Volume 56, Number 16 · October 22, 2009
A Wild Night in the Park
By Daniel Mendelsohn
The Bacchae
by Euripides, directed by JoAnne Akalaitis
presented by the Public Theater at the Delacorte Theater, New York City, August 11–30, 2009
Whatever else it may be—a stark symbolic drama about the conflict between nature and culture; a startlingly prescient 'psychoanalytical' exploration of the dynamics of sexuality and repression; an eerie mystery-play celebrating the obscure power of divinity; or, simply, the work that offers the greatest single 'specimen of sheer theatrical power' that the Athenian stage bequeathed to us[*]—Euripides' Bacchae is surely the cleverest literary riposte in history. It was first presented in 405 BC, one year after the dramatist's death in Macedon, the wild northern kingdom to which he had traveled at the invitation of that realm's culture-vulture king, gladly abandoning Athens during the final, bitterest, most disillusioning years of the Peloponnesian War. Those circumstances no doubt help to explain the work's ostensible distrust of cities and a narrowly conceived 'civilization,' here personified by the Theban king, Pentheus, with his macho swagger and obsession with control; and its apparent embrace of the sauvage, embodied by the king's inscrutable but implacable adversary, Dionysus, the god of wine and mystic ecstasy, whose return to Thebes, the city of his birth, is in every way a return of the repressed.
Review, 4438 words
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