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A Utopia for the Birds

Aristophanes in Birdonia, based on Aristophanes’ Birds, adapted, designed, directed, and choreographed by David Gordon. Presented by Danspace Project at St. Mark’s Church, Pick Up Performance Company, New York City, January 2006.

By Charles Rowan Beye

Aristophanes’ comic drama Birds won second prize at the City Dionysia in 414 BCE. There is nothing to indicate that the prize reflected a considered esthetic judgment any more then than the Academy Awards do now, since critics today generally single out the extraordinarily beautiful lyrics of the choral odes in the play as the high mark of the ancient comic playwright’s genius. Aristophanes was a master at manipulating language, the effect in the odes more pleasing to modern tastes than the running puns, verbal gags, and plays on topical subjects that fill the dialogue of his plays. He is equally celebrated for his use of theater as political platform. One thinks of Lysistrata, a one-note play perhaps, which does hammer home its theme of “make love, not war,” in a relentless way—hence its popularity with American audiences since the days of the Vietnam war protests. The plays of Aristophanes that survive are mostly from the last decades of the fifth century, when Athens was suffering from its protracted war with Sparta, a military adventure that finds criticism in all his dramas, and offers a temptation to contemporary American directors that they are hard put to resist. For example, the Lincoln Center production a year or so ago of the Frogs, which is less obvious certainly, nonetheless managed to give Nathan Lane a chance to sound off against the Bush administration’s war in Iraq while enveloping him in music and jokes of which Billy Minsky would have been proud.

Compared to that Frogs, this production was a minimalist delight, challenging the audience to find something other than the strident entertainment that Broadway-inspired performances usually offer. Of course, it helped to have the Aristophanic original well in mind, the necessity of which might, on the other hand, be considered an unfair imposition on the viewer. In Aristophanes in Birdonia, the director found the essence of the Birds, which he brought over intact to a contemporary audience several millennia later. This was all the more remarkable for its being conceived in terms of dance. Ancient comic choruses sang and danced in costume, but we have no more notion of the choreography than of the outfits that were worn. The Birds turns on the collision of two styles of life, the Athenian go-get-’em, kick-shove-gouge urban velocity versus the need-nothing, want-nothing, freewheeling, empty-air-seeking avian manner. In Aristophanes, this distinction—so far as latter-day readers can recognize—comes through the difference between belly-laughmaking, non-stop punning, and outrageous topical allusions spoken by the principals and the exquisite, finely tuned, metrically sophisticated lyrics sung by the bird choruses. The production’s choreographer, David Gordon, is a legend who goes back to the days of the Judson Memorial Church’s Dance Theater, at which, beginning in 1962, dancers and choreographers shaped dance history by creating postmodern dance. In this production, he transformed the effect of the Aristophanic lyrics into dance movements that were spare and exquisite, too understated for modern tastes perhaps, but distinctly lyrical when read against the bluster of the new arrivals. The ancient comic drama’s structure has been maintained although much of its dialogue has been abandoned (it seemed necessary for one character to remark how talky the evening was for a dance production).

Instead of the ancient chorus of 24 men, the birds in this production were depicted by two women and three men costumed in brightly colored madras and plaid fabric that had been shredded to tatters, thus giving the effect of feathers aflutter as the dancers wheeled and turned and jumped after the manner of birds in precision flying. Their resemblance to birds was uncanny, particularly the three tall, lean males who, by nature or contrivance, managed to maintain the lifeless, glassy stare of birds, to my mind the most positive proof of their dinosaurian genetic inheritance. Their thin, muscled, hairy legs uncovered beyond the length of their costume again eerily resembled that part of a bird’s leg beyond the feathers, all scales and bone. They sufficiently maintained the posture and movements of a flock of birds to create a constant tension of distinction between themselves and the earth-born arrivals, whose jerky, awkward thrusts of movement branded them as aliens to the empyrean realm.

The play turns on the desire of Peisthetaerus (“the Persuader”) to get away from the stress-filled environment of the city to find peace and quiet among the birds in the sky. Escapism is in the plot of every surviving Aristophanic drama; indeed, Euelpides, the sidekick in this play, has a name that means “ever hopeful.” While the idea of escape seems natural enough for a playwright and audience sick to the death with a long war that seemed to be going nowhere, it may be the case—although we really do not have a large enough sample to generalize—that it was as much an inescapable staple of the comic view of things as resignation was to the status quo in tragedy. The name of Peisthetaerus “the Persuader” is indicative of his fundamental character or personality, that is, someone who’s pushy, a manipulator—in sum, everything an Athenian was and, ironically, what Peisthetaerus seems anxious to leave. Athens and the Athenians were notorious for their aggressive personality, as evidenced in Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, in which he describes the Spartans and Corinthians complaining of the polypragmosyne of the Athenians, their pushy, controlling, into-everybody’s-business manner.

In this version Peisthetaerus is called Ollie. He has persuaded his friend, Stan, to join him on his search for utopia. Their entrance, Ollie walking ahead, Stan struggling behind under a huge stack of luggage in his outstretched arms, bears enough resemblance to the entrance of Pozzo and Lucky in Waiting for Godot to stimulate the audience to imply from that scene the harsh servant-master relationship of Stan to Ollie, as well as the inherent futility of the search upon which they have embarked. The first, of course, implies the second, since the peace of the land of birds implicitly denies the cruel aggressions of such a relationship. Can one who leads and persuades another to follow be said truly to seek peace and quiet? The question is immediately posed in more direct terms as Ollie, once he is among the birds, persuades them to take advantage of their position in the skies, between the humans on earth and the gods higher up, to establish a barrier. He urges them to take back the power usurped by the gods a time long ago, build a city, assert and extend control, lead an imperialist adventure.

It seems clear enough that the ancient audience would have discerned a somewhat veiled topical allusion in this scheme: Athens two years earlier had sent an armada against Syracuse with the intention of bringing the island of Sicily into its trading and tributary orbit. It was a misguided undertaking, launched with high hopes—in its own way utopian—which collapsed in a mighty defeat in Syracuse’s harbor. Are not all such ambitious schemes utopian and doomed to fail? Without the kind of heavy-handed hinting that characterized the Lincoln Center Frogs production, America’s adventure in Iraq became the evening’s subtext for the action. But like the Aristophanic original, every kind of topical allusion came thick and fast from the mouths of an entire cast inspired by Olllie’s plan to establish a city and, thus, a constitution. The American constitution became the running source of gags, the most delightful being the separation of church and state inspired by the impenetrable barrier that the birds were meant to erect between humans and the gods: their new city, Birdonia.

If we can generalize from the surviving Aristophanic comedies, the structure follows a pattern in which the hero devises a scheme (outlandish, hence laugh-provoking) that in implementation inspires a variety of reactions that, in a way, constitute miniature subplots not unlike the serial acts in vaudeville. The audience for Aristophanic comedies might be described as those people who enjoy an evening of puns, dumb and dirty jokes, lots of blondes, and lots of tits and ass, as opposed to an audience, say, that relishes an evening of Noël Coward or Neil Simon, with sharp wit riding on the delight of a well-constructed plot: the modern equivalent of the fourth-century comic playwright, Menander. The Birds is the longest of the surviving Aristophanic comedies, and is exceptionally unwieldy for that reason. For instance, the creation of the birds’ metropolis brings out a variety of opportunists who wish to establish themselves in the new scheme: a priest, an oracle-monger, a poet, a civil engineer and city planner, a general, a representative of the gods, and an inspector—who offers himself to the birds as “something all cities need.”

Inevitably, the play has been drastically reduced in scope, allusion replacing exposition. The shape has been preserved, however, by the clever introduction of what one might call a master of ceremonies, in this instance a character enacting the playwright himself. The ever wonderful Valda Setterfield, Gordon’s partner in matters theatrical and personal, assumes the role of Aristophanes, amusingly enough calling attention to the complication of being written into his own play. Not the least of Setterfield’s delightful attributes as an actor is her grand patrician accent, which not only establishes the playwright in the hierarchy of the Western literary canon, but separates her performance from the Aristophanic drama being danced and acted around her. By explaining what is happening or about to take place, the Aristophanes figure both instructs the audience on the plot movements that are otherwise too brief to notice and brings them outside the drama to consider it as an artifact, the way the author does. In this way, the audience can take the measure of the proceedings as a distillation or sketch of an ancient theatrical piece. What is being danced and dramatized is in fact an abstraction.

Instead of this production acting out the arrivals and negotiations that are a major part of the original, the same instinct for abstraction prevails. A series of wooden panels are brought out and attached together, creating both a barricade to keep the newcomers out as well as a kind of prison containing the birds, Ollie and Stan. One head after another pops up from behind these panels, suggesting the various figures arriving and going, and announcing the crises that forming a city has provoked. Aristophanes brings out a tall ladder, climbs it, and, from this perch, gives a running commentary on the drama unfolding in this city-in-a-crate—again the playwright, writing and acting in his own play simultaneously.

Part of the fun of the original play is the impossibility of juggling the demands placed on the two Athenians and their bird associates, not only by the constant stream of visitors but also by the problems arising from their civic association. The two seekers of peace and quiet have seemingly destroyed whatever chance they might have had for them. Yet the structure of comedy prevails in the sudden entrance of Prometheus to tell of the plight of the gods, who have been denied the sacrifices of mortals because of the barrier imposed by the birds. He proposes that Peisthetaerus demand a wife from the gods as a bribe. In this way, the play can move to the traditional ending of comedy, which is marriage, song, dance, drink, and the prospect of sex. That it is an irrational change of plot direction is immaterial in something so loosely conceived. Because it heralded the ending, the ancient audience was habituated to expect that it “fit,” in some sense or other.

The ending in this present production is startling. Suddenly, Stan can take no more of the tension and anxiety of the new city, and announces that he is returning to Earth, despite Ollie’s pleading. In a curious switch, nowhere to be found in the Aristophanic original, Ollie—the controlling, instigating man—surrenders to his feelings for Stan, or to his fear of loneliness, and leaves as well. It is a remarkable scene of contemporary comedy in which the two men realize that their plan was a disaster and retreat from it, a happy ending of sorts in which good sense prevails; and when one man hitherto noted for his self-aggrandizement realizes that he needs his friend more than the fulfillment of his ambitions, up comes another happy ending, this one personal.

At this point, a spectator was ready to applaud. But for reasons that defy analysis, the director imposed a 15-minute reprise of the dancing birds, this time joined by Aristophanes, Ollie, and Stan. Perhaps he wished to recreate the sense of celebration with which the ancient comic dramas always ended, that is, the wedding or the banquet. Perhaps the members of the dance troupe rebelled at the inordinate amount of time allotted to dialogue and acting in what was meant to be an evening of dance. Whatever occasioned this last segment, it severely undercut the sense of what the evening was all about, intruding with a wide paintbrush, one might say, on what had been a delicate sketch, or pencil outline, of an ancient artifact.

Charles Rowan Beye is distinguished professor emeritus of classics at the City University of New York, a contributing editor to greekworks.com, and author, most recently, of Odysseus: A Life.

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