Dikaiopolis' Directorial Deliberations: Final Thoughts on the Clouds

Now that the Center for Universal Meta-Studies and Heuristic Omni-Technology has been deconstructed and the Clouds have gone their separate ways (their costumes hung up in wardrobes, presumably, for a rainy day), Dikaiopolis is once again faced with a vacated assembly. Having looked at Clouds from both sides now - in Greek and English, in its (semi-)original version and in our modernized transformation, on the page and on the stage - he is inclined to look back on the last quarter of his PhD program in the wistful words of his compatriot Joni Mitchell: So many things I would have done,/ but Clouds got in my way.

But that would be to discount not only the fun and fellowship earned through many hours of translating, workshopping and rehearsals over the past year, but also the real insight gained into a play that was, after all, written to be performed (at least in its unrevised form). Many of the mental notes I took are remarks on difficulties that will seem mundane to anyone who has tried to produce an ancient play, and most of them focus on the chorus. Just what are they to do the whole time they are onstage, especially if there is no orchestra? Why do we constantly seem forced to imagine them as addressing Shifty or Diesel when theatrical practicality (at least to a modern director) seems to demand that these last two characters be offstage? And how does Shifty suddenly gain the rhetorical know-how sufficient to deal so briskly with the two creditors who knock on his door, when we have seen in the earlier part of the play that he - in contrast to Diesel - failed to learn anything from Socrates?

Luckily, we cut the two scenes with the creditors. But I could go on with such queries and quibbles. (It was a surprise to this director at least to realize, on consultation with our star and costumer around a fortnight before our performances, that the text seems to demand that Shifty be naked for the greater part of the play). Instead, I want to focus here on two issues, one of dramaturgy and one of interpretation.

After appearing as myself in the Acharnians last year, I thought I had gotten some kind of a handle on the peculiar difficulty of playing Aristophanic roles. Basically, every character (and especially the comic hero) is a schizophrenic with multiple personalities, a Joycean narrator shuffling parodic voices, an actor playing a dozen roles at once. This year, I tried to instruct the actors accordingly: whatever you do, don't try to act naturalistically, as if there were such thing as unity of character. And yet as we worked through some of the scenes, I became strongly conscious of a countervailing dynamic, one that involved a slow build-up, from Shifty's paternal affection for Diesel at the beginning of the first scene to the pair's heated exchange at the end of the episode, for example. The hilarious explosions of frustration from our Socrates similarly worked in tension with a Feydeau-style progression from the constrained to the ridiculous. I can't say the two tendencies were ever reconciled or firmly ordered in our production, except perhaps in the contest between Straight Talk and Subversive Speech.

The interpretive dilemma that most often came up in rehearsal was the matter of which side the Clouds are really on, leading to the secondary question of what their reactions should be to events in the play and finally to our evaluation of Shifty's actions at the end of the play. Interestingly, I think all of these issues were distorted in some ways by our modernizing adaptation. First of all, it has always been my view that the Clouds come out quite

clearly at the end of the play as having been on the side of traditional morality and the traditional gods. They say as much in the Greek, telling Strepsiades (our Shifty) that they always plunge into evil the man in love with bad deeds, 'until he knows how to fear the gods (tous theous dedoikenai)'. We gave up this theological clarity, rightly enough in some regards, for the sake of another rude joke, translating 'until he learns how to stop being an a-hole'.

How a director resolves the second issue - how the Clouds should react to what is happening onstage - is more a matter of taste. When I consulted our local Greek oracle, Phoibos expressed the opinion that the Clouds should be celebrating Diesel's beating of Shifty, for example, since it is after all their stated plan all along to plunge this lover of bad deeds into evil until he learns to fear the gods (and stop being an a-hole). With less than complete conviction, I chose another route. The Clouds play along with much of Socrates' nonsense, but are fundamentally righteous, so that they cannot hide their horror at Diesel's father-beating (even if they are then momentarily impressed by some of his argumentation). But Diesel's proposal to beat his mother goes too far, outraging them, and this is what finally leads them to decide that the time has come to declare their true role and allegiances.

In the program note, I said that there was little to sanction in admire in Shifty's subsequent actions in burning down the C.U.M.S.H.O.T., but doubt expressed by Socrates himself at a Palo Alto drinkery led me to reconsider this too. As a classicist, I am trained to have a horror of any supposition that the ancient Athenians were somehow less civilized or sophisticated than we are; but I must say I found something attractive in the suggestion by one of our troupe's political scientists that the original audience may have been entirely untroubled by the rough treatment meted out to a bunch of pettifogging intellectuals (which bears comparison to the brusque handling the astronomer Meton receives from Peisetairos in the Birds). As it happened, our conversion of Zeus into Jesus made Shifty's shift from religious sincerity to violent action more jarring than it would otherwise have been had the god in question remained one who preferred throwing another thunderbolt to turning the other cheek.

And that, I'm afraid, is all you'll be hearing from Dikaiopolis in directorial form. Like Shifty, he finds himself indebted to a number of people. If his characteristically drunken and orgiastic speech at the cast party - one assembly that was full - sometimes exchanged moral clarity (as usual) for a chance for more rude jokes, he would like again to thank everyone who had a part in making the Clouds reign: the cast, the crew, and especially the Council of Five(ish) that takes care of the company's day-to-day business. Next year, SCIT will have a new play, new officers, and perhaps even a new venue. But after this year we can say with some assurance that the sky is no longer the limit.

Playing your hero when he is ridiculed: the case of Aristophanic Socartes

How is it for an actor to play his own hero? Well, given the usual circumstances, the hero will usually be another actor, a politician, a leader or some other sort of social figure. When Jim Carrey played Andy Kaufman in “Man on the Moon” he completely transformed, so they say, being Andy or Tony during all the breaks and all rehearsals. The director Milos Forman says he only met Jim twice during the making of the film. I guess for real actors, there’s an excitement in playing the role of a famous hero-actor that makes them want to push themselves to their own limits. Kaufman was a very talented mutli-faceted actor and Carrey was probably anxious to meet such high standards.
As a first year student in my undergraduate degree I had to take a course called “History of Political Philosophy I”. Right at the first class the professor introduced us to the first man in the western world that has been documented to think about our social and political life, our first critic and observer, the father of all philosophy – Socrates. With great awe and admiration we read the apology and other dialogues. The professor, a true guardian of the scholastic tradition, questioned every student for the suppositions behind his comments and did not hesitate when emphasizing the foundational importance of the Socratic “I do not think that I know what I do not know”. Just a few years later with the presumption of a political theory graduate student and despite being an amateur actor at best - I tremble with the kind of apprehension perhaps met by Carrey, an urge to meet more stringent demands when I portray a figure that has been a role model for my aspired profession.
But there is another layer of difficulty in playing the role of Socrates in the Aristophanes’s Clouds. For despite the figurative role Socrates plays in our modern philosophy, as the illustrious dedicated pursuer of the truth, exposer of sophists for their vacuous rhetoric and steadfast guardian of scientific integrity with the public acknowledgment of his own limits – Aristophanes’s Socrates is himself a sellout, a rhetorical artist of little substance, a perverse parody of his own social criticism. In order to even begin thinking about the role, I have to placate the cognitive dissonance I experience when I hear the name Socrates abused that way.
These two radical ends meet for me in The Clouds – the amazingly intelligent Socrates, the inspiration and role model for all western philosophy and the laughable idiot, detached from real life in his ivory tower, looking for opportunities to show off his useless wittiness and obnoxious eloquence and even to sell his poignant tongue to the highest bidder. I try to meet the challenge by offering a self-conscious academic, dedicated to his spiritual world and his critique of material world but also aware of his own flaws and weaknesses. Aristophanes’s bottom line is extremely unfavourable; but in my inner struggle I try to give Socrates a charitable interpretation, ascribing sincerity to his passionate but wacky pursuit of elegance, eloquence and ultimately – knowledge. I take this contradiction happily, pondering the social criticism of the role of academia in political life and particularly the use of analytic theoretical frameworks that ‘simplify’ reality into a model which loses contact with ordinary life on its way. I have always said, and explicitly elsewhere, that folly should be taken very seriously. I take Socartes’s ridicule very seriously and I hope I can do justice, as the saying goes, to his odd and bipolar Aristophanic character.