The Persians

Known as "The Father of Tragedy," Aeschylus was born circa 525 BCE in Eleusis, northwest of Athens. As a youth, he worked in a vineyard and fought in The Persian Wars. He wrote his first play around the age of 26. Of the estimated 70 to 90 plays he wrote, seven have survived: THE PERSIANS, SEVEN AGAINST THEBES, THE SUPPLIANTS, THE ORESTEIA trilogy, consisting of AGAMEMNON, THE LIBATION BEARERS, and THE EUMENIDES, and PROMETHEUS BOUND, whose authorship is disputed. All of Aeschylus's extant tragedies won first prize at the Dionysia, the annual dramatic contest held in Athens. He is believed to have died circa 455 BCE.

Robert Auletta's plays have been produced at many theaters, including The Yale Repertory Theater, Joseph Papp's Public Theater, The American Repertory Theater, The Production Company, PS 122, Café La Mama, and the Westbank Downstairs Theater Bar, where many of his one acts were first performed. His play AMAZONS helped open The Market Theater in Cambridge, MA in 2000. Previous to that, his modern versions of Aeschylus's THE ORESTEIA and Molière's TARTUFFE, both directed by the French/Swiss director Francois Rochaix, were produced in the same city by the American Repertory Theater during their 1995/96 season. Two of his one acts, STOPS/VIRGINS, were awarded a Village Voice Obie for distinguished playwriting in 1983. His modern version of Sophocles' AJAX, directed by Peter Sellars in 1986, was performed in America at both the Kennedy Center and the La Jolla Playhouse, and to great acclaim in many theaters in Europe. It also received The Hollywood Drama-Logue Critics Award, and was filmed by Dutch television It has subsequently been shown at various film festivals in Greece. His Gulf War version of Aeschylus' THE PERSIANS, directed by Peter Sellars in 1993, received both controversy and acclaim in many productions both in America and abroad; causing a heated reaction at Los Angeles' Mark Taper Forum. It was produced again in 2005 by the Scena Theater in Washington, D.C., with an entirely different reaction from the audience. It was first published by Sun and Moon Press and recently reprinted by Broadway Play Publishing Inc. They also printed a collection of his plays, and later his version of Georg Büchner's DANTON'S DEATH, directed by Robert Wilson at the Alley Theater in Houston TX, and later at the Berliner Ensemble. He has received two National Endowment for the Arts Grants, a New York State Foundation Grant, and has been awarded residencies in various art colonies, including The MacDowell Colony, Ledig House, The Millay Colony, and Hawthornden Castle in Scotland. He taught at the Yale School of Drama for five years on various occasions, for thirteen summers at The Harvard Expository Writing Program, and continues to teach at The School of Visual Arts in New York City, and recently at the Lee Strasberg Theater and Film Institute. Since 2008 his short play RABBITS, which is published in PLAYS BY ROBERT AULETTA, has been enjoying another life as a twenty-minute film starring Jessica Hecht and Christopher McCann. For over seven years it has been seen all over the world, including in Russia and China, where it has played on occasion to over 100,000 viewers a week.