Akalaitis' The Bacchae and Ben Brantley

Achilles and his heel, Odysseus and his bow, Agamemnon and his bathtub, Oedipus and his Sphinx, Agave and her son's decapitated head, Hamlet and his Ghost, Macbeth and his Witches, Lear and his daughters, Othello and his handkerchif and Estragon and his boot. A boot is suggestive of soldiers, and Beckett's use of the boot in Waiting for Godot is a then-fresh reflection of Nazi troops witnessed by Beckett and wife Suzanne walking in Paris streets. Only God knows what made JoAnne Akalaitis think of transferring 'Tis Pity She's a Whore from early seventeenth-century Italy to mid-twentieth-century Italy during times of il Duce Mussolini! and in 2009 in her new staging of Euripedes' The Bacchae about which staging Ben Brantley in "the New York Times" wrote that "the actors playing Pentheus and Dionysus with a definitive if unacknowledged taste for kink ... manage to strike a few erotic sparks in their charachters' confrontations but that suppressed homosexuality is not the primary subject of The Bacchae." At that time, I emailed Brantley saying to him, "JoAnne deliberately added from her own this dash of homosexuality being aware of you sitting in the stalls making notes for your next morning's review of the play, and intending to--to use Pozzo's word about Luck trying to impress him--"mollify" you to put good notices in the NYT about her show, she added that gay dash, and JoAnne is stanchly proud of her femininity that the last word to come down on the stage in her 'Tis Pity She's a Whore was the word CUNT, and because you missed JoAnne's gay semiotic signal for your exclusive sake, you wrote that scathing review on her The Bacchae. A critic, no matter how fulture-eyed, misses sometimes some significant signals." Agave besides Euripedes' other heroine Medea are two of my favourite dramatic characters. My other heroine is Karla Zachanasian from Durrenmatt's The Visit. Who would forget Meda in the last scene riding her chariot and with her frenzy laughter departs for her father the sun god. Only Pozzo's two exits at ends of two acts of Waiting for Godot could compare to such a spectacular exit. When Agave, drunk to the brim, realises her tragedy of sucking the bones of her slaughtered (by her and her intoxicated wowen-friends) son's head, like an Arab sucking bones of a lamb's head, only Don Quixote, when looking at the mirrors and realising the fool he was, can compare, and Karla Zachanasian taking with her the coffin in which dead Anton lies is a scene with which only King Lear carrying dead body of his daughter Coredlia can compare


Aeschylus and Sophocles are greater poetry writers than Euripedes, but Euripedes is the better theatre writer. Of the three great Greeks, I relish Euripedes most