gendered Terrain in Contemporary Theatre of War by Women, Sharon Freidman introduces a concept of other that audience members may be forced to reckon with when watching character go through their trials and tribulations:
...characters who give a faced injustices and atrocities often unsettle deep-seated prejudices in audience members who interpret these words as byproducts of
28“Bosnia-Herzegovina : Foca Verdict - Rape and Sexual Enslavement Are Crimes against Humanity,” AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL, February 22, 2001,
(https://web.archive.org/web/20090907091105/http://asiapacific.amnesty.org/library/Index/ENGEUR630042001?op en&of=ENG-BIH)
“primitive” cultures, “othered” in terms of race, class, religion, ethnicity, and status in the global hierarchy of power and privilege rather than his consequences of poverty and economic and political exploitation in a global marketplace. 29
This othering is a common trope in writing to separate the audience from the subject, but it is most prevalent in the world of social politics. Stuart Hall, known for bringing these cultural theories into the world of British Academia (and spread worldwide not long after), speaks extensively on the sensation of othering when it comes to race, and the relationship between white people and highly othered people of color. In his extensive essay on The Spectacle of the
Other, Hall lists the elements of Othering that manifest in colonial structures and narratives:
The main argument advanced here is that “difference” matters because it is essential to meaning; without it, meaning could not exist...The argument here is that we need “difference” because we can only construct meaning through a dialogue with the “Other”...The “Other”, in short, is essential to meaning...The argument here is that culture depends on giving things meaning by assigning them to different positions within a classificatory system . The marking of “difference” is thus the basis of that symbolic order which we call culture...symbolic boundaries are central to all culture. Marking “difference” leads us, symbolically, to close ranks, shore up culture and to stigmatize and expel anything which is defined as impure, abnormal. However, paradoxically, it also makes “difference”
29Sharon Freidman, "The Gendered Terrain in Contemporary Theatre of War by Women," Theatre Journal 62, no. 4 (2010): 595.
powerful, strangely attractive precisely because it is forbidden, taboo, threatening to cultural order. 30
Establishing that Othering is not simply a dramatic trope, but a cultural tactic and an essential mode in which people socially navigate the world, we can better understand how using it within drama deliberately, and not simply as a reflection of violent and racist lines of thought
concerning non-white people, the lines in which these two things exist—use of dramatic tropes and real-world racism—becomes clearer. This trope comes into play most obviously with
Eclipsed, where a group of West African women are subjugated to terrible conditions and
brutalized by the men they seek out for protection. The othering present in Eclipsed is most firmly rooted in the Liberian English that the women speak in. In the live performance, the space created by the designers and the costumes that the actors wear also immediately signify an othering that takes advantage of the way a white American audience would perceive the
conditions of these Black African women, while also remaining true to the nature of the conflict. Othering is a firmly colonial line of thought that continues its way into the post and neocolonial movements worldwide, even that social progress continues in the 21st century. The othering is also present in Trojan Women, albeit more atypically, given the pre-racialized nature of Classical Greek writing. Women are frequently othered, but if this play is being played as Greek, the women in question may present as white, limiting the othering immediately seen by the
audience, though the othering could come from their status, citizenship and circumstance. A 21st century Eurocentric audience may well watch Trojan Women and firmly believe that the
circumstances in which Hecuba and her company find themselves would never happen to them.
30 Stuart Hall, “The Spectacle of The Other,” in Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, ed. Stuart Hall, (London: Sage Publications, 1997): 234-237.
An audience of women in a different part of the world under different circumstances may find Hecuba’s grief all too familiar, witnessing the similarity to much of the grief and trauma that the Liberian women suffer in Eclipsed, though their lives are more acutely and routinely violent.
When Women Fight
The role of women in war, as it has been recorded in history, varies widely from culture to culture throughout time. The Greeks had their own mythological race of women warriors, known as the Amazons, but there were few actual historical instances of women joining battle in Ancient Greece. In other regions of the world at the same time as the when Trojan War was set 31
(remembering that the war itself is ahistorical), however, there were recorded instances of women fighting in battle, like Ancient China and Egypt. In fact, China has a well-documented tradition of women warriors as early as the 13th century BCE, through to the 6th century CE, when the legend of Hua Mulan first emerged, with documented instances of women leading battalions all the way to the Communist Revolution and the rise of People’s Republic. There are other individual instances of women leading the charge in battle or defending their homes, but it was not until modernity when women would be systematically considered fit for combat(it is not universally agreed-upon).
There have been non-combative roles for women during wartime, especially noted in the 20th century, during the Second World War. Rosie the Riveter was a popular icon signifying the importance of women’s participation in the wartime process by helping in construction and manufacturing. The current Queen of England famously served as a mechanic during the war and
31 At the time of writing this chapter, the Amazons were still a myth. However, at the time of revisions, a report came out of Stanford University that an archeological dig discovered a grave of four females in Russia, Scythian nomads, that may have been the inspiration for the famed Amazons.
remains to be the only living head of state to have actively served in World War II. Even into modernity, the role of women during wartime has evolved. The United States still continues its conversation about allowing women into combat roles. This is all to say that while women in wartime combative roles is a worthwhile and interesting topic, it is not the topic being covered in this chapter but should still be acknowledged.
But the women’s role in war outside of combat is one that perhaps many more women would be familiar with. Due to the limited amount of written records when it comes to women during wartime in the ancient world, much has had to be theorized based on archaeological finds. Sometimes corroborated by historical writings, sometimes not. There is a feeling of helplessness, because the women are not fighting, so what can they do about the conflict itself? In Eclipsed, the peacekeeper Rita exercises the most agency in this regarding, because she is a privileged Liberian woman, and attempting to use her status to help the other women out of the violence they are subjected to. In the end, one of the wives stays behind, because she has a baby with the CO, and he is the only man that has ever protected her, and the cost of that protection does not matter to her as long as her baby is safe. Maima is the opposite end of this spectrum, choosing to wield a weapon and act as the men do. This does not occur in Trojan Women, where the women act for the most part in resignation.
The Use and Portrayal of Sexual Abuse
War is traumatizing, that much is well-known in this society. But death certainly is not the only thing that traumatizes. As seen in Eclipsed, although most of the women do not fight, they are subject to an often-secondary cause of wartime trauma through the sexual abuse
