Jeffrey Wright Instagram – Palate cleanse – an afternoon spent at Columbia Univ reading ancient Greeks – excerpts from Homer’s Iliad and from The Trojan Women by Euripides – with a chorus made up of Columbia students, from seemingly disparate backgrounds, seeking common ground in a time & place riven by conflict thousands of miles away. For Euripides’ play, Lois Smith read Hecuba, Elizabeth Marvel read Andromache, I read Talthybius. The reading was another in the @theaterofwar series led by Bryan Doerries. After the reading, a forum to discuss the unfortunate – even tragic – timelessness of writers’ words from millennia ago. Humans. We never change, except maybe in advancing our capacity for brutality.
Great questions/thoughts raised by student-performers and audience members alike: What was Euripides attempting with his play focused on Trojan women and a child destroyed years before by a Grecian army – Grecian, like his audience? Why is it that international law (and law generally) seems often a cynical weapon for the powerful to deploy against the vulnerable? Wouldn’t the Trojans have visited the same brutality upon the Greeks, if it’d been they who’d had the advantage (question to myself)? How do humans break the cycle of generational trauma & pain passed down as a birthright? Who will join up tomorrow in dialogue across the stubborn divides? Where is empathy?
I was reminded again of the purpose of theater and of all art: to conjure enlightenment; to invoke the beautiful, even via the tragic; to awaken empathy, even as it seems dormant in so many people and places. Simply suspending disbelief is an act of empathy by an audience. In the ideal, they carry away with them the elevated reality they experience inside the theater – in the ideal.
I hope, as they also do, that these students carry on in their invocation of and insistence on higher ground and in their resistance to the selfishness and cynicism of this world, even as I wonder if cynicism & ignorance might disappear only when all humans do.
Oh! And I played lax in college with an uncle of one of the students. Lax bois – we stick close. | Posted on 28/Feb/2024 05:36:42
