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Sex and War on the American Stage
American adaptations of Aristophanes’enduring comedy Lysistrata have used
laughter to critique sex, war, and feminism for nearly a century. Unlike almost
any other play circulating in contemporary theatres, Lysistrata has outlived its
classical origins in 411 BCE and continues to shock and delight audiences to this
day. The play’s“make love not war”message and bawdy humor render it
endlessly appealing to college campuses, activist groups, and community theaters—
plays are performed in the West as frequently as Lysistrata.
Starting with the play’sfirst mainstream production in the US in 1930, Emily
B. Klein explores the varied iterations of Lysistrata that have graced the
American stage, page, and screen since the Great Depression. These include the
Federal Theatre’s 1936 Negro Repertory production, the 1955 movie musical
The Second Greatest Sex, and Spiderwoman Theater’s openly political Lysis-
trata Numbah!, as well as Douglas Carter Beane’s Broadway musical, Lysistrata
Jones, and the international Lysistrata Project protests, which updated the
classic in the contemporary context of the Iraq War.
Although Aristophanes’oeuvre has been the subject of much classical scholar-
ship, Lysistrata has received little attention from feminist theatre scholars or
performance theorists. In response, this book maps current debates over Lysis-
trata’sdubious feminist underpinnings and uses performance theory, cultural
studies, and gender studies to investigate how new adaptations reveal the
socio-political climates of their origins.
Emily B. Klein is Assistant Professor of English and Modern Drama at
Birmingham-Southern College. Her work has appeared in Women and Perfor-
mance and Frontiers as well as Political and Protest Theater After 9/11: Patriotic
Dissent (Routledge, 2012).
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Sex and War on the American
Stage
Lysistrata in performance 1930–2012
Emily B. Klein
Routledge
Taylor & Francis Group
LONDON AND NEW YORK
ROUTLEDGE
First published 2014
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
Text © 2014 Emily B. Klein
The right of Emily B. Klein to be identified as author of this work has been
asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data
Klein, Emily B.
Sex and war on the American stage : Lysistrata in performance, 1930-2012 /
by Emily B. Klein.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Aristophanes. Lysistrata. 2. Aristophanes--Adaptations--History and
criticism. 3. Aristophanes--Stage history--United States. 4. Theater--United
States--History--20th century. 5. Sex in literature. 6. Women in literature. 7.
War in literature I. Title.
PA3875.L8K64 2014
792.9’5--dc23
2013039819
ISBN: 978-0-415-81215-3 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-203-06963-9 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by Taylor & Francis Books
For Dan and Julian
This page intentionally left blank
Contents
List of illustrations viii
Acknowledgements x
Introduction –Power play: History, theory, and adaptation 1
1 Sophisticated or seditious? Broadway, Gilbert Seldes, and Pablo
Picasso (1930) 23
2 Raced bodies/erased bodies: The Federal Theatre Project’s Negro
Repertory Lysistrata (1936) 43
3 Cold War cowboys at home on the range: The Second Greatest
Sex (1955) 63
4 Spinning yarns: Spiderwoman Theater’sLysistrata Numbah! (1977) 87
5 Staging strikes and trafficking in trauma: The Lysistrata
Project (2003) 108
6 Opting out and giving (it) up: The Uncoupling and Lysistrata
Jones (2011–12) 127
Bibliography 146
Index 156
Illustrations
1.1 Set model for Lysistrata. Photograph by Maurice Goldberg. Image
courtesy of the Edith Lutyens and Norman Bel Geddes Foundation.
Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin 28
1.2 Myrrhina. Pencil drawing by Mildred Orrick. Courtesy of the
Mildred Orrick fashion and costume collection. Kellen Design
Archives, New School Archives & Special Collections 29
1.3 Spartan Herald. Pencil drawing by Mildred Orrick. Courtesy of the
Mildred Orrick fashion and costume collection. Kellen Design
Archives, New School Archives & Special Collections 29
1.4 Production photograph of Lysistrata. Photograph by Maurice
Goldberg. Image courtesy of the Edith Lutyens and Norman Bel
Geddes Foundation. Harry Ransom Center, The University of
Texas at Austin 30
1.5 Picasso’s“Kinesias and Myrrhina from Lysistrata”published in
Gilbert Seldes’Lysistrata, courtesy of MBI, Inc. 36
1.6 Picasso’s“two lovers”published in Gilbert Seldes’Lysistrata,
courtesy of MBI, Inc. 36
2.1 Flyer for Lysistrata at Moore Theatre. Florence Bean James Papers.
University of Washington Libraries. Special Collections UW 35781 46
2.2 A scene from Lysistrata at Moore Theatre. University of
Washington Theaters Photograph Collection. University of
Washington Libraries. Special Collections UW 35783 47
2.3 The cast of Lysistrata at Moore Theatre. University of Washington
Theaters Photograph Collection. University of Washington
Libraries. Special Collections UW 35782 55
3.1 The Second Greatest Sex poster, Universal Picture Company,
Inc. (1955) 67
3.2 Opening scene. Universal Pictures Company, Inc. (1955) 71
3.3 Kathleen Case. Universal Pictures Company, Inc. (1955) 71
3.4 Jeanne Craine and George Nader. Universal Pictures Company,
Inc. (1955) 74
3.5 The wedding night barn dance. Universal Pictures Company,
Inc. (1955) 77
3.6 Telling the story of Lysistrata. Universal Pictures Company, Inc.
(1955) 80
3.7 Universal Pictures Company, Inc. (1955) 81
3.8 Bert Lahr. Universal Pictures Company, Inc. (1955) 82
3.9 At the old Indian fort. Universal Pictures Company, Inc. (1955) 83
4.1 The original cast of Lysistrata Numbah!:Lisa Mayo, Lois Weaver,
Gloria Miguel, Pam Verge, Naya Beye, and Muriel Miguel.
Photograph by Antonio Sferlazzo/Françoise Lucchese. From the
Native American Women Playwrights Archive, Walter Havighurst
Special Collections, Miami University Libraries, Oxford, Ohio 92
4.2 Lysistrata Numbah! poster. From the Native American Women
Playwrights Archive, Walter Havighurst Special Collections, Miami
University Libraries, Oxford, Ohio 95
4.3 Photograph by Antonio Sferlazzo/Françoise Lucchese, From the
Native American Women Playwrights Archive, Walter Havighurst
Special Collections, Miami University Libraries, Oxford, Ohio 96
4.4 Photograph by Antonio Sferlazzo/Françoise Lucchese. From the
Native American Women Playwrights Archive, Walter Havighurst
Special Collections, Miami University Libraries, Oxford, Ohio 99
4.5 Lysistrata Numbah! restaging with Sylvia Robinson and Kashaka
Snipe 104
4.6 Photograph by Martin S. Selway. From the Native American
Women Playwrights Archive, Walter Havighurst Special
Collections, Miami University Libraries, Oxford, Ohio 104
4.7 From the Native American Women Playwrights Archive, Walter
Havighurst Special Collections, Miami University Libraries,
Oxford, Ohio 106
4.8 From the Native American Women Playwrights Archive, Walter
Havighurst Special Collections, Miami University Libraries,
Oxford, Ohio 106
5.1 Lysistrata Project poster. Image courtesy of Kathryn Blume. Poster
design by Mark Greene 112
5.2 Accidental Activist poster. Image courtesy of Kathryn Blume/
Tamzina Films and Mighty Ruckus 113
6.1 The cast of Lysistrata Jones. Photograph courtesy of Joan Marcus 130
6.2 Patti Murin and Jason Tam as Lysistrata and Xander. Photograph
courtesy of Joan Marcus 131
6.3 The women swear their oath. Photograph courtesy of Joan Marcus 132
6.4 The men of Athens University. Photograph courtesy of Joan Marcus 135
6.5 The boycott. Photograph courtesy of Joan Marcus 139
6.6 The players. Photograph courtesy of Joan Marcus 139
6.7 Hetaira presides over the Eros Motor Lodge. Photograph courtesy
of Joan Marcus 140
6.8 Liz Mikel as Hetaira. Photograph courtesy of Joan Marcus 141
Illustrations ix
Acknowledgements
In my long list of thank yous, it seems only right to begin with this project’s
true starting point, at Theatre Bay Area in San Francisco, 2003. I am grateful to
my friend and then-boss, Dale Albright, for sympathetically looking the other
way more than once while I quietly slipped out of the office to watch the anti-war
rallies on Market Street. January, February, and March of that year were rife
with downtown protests and street theatre as the US’s invasion of Iraq grew
increasingly imminent. In those months, between running in and out of the
Flood Building among police officers in riot gear and groups of chanting picketers,
I heard artists excitedly plan for the Lysistrata Project. The whole world
seemed to be thinking about public performance and acts of resistance. For the
first time, I could feel theatre’s danger and its power.
Since then, I have been fortunate to find inspiring mentors, colleagues, students,
and friends who have shared my enthusiasm for political performance and
enriched my thinking about theatre, war, gender, and their tangled history. My
deepest thanks go to Jenny Andrus, Julie Bowman, Natka Bianchini, Stephanie
Batiste, Michael Chemers, Jill Dolan, Kathy Newman, Kristina Straub, Michael
Witmore, Barbara Johnstone, Peggy Knapp, Jenny Spencer, Jane Archer, Amy
Cottrill, Clare Clifford, Anne Yust, Mary-Kate Lizotte, David Resha, Michael
Flowers, Susan Hagen, Alan Litsey, Mark Schantz, and Sandra Sprayberry. I am
also indebted to the groups that have given me a sense of home within the
academy: the Women and Theatre Program of the Association for Theatre in
Higher Education, the Theatre and War Working Group of the American
Society for Theatre Research, and the English and Drama departments at
Carnegie Mellon University and Birmingham Southern College.
I am grateful to the wonderful members of the Routledge staffwho patiently
shepherded this project from its earliest days to its completion, especially Talia
Rodgers, Ben Piggott, and Harriet Affleck, as well as my research assistant, Nona
Nichols. It was my honor to receive advice from Alan Sommerstein, J. Michael
Walton, and the anonymous readers of my early work. Their suggestions and
insights helped me flesh out a richer project. Chapter 5 of this book includes
excerpts from another volume in which I am proud to have my work included,
Political and Protest Theatre after 9/11: Patriotic Dissent (2012). My research
would not have been possible without the use of archival material and images
from the George Mason University Special Collections and Archives, Miami
University’s Native American Women Playwrights Archive, MBI Inc., the Uni-
versity of Washington Theaters Photograph Collection, the New School’s
Kellen Design Archives, the Estate of Pablo Picasso and the Artists Rights
Society of New York, the Library of Congress Music and Performance Collection,
and the Harry Ransom Center’s Performing Arts Collections at the University
of Texas at Austin. I am especially grateful to Brad Simmons, Lewis Flinn, Joan
Marcus, Kathryn Blume, Deborah Ratelle, and Muriel Miguel for their willingness
to talk with me about their work in the theatre and/or their generous permission
to use their words and images in this book. My work was also supported by
generous grants from the Faculty Development Committee and the Provost’s
Office at Birmingham Southern College.
Finally, there is the kind of unbounded gratitude that is most difficult to put
in writing. To my mom and dad, my family, and dear friends, the people whom
I have the unmatched privilege of loving: your incisive questions, humor, and
understanding made this work possible. Dan and Julian, my two hearts, this
book is dedicated to you.
Acknowledgements xi
When Hercules sat at the feet of Omphale and helped with her spinning, his
desire for her held him captive; but why did she fail to gain a lasting power? To
revenge herself on Jason, Medea killed their children; and this grim legend
would seem to suggest that she might have obtained a formidable influence over
him through his love for his offspring. In Lysistrata Aristophanes gaily depicts a
band of women who joined forces to gain social ends through the sexual needs
of their men; but this is only a play. In the legend of the Sabine women, the
latter soon abandoned their plan of remaining sterile to punish their ravishers. In
truth woman has not been socially emancipated through man’s need—sexual
desire and the desire for offspring—which makes the male dependent for satisfac-
tion upon the female. Master and slave, also, are united by a reciprocal need, in
this case economic, which does not liberate the slave.
Simone de Beauvoir
E.H. Carr describes the march of history as serpentine. Remote periods suddenly
loom close to the present as the march of time snakes on. We are in a moment in
which classical antiquity feels proximate, and those aspects of human life which
have not changed much since the time of the great Athenian dramatists are of
particular importance to us now. To some of us the classics are important only
because they prove that people don’t change. To others […] they prove rather
that the struggle for change, the desire for change, is ancient and unconquerable.
Tony Kushner
Introduction –Power play
History, theory, and adaptation
Peace in patriarchy is war against women.
Maria Mies
That is what war is and dancing it is forward and back, when one is out walking
one wants not to go back the way they came but in dancing and in war it is
forward and back.
Gertrude Stein
In 2012 I went to Nashville for a conference. I was on a panel to discuss the
history of Lysistrata on Broadway. My research suggested that Aristophanes’
famous comedy made for a pretty hot ticket on the Great White Way in
the 1920 and 1930. But what was it, I wondered, about the naughty old play
that started to pique American interest in those roaring days of suffrage,
prohibition, and later, economic depression? Was it something particular to the
high culture theatre scene in New York? Maybe it gave the city’s elite a chance
to take in a light sex farce under the guise of classical sophistication? What
I didn’t realize until I got to town was that Tennessee’sstatecapital,“the Athens
of the South,”had been in a swoon of its own over Hellenic life since the turn
of the twentieth century. Who needed Broadway? The Nashville Parthenon, first
constructed as a temporary showpiece for the Tennessee Centennial Exposition
in 1897, is a full-scale replica of the Greek original. When, in 1920, its popu-
larity began to noticeably outlive its crumbling plaster façade, the city’s Board
of Parks decided to hire an architect and fund the building’s reconstruction,
making it a permanent fixture of the municipal park. The renovation was
completed in 1925—the same year that Aristophanes’Lysistrata enjoyed its
inaugural visit to Broadway. Since then, the Parthenon has served as an art
gallery, and now hosts visitors under the watchful gilded eye of a 42-foot tall
Athena Parthenos.
Though the Nashville Parthenon now functions as a museum, my own research is
not curatorial. The worthy investigations of Greek drama in its ancient context are
better left to my colleagues whose knowledge of classical theatre and philology
is far greater than my own. Besides, it isn’t artifacts that interest me so much as
the weird contemporary responses and reprises that old things evoke. Like my
delight at being able to hang out at Music Row and the Parthenon on the same
day, it’s the uncanny juxtapositions of ancient and present-day, “exotic”and
all-American that fascinate me. This is not to say that I wasn’t wowed by my
long-ago visit to the real Parthenon in Greece, but there was certainly something
both quaintly kitschy and unsettlingly remarkable about watching caterers set
up buffet stations for a wedding party on the steps of the Nashville Parthenon.
For me, exploring contemporary re-visionings of Lysistrata produces a similar
effect; the old play is always a site of new pleasures and queasy tensions. Since
my initial encounter with Lysistrata in performance, first as guerilla theatre on
a San Francisco street in 2003, and then in 2005 as a staged adaptation by J.A. Ball
and Michael Chemers at Carnegie Mellon University, I was struck by the ways
that twenty-first century activists and theatre artists used and reused this old
play. How did Aristophanes’silly make-love-not-war script, the one I remem-
bered from college, with its bad puns and strap-on penis props, suddenly become
a vehicle for millennial activism and a trendy season anchor for progressive
theatre companies?
As it turns out, Lysistrata’sreappearance was not so new or sudden. A little
research led me back through centuries of international revivals and reappro-
priations, and a particularly rich inventory from the last hundred years alone.
In 1908, the famous Austrian director Max Reinhardt staged Lysistrata in Berlin.
In 1918 George Cram Cook, writer, philhellenist, and husband of Susan Glaspell,
produced a Lysistrata-inspired anti-war play called The Athenian Women,
which was performed by his Provincetown Players (Foley 68). The text had
been amply employed by suffragists in Europe and the US as a time-honored
treatise in support of the rights of women. Once liberated from the classical
constraints of the all-male cast, the play’s female protagonist became a center-
piece of women’s protest in academic settings in the UK and community theatres
in the US.
1
It was also reimagined across a variety of media: as a German
operetta in 1910, a ballet in London in 1932, a film, Flickorna, about Swedish
feminists in 1968, and an American graphic novel, Lysistrata in Gangland, in
2012. Herb Blau’s San Francisco Actors Workshop opened its doors with Lysis-
trata in 1953 and the play was also performed at Wayne State and on countless
other college campuses in the 1960s in protest against the Vietnam War. Though
I’m not a classicist, and I don’t read Greek, I was compelled to learn more
about the origins of the ancient text.
I discovered that Aristophanes, now revered as the father of Old Comedy,
was sometimes hailed as a first-rate journalist of his day. Between 427 and
386 BCE he used the theatre to report on the daily realities of Greek life as he
saw it. Of course, some of his critics regarded him as a salacious gossip writer.
An ancient master of broad sketch comedy, one part Tina Fey and one part
Oscar Wilde, his plays were beloved by Athenians for their piercingly relevant
satires on Greek political life, but that same opus may have had him in and out of
court, as he faced charges of slander. Throughout the interminable Peloponnesian
War, two oligarchic overthrows, and the dramatic reshaping of the Greek
empire Aristophanes made a career out of using humor to sling political
2Introduction
critique. His 40 or so plays, 11 of which still survive today, were staged at the
City Dionysia and Lenaia festivals for Greek audiences of 10,000 or more.
Popular with the mass citizenry and judges alike, the plays were frequent award
winners. His scripts—the subjects of doctoral dissertations and burlesque
shows, labeled as everything from treason to pornography—explain why. The
ones that we know of today were discovered in Ravenna in the eleventh century
and copied by Byzantine monks in the twelfth. Although the scandalously
bawdy Lysistrata has historically been Aristophanes’least anthologized piece,
appearing in only a handful of manuscripts until the 1900s, in the last century it
has enjoyed a vibrant cross-continental revival. Like the crumbling Parthenon and
its glossy modern duplicate, Lysistrata has enjoyed its own eerie and amusing
transnational cycles of ruin, revivification, and replication.
A play with legs
Like almost no other play circulating in contemporary theatres, Lysistrata
has long outlived its classical origins in 411 BCE and has continued to shock,
delight, and titillate audiences to this day. The play’s“make love not war”
message renders it endlessly appealing to college campuses, activist groups, and
community theatres—so much so that none of Aristophanes’plays are now
performed in the West as frequently as Lysistrata. Theatre managers would be
hard-pressed to find a play timelier than this 2500-year-old classic, with its
focus on war, politics, public sex scandals, protests, citizenship, and gender
dynamics. Adding to the play’s interest and controversial appeal is the fact that
its sex strike plot is grounded in a raunchy, pun-filled world of blue humor
and burlesque sight gags. Of course, these performance traditions were nothing
new or shocking to Athenian audiences of Aristophanes’day, but over time
they have become the very features that have gotten the play’s performances
censored or shut down in some historical contexts and, alternately, lauded
in others. Bawdy double entendres, however, aren’t the play’s only area of
controversy.
With its vocal female protagonist who unites Athenian and Spartan women
in a sex boycott to end the Peloponnesian war, Lysistrata’s explorations of
gender roles and female leadership have also been at the heart of debates for
centuries. The question inevitably asked today by most students, audiences,
actors, and directors who know the text is: Is Lysistrata a feminist play? The
Lysistratas portrayed in many contemporary performances seem to respond
with a commanding “Yes!”Often staged as an early antecedent to a popular
brand of post second-wave girl power, many current college productions figure
the play’s hero as a 1990s Spice Girl lookalike, wielding her own incipient
sexuality like a weapon while advocating a chaste war against war. The recent
Broadway run of Lysistrata Jones, set in the world of college cheerleading,
perfectly represents this figuration. Yet, despite this contemporary production
trend, classicists have understood Aristophanes’use of a central female hero as
an ironic way of showing that the Peloponnesian War had become so unceasing
Introduction 3
and pointless that even the most irrational beast—woman—could imagine a
way to bring the decades-long crisis to resolution.
In fact, the comedy’s fearless attention to female sexual desire and the corporeal
qualities that link sex to war, and violence to pleasure, have troubled feminists
and anti-war activists, classicists, and theatre historians alike. As playwright
Sarah Ruden writes in the commentary to her own translation, the play’s
“protest is remote from modern feminism [ …] That women have to make peace
is less an encomium of women than a mockery of the men who have failed to
do it. That women characters are farther-seeing, more self-restrained, and
more willing to act decisively on behalf of their city than the men are is an
uproarious joke and a pitiless condemnation of their husbands”(107–8). Alas,
Aristophanes was likely not the feminist visionary some readers imagine him
to be. His original play might even have been a re-telling in its own right –a
comment on the city’s priestess of Athena Polias, the similarly-named
“Dissolver of Combat.”Still, as I argue in these pages, part of the comedy’s
longevity may stem from its many points of interpretive conflict, like the kind
Ruden points out above.
Tempting as it is to try and define different adaptations of Lysistrata as
explicitly feminist or not, I intentionally avoid such designations here. Such an
effort would foreclose opportunities to tease out what I see as one of the play’s
greatest features—its interpretive ambiguity. Each chapter seeks, instead, to
pursue elements of “feminist residue,”a term I borrow from Janelle Reinelt and
apply broadly, not just to the ripple effects of second-wave feminism, but also
to the post-war and post-suffrage residue of first-wave feminism in texts of the
1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Though adaptations may not be “overtly feminist”they
often reveal “thepresenceofthe‘post,’the effects of coming after”(Reinelt). I take
up this work through two lines of investigation.
My first goal is to parse the gendered (and often also raced and classed)
performances of agency and self-determinism as they are figured in each new
version of the play. Second, I consider how each adaptation’s treatment of sex
and war reflects the tenor of those themes in their broader historical moment.
Since war has long been understood as a social force constitutive of our most
basic conceptions of masculinity and femininity, Lysistrata’supdates and itera-
tions are like petri dishes for the study of these isolated themes. “Causality runs
both ways between war and gender,”international relations theorist Joshua S.
Goldstein writes (6). “Gender roles adapt individuals for war roles and war roles
provide the context within which individuals are socialized into gender roles […]
War shadows every gendered relationship, and affects families, couples, and
individuals in surprising ways.”Therefore, this study seeks not only to map
current debates over Lysistrata’s dubious feminist underpinnings, but it also
examines the ways that American productions of the last 80-odd years have
revealed cultural anxieties of the day and reconciled popular responses to war
and shifting gender roles in the US.
Starting with Lysistrata’sfirst mainstream nationally touring production in
the US in 1930, this book explores the widely varied iterations of the comedy that
4Introduction
have graced the American stage, page, and screen since the Great Depression.
While the 2003 anti-war Lysistrata Project might be familiar to theatre fans,
few are likely to know of the 1936 Negro Ensemble production sponsored by the
Federal Theatre Project that was shut down on the heels of a sellout opening night.
Film buffs may also be surprised to learn about the 1955 Lysistrata-inspired
musical, The Second Greatest Sex, which was directed by George Marshall
and set in an all-American Midwestern town, populated by distracted husbands
and frustrated housewives. Though rarely critiqued in the American academy,
this rich lineage of US treatments of Lysistrata also includes Gilbert Seldes’
published adaptation for Broadway, illustrated by Pablo Picasso in 1934 and the
Spiderwoman Theater’sLysistrata Numbah from 1977. Finally, at the book’s
conclusion I turn to two new adaptations from 2011 and 2012: Douglas Carter
Beane’s Broadway musical Lysistrata Jones, and Meg Wolitzer’s acclaimed
novelistic update, The Uncoupling.
To be sure, these particular selections only represent a handful of the many
brilliant reimaginings of Lysistrata that have emerged around the globe in the
last century.
2
This project is not an historical inventory of such adaptations,
nor is it an attempt to reconstruct the details of Lysistrata’s production and
reception in ancient Greece. Those broad endeavors would have quickly led me
out of my depths as an Americanist and a scholar of modern theatre and
performance. Instead, I chose to limit the scope of this project to a handful of
popular twentieth and twenty-first century Lysistratas that earned national
recognition and revealed some unique purchase on American cultural life,
aespecially American attitudes about feminism, citizenship, sex, and war. All of
the performances and texts discussed here interest me as objects of critical and
aesthetic interpretation unto themselves, as well as heuristic devices for interpreting
the rich historical context of their own production. Every iteration frames
questions of sex and war through a fresh interpretive lens.
Why feminism? (or Your body is a battleground)
Although Aristophanes’oeuvre has been the subject of much classical scholar-
ship to which this book is indebted, his most popular comedy has received little
attention from feminist theatre scholars or performance theorists.
3
As I sought
out studies of the play, this relative silence both belied and confirmed the text’s
anxiety-producing potency. Even though the comedy continues to be staged in
mainstream American theatres, scholars other than classical philologists have
produced proportionately little work on the subject. One of the original work-
ing titles for this book, Your Body is a Battleground, alluded to this quiet
tension; the play fills theatres because of its comic focus on battles and bodies,
but in a play about feminism, sex, and war, the idea of bodies under siege
verges into more treacherous political territory than some audiences might like
to admit.
The bodies of Lysistrata and the other female characters in the play are
battlegrounds as well. Lysistrata’s tenuous feminist status marks her as a
Introduction 5
