Content area
Full Text
Re-imagining Greek Tragedy on the American Stage
Helene P. Foley
Berkeley: U of California P, 2012. 396 pp $95 cloth
"What the American public wants is a tragedy with a happy ending." Helene Foley chooses this quotation from William Dean Howells as the epigraph to her book and it nicely encapsulates her investigation into the ways Greek tragedy has been re-interpreted to serve the changing social, political and aesthetic needs of American audiences over several generations. Following a discussion of nineteenth-century productions, Foley, professor of classics at Barnard College, focuses on two periods-1910 to the Depression, and 1970 to the present-to demonstrate the variety of approaches that American productions took to "translate" Greek tragic plays to suit American purposes, often by treating specific home-grown controversies including war, slavery, race, the status of women, and immigration.
Early productions of Greek tragedy adapted the originals to conform to America's utopian self-image, turning disturbing stories of revenge and social upheaval into success stories of hard work and struggle. Productions were often informed by the popularity of melodrama and a progressive sensibility that saw the world in comic or tragi-comic terms: Oedipus became a descendent of the heroes of melodrama, while the dangerous Medea became a figure for "'the other' who resists social and political restraints in a nation that aims, but often fails to...