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.

Dikaiopolis' Directorial Deliberations: Dover

'There are practical limits to changing and augmenting a play once rehearsals have begun, and whenever we consider the relation between the subject of an Aristophanic play and the political situation at the time of its performance we must not forget that the situation at the time of composition was sometimes significantly different.' These are words that will ring true to anyone who hand a hand in our production of the Acharnians last year, in which Rumsfeld played a starring role, Bush and Cheney were lampooned, and a private peace was made with the Iraqis, several months after the accession to power of a new American Pericles.

They were written by Kenneth Dover, the doyen of scholars of Attic Old Comedy, in his classic survey Aristophanic Comedy. Our usually merry troupe was saddened by the recent death of Sir Kenneth, whose personality was as multi-faceted as his scholarship (only the Telegraph's obituary lives up to its subject's notoriously high standards of frankness), and Dikaiopolis could think of no better way of paying tribute to the former president of his undergraduate college than by working through Dover's exemplary comic textbook and bringing some of his arguments about the staging of Clouds to 'light' here.

One of Dover's virtues as a scholar was a stubborn refusal to move beyond what was warranted by the available evidence, though at times this could lead him into minor absurdity. For example, Dover insists (in his edition of Clouds) that there is no reason to believe that the unnamed creditors who come in near the end of the play correspond to Pasias and Ameinias, the two creditors Strepsiades complains about at the beginning of the play. It is certainly true, as Dover points out, that it makes no sense for Strepsiades to shoo away the second creditor with the words 'Get a move on, Pasias!', as occurs in some manuscripts, since it is the first anonymous creditor who asks for the twelve thousand minae Strepsiades has previously complained of owing to Pasias. But this this textual corruption is cleaned up easily enough by substituting the variant samphoras - 'Get a move on, you particular breed of ancient Greek horse!', or 'Run like a Dodge Viper' in our version. And, once that is taken care of, it is hard to see why we shouldn't go ahead and identify the two creditors as (in our version) with the employees of the Bank of American and Mastercard that Shifty whined about at the beginning of the play.

A more pressing issue, and one of Dikaiopolis' current directorial dilemmas, is how many doors are required in the stage-building (or skene) to do what Aristophanes's script seems to want us to do. No surviving tragedy - apart from one scene in Aeschylus' Libation Bearers - requires more than one door, though stage-buildings may not have been absolutely identical in both tragedy and comedy. There are definitely three doors in Menander's play The Grump, but this was first performed in 316 B.C., half a decade after Aristophanes' last plays. This director would like there to be only one door, partly because it makes the set-design simpler! But he has to admit that one door becomes awkaward in Clouds. For example, near the beginning of the play, Strepsiades says 'Do you see that door and the little house' referring to Socrates' school; but after his son Pheidippides refuses to enter the school, he nonetheless anounces 'Well, then, I'll go inside' - so he must be talking about his family home. This case can, just about, be dealt with by simply leaving to the audience the task of switching the identity of the stage-building when necessary (as seems to be done in Frogs when Dionysus travels from Herakles' house to Pluto's). Or it can be dealt with just by making Shifty show his son a brochure of the school rather than pointing to it (which is what we've done).

Dover thought that the final scene of Clouds made the use of two doors in the play a virtual certainty. Earlier on, Strepsiades was convinced by Socrates that dinos (the Vortex) has replaced Zeus, but after seeing the error of his newfound intellectual ways, he announces that that was only what he was taught 'by this dinos' (here meaning a large type of ancient Greek pot). Shortly afterwards, a repentant Strepsiades has an intimate conversation with the traditional deity Hermes. 'When we remember that a herm [a kind of statue] representing Hermes, normally stood at an Athenian's front door, it seems plausible to suggest that two doors are in use: one, flanked by the conventional herm, represents Strepsiades' house, and the other, flanked by a dinos type of pot, symbolizing the Dinos in which the Socratics believe, represents the school'. This may be a plausible suggestion, but it is also rather speculative, and it doesn't seem to me to be too hard to imagine Strepsiades fetching a pot and a statuette at some point from the skene. Stage-buildings did occasionally simply serve as stroage-rooms for stage-properties, as when the Old Man suddenly orders for a mat to be brought out from the skene in Thesmophoriozusae.

We could close with any number of bon mots from a formidably sententious classicist. (For example: 'The noisy expulsion of gas from the bowels has as good a claim as anything in our experience to be absolutely and unconditionally funny.') But luckily for us, Dover seems to have left some explicit words of encouragement for our project. 'It is always easy to pick holes in other people's translations, and nothing like so easy to produce a translation which will make an audience laugh when it is performed.' And, as if he had been present at last year's performance of Acharnians, he caps his sentence by assuring the reader, 'the modern American translations do make audiences laugh.'

Discussing aspects of production

SCIT conducted its second Stanford Classics Reception Workshop colloquium on March 2, this time covering aspects of production for our 2010 show, Aristophanes' Clouds.

We were lucky enough to enjoy the input of faculty at this session, as well as the perspective of a local thespian, Mr. Bennett Fisher of the Atmos Theatre Company and San Francisco Theater Pub. The latter company produced a version of Euripides lone surviving satyr play the Cyclops featuring our own James Kierstead; the present writer was privileged to see it, and to enjoy a frosty beverage at the bar where it was conducted! How's that for restoring some of the old Dionysiac spirit to Classical drama?

The first set of problems we tackled involved the staging of the agon or "debate" scene from the Clouds, the details of which I will not disclose for the sake of those who want to be surprised at the final show. At the time of the colloquium I presented a paper on the history of interpretations of this scene and on some aspects of the ancient staging. According to one ancient commentator, Aristophanes presented the two participants in the debate onstage as fighting cocks in wicker cages, a scene possibly (though not probably) depicted on the image below of the "Getty birds," from a near-contemporary vase. Needless to say, we will not be replicating this now-obscure metaphor.

Other important issues that came up during this presentation included: whether or not we should supplement comic dialogue with creative staging, pantomime, and tableau, or let the words speak for themselves; how to get an audience into a debate on stage, where it's more about ideas and language than action; and how to create characters who are convincing amalgams of pop-culture stereotypes without being puzzling or distracting.

Next we discussed Socrates' infamous entrance scene. (If you read Plato's Apology you'll see that this scene stuck in many people's minds!) How could we pull it off? Does our performance space permit such "special effects"? And can we do it without breaking our Socrates' neck? (Yes, of course, Mr. Perry, if you're reading this...)

Finally, we talked about our Cloud chorus, which is the one really unchanged holdover from the original Greek version. Choruses are always tricky beasts to incorporate into a modern production, and can run the gamut from being seamlessly integrated into the action to being awkward appendages that no modern audience understands. In our case we also have to address the problem of presenting a chorus which, in 423 BCE, would have made perfect sense as a representation of new, "sophistic" deities tied to developments in natural science, but which now has its closest equivalent in the phrase "head in the clouds." In any case, we're committed to giving our chorus even more song-and-dance numbers than last year, and to getting as creative as possible with our presentation of fluffy white "cloudness."

We came away from the colloquium with several great new ideas and helpful recommendations. Our next step is to read through the script with our wonderful cast!

Translation Colloquium, Tuesday, February 2nd 2010

Local hero, Atthidographer and organizations guru Josh Ober is keen on 'institutional learning'. In the Athenian context, this meant that citizens were educated for politics partly by doing politics - by actively participating in the Assembly, Council, and the 700 or so magistracies that kept the city-state ticking. One year's councillors could learn from the experience of the previous year's bunch, and their travails and successes would in turn feed into the following year's team, in an ever-brighter circuit of information and know-how.

Some SCIT members - well, maybe just Dikaiopolis - just really wanted to be like ancient Athenians, and couldn't get a place on the Olympias. Most of us, as academics in the mould, didn't quite have time to produce proper academic papers for last year's colloquia. So we decided to see if we could pool our experience of last year's production and channel the various streams of feedback offered by other members of the department into something that got flow, both theoretical and practical. Plus there were some bits in the translation we couldn't quite get right.

And that's where Dikaiopolis came in, loudly and obnoxiously urging the assembled citizens of SCIT to make a decision about some of these key cruces. First up was the name of one of the main characters, Pheidippides (see post below!). Suggestions included Thrifty (pheidos plus car-allusion), Datsun (cheapness plus car-reference plus dubious 'dat son' pun), and the inspired Diesel (bathos at the end of a list of classier names, automobile-nod, plus unexpected and perhaps unwanted evocation of muscle-bound pillock). And Diesel by no means tanked it.

Second critical juncture: what do we call the phrontesterion? Suggestions were, at first, innocent. The Cogitarium. The Center for Learning and Discovery. The Center for Advanced Interdisciplinarity (some participants were worried these places already existed on Stanford campus). Then things got delicately, or grossly, acronymic. The Center for Learning, Inter-Disciplinarity, and Technology. The Center for Universal New Technology Studies. And finally, the coup de grace: the Center for Universal Meta-Studies and Heuristic Omni-Technology.

Farming in Silicon Valley has made old Dikaiopolis pretty savvy about technology, so he thought it would be a great idea for the Clouds to become The (Google) Cloud. This is, of course, a network of super-computers that will store information and offer a platform for software centrally, allowing take-home hardware to become radically simplified. It is also something that Stanford Classics grads have never heard of. So we stuck with the conventional sort of clouds, some of which have actually appeared of late in our big blue Californian sky.

In the original play, Strepsiades complains of being bitten by bed-bugs or fleas in his cot, which also serves as a kind of private thinkery. A modern equivalent allowing easy infestation? Some wanted a school-desk; others a dorm-bed or a yoga-mat. What won out in the end was a bean-bag, a staple (apparently) of Bay Area hippy-intellectuals, and accordingly often infested with fleas. And if you thought that was the last you would hear of fleas, the director is absorbing daily-lobbying for a full-fledged flea side-show featuring a certain Smyrnaean...

Helpful resources for Aristophanes and the Clouds

I plan to post soon about the problems I've encountered while translating the "Better/Worse Argument" scene, but for now I thought I'd start a thread for helpful resources for better understanding a number of things: the context of the original Clouds, tricks for translating Aristophanes, and dramaturgical details. Feel free to add sources that you find helpful. Some of these will probably be painfully obvious (I've withheld Dover on the grounds that he is just too obvious), others perhaps less so. All of them should be in Green Library or online.

D. M. MacDowell.1995. Aristophanes and Athens. Oxford. "Clouds" chapter.

A. M. Bowie. 1993. Aristophanes: Myth, Ritual, Comedy. Cambridge. Chapter 5.

Martin Revermann. 2006. Comic Business. Oxford. Chapter 5.

Martha Nussbaum. 1980. "Aristophanes and Socrates on learning practical wisdom." YCS.

Alan Sommerstein. 1973. "On translating Aristophanes." G&R 20.

American Journal of Philology, vol. 123 no. 3 (2002): special issue on "Performing/transforming Aristophanes' 'Thesmophoriazusae'". See esp. Gamel's longer essay: she's a skilled updater of Aristophanes and an admirer of our Acharnians production.


Any other suggestions?

The Clouds are Moving Fast

Before your dear just citizen could get his hammer and chisel together, a distant Durbaner had already leapt like a spring-bok into the midst of the translating maul...Which may make it even more important at this point to clear the lines and remind ourselves of where the goal-posts are this time around.

The problem with last year's translation were institutional rather than artistic. To cut a long story short, too few people ended up doing too much for too long. To try to ensure that we reap the full benefits of collective action in circumstances of epistemic diversity, we elicited explicit (and, we hope, credible) commitments from no fewer than ten translators, and then assigned different sections of the text to each of them.

The sections were assigned with various needs and requests in mind: some people wanted to do songs (and many to avoid them); others scrapped to scrutinize particular passages (like the argument between Right and Wrong); and some effort was made to make everyone's portion a resonably continuous chunk of the play. No doubt there will be some trading of bits somewhere down the line, but for now we have a pretty clear idea of who's responsible for what.

Having sent each other off with cheering reminders of the intentions of our founding fathers (us: to have more fun), we then separately and collaboratively set about the Aristophanic corpus with all the zeal of a curious pathologist embarking on an autopsy. But alas! the opening sections were to test to the limit the comic savvy of your faitful phallic friend.

What was I to do with the section on naming (60ff. - ish)? Strepsiades wants to name his son after his own father, Pheidon, whose name seems to have something to do with thriftiness (see LSJ under pheido and Pheidon itself). His wife though insists on adding a horsey suffix (-ippos, -ppides), and they eventually arrive at the compromise Pheidippides.

Juggling all these thoughts and bearing in mind our translation of junior's equestrian predilections into automobile-mania, I came up with a load of bad car-puns and the names Thrifty and Thrifty-Car. With which there are two problems. One is that Pheidippides was according to Dover (ad. loc.), unlike the bizarre and bathetic moniker I came up with, a not uncommon name. The other is more serious. The sequence may not be funny. And, since one of the main characters' names is a pretty serious issue, I thought I would make it known to the demos and let whoever wishes have their say.