I was on the road in a big way until mid-March, and have only recently realized just how lucky I was to get home. It meant forgoing the last leg of my trip, which would have been to Greece, but I did manage to get myself out of Istanbul on one of the last possible flights. The idea that I might have been trapped in Turkey, a country where I know no one and don’t speak the language, can still wake me with a jolt during these strange, hushed days as we watch the spring arrive from our various bunkers and ache as a species for all the sick and dying and those beleaguered few attempting to care for them.
I was in Troy, of all places, as a visiting professor for a graduate classics course from U Penn, teaching with Sheila Murnaghan, a classicist I have long admired, and Brian Rose, the archeologist who ran the excavation there for twenty-five years. It was an experience I will always be grateful I had, culminating for me with a reading of my version of The Trojan Women in the remains of an odeon on the ruins of, well, Troy. (I know!) I customized the script to feature all the languages present in that polyglot group, and included, since they were all classicists, ancient Greek in the mix. I also multiple-cast all the roles—there were never fewer than two people acting each part—so we could hear it as a choral work, characters speaking the same lines in different languages, refracting off one another or overlapping. The idea was that if you spoke only English, you could hear the whole script, but if you spoke only ancient Greek you caught a lot of it. And then there were several passages spoken in English by one person while a second speaker followed, translating them into what I called one of the “first” languages present—which included modern Greek, Italian, Chinese, Turkish, and Russian. (I counted seven languages in the air at one point, which made me very happy.) Because none of the students was a theater person, the impact seemed to be just that much more powerful—they didn’t realize how moved they would be by the experience until they were in the midst of it. For me, having seen several versions of the play, it was beyond anything I have ever hoped to experience in this life, the power of standing on the very stones we were talking about to speak that story. My favorite moment was when the Andromaches were on their way to the ships at the same time that the Muslim call to prayer began in a neighboring village, that yearning beauty echoing over the hillside and off the rocks. As we progressed through the play, the sun was setting, and you could hear sheep bells above the voices of the tragedy, as a shepherd drove his flock down the path along the city walls, a path that must be the same one his ancestors used for thousands of years, going back to the Troy we were evoking, with all its ancient sorrows. It was a remarkable thing, one I think none of us will ever forget, that at the end of the play, as the company stood on the stage, gathering themselves to leave forever their beloved home, now destroyed, they were looking out at the ruins of that very city.
Here is the little odeon on the site, where we performed:
In attendance were a few of the presiding authorities: some archeologists who were working on the site and perhaps six cats, the real experts, one might say, in the field.
The loss of the theater in this COVID-19 world, a world in which we can no longer gather, has hit me, and everyone I know who is (was) working in the medium, hard. It has been disorienting and wrenching to lose the art form entirely. It is apparently an experience I keep finding it impossible to accept, since in my dreams I am still in theaters, still telling stories from the stage or hearing them told while sitting in close proximity to strangers, all of us one in the telling, the making and the witnessing, the time we spend together in the physical presence of the art form. I can only feel grateful to have so recently had the experience I had in Troy, when the palpable nature of the medium, its inherent physical and temporal power, has never been clearer to me. It was that particular group of people with their specific pasts and first languages standing on those stones of that ancient city, listening to the sheep bells echoing across those hills as that sun set on that early spring evening. Never before and never again. If you weren’t there, you missed it. That is the heartbreak and the power of this most ephemeral of art forms. And all we can do now is wait in gratitude and in memory for the time when we may live it together again.