Bawdy Aristophanes comedy gets SF staging
‘Even for the Greeks, I think, it was outrageous,’ the play’s director says
Discussing the 2,400-year-old Aristophanes comedy that he’s adapting and directing at San Francisco’s EXIT Theatre, Stuart Bousel is quick to admit that it’s a hard play to get your mind around.
“It’s a problematic play,” says the prolific San Francisco playwright, director and producer. “I think every director has one or two plays like this, that they secretly love partly because they don’t really know if they actually like it.”
It you haven’t heard of “The Congresswomen,” there’s a reason for that. Several reasons, really. “It’s the least performed of all his plays,” Bousel says. “I think people don’t know what to do with it. It wasn’t even in my collected Aristophanes when I went to college.”
Those who have heard of the play probably know it by another name. “It’s usually translated as ‘The Assemblywomen,’ but my parents for some reason had the one published version of this play where it’s called ‘The Congresswomen,’ ” Bousel says. “The cover is this woman with an obviously fake beard holding a lamp, and it captured my imagination as a kid. When I was finally old enough to read it, what was inside the book was entirely not what I expected it to be.”
Finally reading the play didn’t quench Bousel’s fascination with it.
“Even for the Greeks, I think, it was outrageous,” Bousel says. “It’s a very, very bawdy comedy about how we’re all doomed to fail because humanity is fundamentally flawed and all of society is a dumpster fire. It also contains the earliest known depiction of human defecation in Western theater and the longest single word in Greek. And if that’s what you can say about your show instead of giving a plot summary, I think that actually says everything about ‘Congresswomen.’ When people ask me what it’s about, I say, ‘Well, that’s not important. Here’s what’s important: A guy takes a poop onstage, and the longest word in Greek is in it.’ I feel like the whole show is a dare.”
It’s a deeply cynical comedy about a group of idealistic women who take over Athens and initiate reforms that backfire calamitously. “This isn’t a play about how women take over a country and fail because they’re women,” Bousel clarifies. “This is a play about a country that is failing, and then another political party takes over and just fails in a different way.”
Bousel finds this play’s protagonist more interesting than Aristophanes’
more famous Lysistrata, because Lysistrata’s schemes go perfectly as planned while Praxagora’s go horribly awry.
“Praxagora is this idealist who has this proto-communist vision of how the world could be, where everyone could love everyone and everything could be shared as common property and we’d all take care of each other,” he explains. “She engineers a peaceful coup and enacts this sort of early proto-communism, and within six hours it completely falls apart because the one thing Praxagora wasn’t counting on was just how
terrible everyone else is.”
And things go downhill from there.
“At the end of the play, depending on how you read it, she either chooses to ignore that everything’s falling apart or she’s so helpless that she ends up reciting the longest word in Greek, which is just an extended recipe for a lamb stew,” Bousel says. “Nobody in the play does anything good, and anyone who tries to do anything good fails. And they fail because the society they live in is so fundamentally flawed that we can’t salvage this. This is something that
we have to wipe off the face of the earth and start all over again.”
Bousel thinks it’s hardly any wonder that Aristophanes’ play is so unruly. “I tried to give it more form and more structure and more ins for the audience but also not compromise that vision of chaos,” Bousel says. “That’s kind of his point, that the world is a mess, so why would you write a tidy play about a messy world?”