Press Quotes
AJAX
“Sophocles’s AJAX has been adapted by Robert Auletta into a contemporary American play set in front of the Pentagon after the triumphant conclusion of a major Latin American war from which the United States has emerged victorious. This is a world where shame is worse than death. Ajax dies like a samurai on his sword and the Greek generals gather to dishonor his body. Odysseus talks them out of it. The man was a hero after all.” —Dan Sullivan, Los Angeles Times
CRAZED WOMEN (THE BAKKHAI)
“From the outset, it is essential to understand that in Greek theater, as in fact in Shakespearean theater, the self that is really at stake is to be identified with the male, while the woman is assigned the role of the radical other.” —Froma I Zeitlin
“Intoxicatingly beautiful, coldly sordid, at one moment baffling, at the next thrilling us with the mystic charm of wood and hillside, this drama stands unique among Euripides’s works.” —Gilbert Norwood
“… a tragic parody of a comic theme, which we have in THE BACCHAE [THE BAKKHAI], is really troublesome, and furthermore rare before our time and the great use of it by Samuel Beckett … THE BACCHAE makes it plain that some uses of comedy do not diminish tragedy or ‘relieve’ it but indeed augment it.” —Donald Sutherland
“The most obvious influence of Euripides’s BAKKHAI on Christian mythology lies in its concept of Dionysos as the suffering Son of God.” —Arthur Evans
“Sometimes Euripides seems like a religious man, and again, like a charlatan. Of course he was neither. He was a playwright.” —John Jay Chapman
OEDIPUS THE KING
“The plot of the play consists of nothing other than the gradual rising and artistically protracted revelation — similar to the work of psychoanalysis — that Oedipus is himself the murderer of Laius, but also the son of the murdered man and Jocasta. King Oedipus, who has slain his father and married his mother, is only the wish-fulfillment of our childhood.” —Sigmund Freud, Interpretation of Dreams
“To me personally, Oedipus is a kind of symbol of the human intelligence, which cannot rest until it has solved all the riddles — even the last riddle, to which the answer is that human happiness is built on an illusion.” —E R Dodds
“The histrionic basis of Sophocles’ art is what makes it so crucial an instance of the art of the theater in its completeness.” —Francis Fergusson
“Oedipus is a man totally committed to his own freedom to be who he thinks he must be, to live up to his own notion of heroic greatness. He’s Oedipus, whose greatness manifests itself in being totally true to itself, without duplicity.” —Ian Johnstone
THE ORESTEIA
“THE ORESTEIA is the granddaddy of domestic-violence drama, and that’s hardly Greek to us. The 2,500 year-old Aeschylean trilogy — on which Sonny kills Mom and her love, who made sword meat of Dad — is as American as apple pie … Auletta — whose own works include WALK THE DOG WILLIE, RUNDOWN, and the Obie-winning STOPS and VIRGINS — seems an odd collaborator for Aeschylus. But he is in fact an old hand at diddling with old Greeks. He has adapted both Sophocles’s AJAX and Aeschylus’s THE PERSIANS for Peter Sellars. He also adapted Georg Büchner’s DANTON’S DEATH for Robert Wilson.” —Carolyn Clay, Phoenix (Boston)
“… I very like very much the truncated colloquial that you’ve worked out. It’s better than Ezra [Pound] managed and it’s just right for the purpose you have, to provide a fast moving text for the stage …” —letter from James Laughlin, New Directions
“… Auletta’s script glistens with old strokes highlighting rather than detracting from Aeschylus …” —Ed Siegel, The Boston Globe
THE PERSIANS
“In Aeschylus’ contrarian tragedy THE PERSIANS, the titular enemies of the author’s native Greece are to be pitied more than censured after their bloody defeat at Greek hands … Robert Auletta’s slickly poetic adaptation moves the action to the Gulf War, deftly shoehorning bloodcurdling descriptions of modern weaponry into the Persian laments and exchanging references to the Greeks for references to the United States. The chorus speaks of ‘velocity bows and razor swords that can laser the heart out of a man’s chest,’ and much of its dialogue is a litany of exotic ordnance from recent wars in the Middle East. ‘Have we taken too much?’ asks the deposed Queen Atossa … as she contemplates what her country has done to deserve its fate. ‘Have we gone beyond some unknown but sacred line?’ She and her compatriots express remorse for their wrongs, in the process describing our own current state of affairs (‘Is the power of what we own about to destroy us?’) and emphasizing how much we might have in common with our enemies … THE PERSIANS’ best moments are also its most horrifying, including an eloquent, metered blow-by-blow account of the effects of a 5,000-pound bomb on the human body. The bait-and-switch approach to classic political theater is a risky one, sometimes sacrificing subtlety in service of a dated statement, but Auletta mostly pulls it off, forcing sympathy with the rankest of villains …” —Sam Thielman, Washington City Paper