As promised last time, I will drag myself away from the Greek Legendarium and any sort of comparative literature speculation in this final blog about our Iphigenia, closing this Saturday. Instead I want to discuss the Chorus, a foundational element of the Greek Tragedy, and the role our interpretation of it serves in grounding our play in reality.
This is not the first show we have done featuring a Chorus; Henry V has a Chorus introducing each act, a role that is often played by one person but is specifically named as Chorus in the script (Shakespeare would play with this idea again during his Greatest Hits Era with Pericles, in which the Chorus is represented by the story’s author Gower). And our Tempest from Jesus Christ a decade ago 2013 turned Ariel into a truly omnipresent force on the island by making every actor but Prospero, whenever they were not playing someone else, function as a choral interpretation of the spirit. But the Greek relationship with the Chorus was…shall we say, Original, and this production afforded us another opportunity to play around with this ancient and tricky stagecraft.
The Chorus was a feature of 100% of Greek tragedies. The very idea of staged theatrical production at all grew out of choral recitations; when, apocryphally, Thespis stepped out from the Chorus at a Festival Dionysia and spoke as an individual character in a story. The concept of ‘actors’ or ‘a play’ were new technologies for the Tragedians; it is claimed that Sophocles came up with the idea that there could be three actors in a scene at a time, and before his innovation there were only two, which holds up in what little Aeschylus we have. And it is further claimed that Aeschylus innovated having TWO actors on stage, and that before him one character at a time spoke with the Chorus, which does not to me sound like the most riveting entertainment [no offense to the one-man and one-woman shows out there, you are free to change my mind when I decide to watch one of you. But don’t hold your breath -KH]
The Greek Chorus represents a crowd of people observing the action of the protagonists: often soldiers or sailors, women, slaves, or elders of the city. They are on stage for the entirety of the show and generally have little to no power over the situation at hand. Characters may speak with them, and they will express their approval or, more likely, condemnation of what is happening on stage, but with very few exceptions they are powerless to do anything other than observe with dread and dismay the protagonist’s downfall [find a ‘D’ word for “protagonist” here -ed.] And a key element of the Greek Chorus is that they speak with one, or occasionally two, voices. When they speak to another character they are as one, expressing the impotent thoughts or desires of the crowd of people they represent. But in their choral interludes they will occasionally split in two, the strophe and antistrophe, and speak to each other, indicated in the original and in verse translations with different lyrical meters that I could not with a gun to my head explain, much to the dismay of every Literature teacher I’ve ever had as well as, I’m sure, Benji Djain, John McGowan, and all the other Literature Professor Friends of the Company that are shaking their heads as they read this. The only metrical form I could ever really wrap my head around was the caesura-heavy alliterative poetry of the Vikings and Anglo-Saxons. But I digress. The Chorus’ primary function is to exposit, explain, and contextualize the story, much like myself, though I think they were a little less pedantic about it than I.
Our Chorus, composed, like in our Tempest, of everybody in the cast who isn’t playing a named character in a scene, functions as both actors and audience. A combination of bored Greek soldiers and the Players of Pippin or Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, they step in and out of roles as the circumstances call for, and otherwise observe the action as it unfolds around them. Our choral interludes are also both the same and different from the Classical mode; instead of singing in unison about Many-Towered Ilium or splitting in half for a back-and-forth discussion about which god Ajax had angered, our Chorus debates and analyzes the story as it is being told, with at least as many viewpoints as there are actors to express them. In this way they allow us to fill out that essential contextualization that the Chorus traditionally handles and that Greek Tragedies really require for a modern audience, without becoming overly florid or didactic by expounding 20-30 lines of poetry, as their ancient predecessors would have.
Another major advantage of this structure is that we keep many of our actors on the stage for most of the time, which forces us to reckon with, account for, and recognize costuming quick changes, often happening on stage and in view of the audience. If you’ve been a regular reader you will know how much significance I place on quick changes and multi casting [if you’re new to the blog or the company, it’s a lot -KH] Many of We Happy Few’s plays are on some level about artifice and staging, but this one is explicitly and textually about the creation of stories, how and why stories come into being. The actors know they’re in a play; they talk with regularity about what did happen, or should happen, or will happen next on the stage. The audience knows they’re watching a play; you’re the ones who gave me their hard-earned money for a ticket, stepped into a small square room with black walls and lights hanging from the ceiling, and sat in a chair to watch us pretend to be Greek. And we as a company have neither the budget nor the inclination to attempt to create true verisimilitude of a three millennia old story, especially when the core conceit of our retelling is that stories are changed by the context in which they are told and by the people doing the telling. There is little advantage to us breaking our necks attempting to maintain the illusion that we are standing on a becalmed beach in Greece when we are openly discussing the craft of storytelling in this piece. By contrast, there are MAJOR advantages to keeping fresh in the audience’s mind that it is ordinary people telling this story now, just as it was ordinary people telling this story hundreds or thousands of years ago. Euripides and Racine had the same discussions with their actors and directors and whatever designers and technical artists they had at the Festival Dionysia or the stages of Versailles and Paris as we did through our rehearsal process. The only differences were what language the discussions were in, and what the play looked like at the end of them.
I hope you were able to follow the meander of this blog from the historical function of the Chorus to the significance of knowing that human beings create the art that you enjoy. If you want to see what in the world I am talking about, we still have a handful of performances so you can come and see for yourself! Tickets are available here for tonight through Saturday June 17th!
We Happy Few DC 