When playwright Alice Austen began adapting a Greek classic for a First Stage audience, she knew she was in trouble.
“When I started working on this, I panicked,” Austen said, speaking by phone about her transformation of Aeschylus’ The Eumenides into The Gracious Sisters. “Oh my God, this is impossible,” Austen remembered thinking, adding that “Aeschylus is the most difficult of the classical dramatists” and correctly noting that many of the translations of his work are “opaque.”
Directed by Matt Daniels and featuring the award-winning First Stage Young Company that Daniels helms, Austen’s play opens Friday, as First Stage’s second entry in the World Premiere Wisconsin festival.
Austen has done the “impossible” before. Her critically acclaimed Give Me Liberty was filmed in Milwaukee without the vital public financial incentives available to filmmakers elsewhere. And as a young lawyer, she’d represented the Czech Ministry of Industry during fractious negotiations to write laws for Václav Havel’s fragile new democracy
That legal experience explains Austen’s attraction to Aeschylus’ play, which is all about how a country might move past murderous and endless cycles of violence, oppression, and revenge to birth a nation grounded in democracy, fairness, and law. When Daniels asked Austen to adapt a Greek text of her choice for First Stage, she chose The Eumenides.
Giving Women a Voice
Aeschylus’ play concludes a trilogy that begins with a vengeful Clytemnestra murdering her husband, Agamemnon. In the second part of the trilogy, their son Orestes murders his mother for having killed his father. As the concluding play opens, the three Eumenides – think Furies – are in hot pursuit of Orestes, determined to bring him down for killing Clytemnestra.
So who’s right? Is it Orestes, avenging his father’s death by killing his murdering mother? Or is it the Furies, avenging Clytemnestra’s death by killing her murderous son? Is this even the right way to frame the problem? Are we going to have another round of an eye for an eye, leaving everyone blind? Or is there perchance another way forward?
In The Eumenides, there is: At the eleventh hour, the goddess Athena intervenes to save the day. Convening a jury, she facilitates a trial allowing both Orestes and the Furies to state their case.
When that jury deadlocks, Athena – a goddess fathered by Zeus alone and therefore not of woman born – casts the tie-breaking vote for Orestes while admitting that she usually sides with the men. She placates the Furies by promising that they’ll be given “a place of your own, deep hidden under the ground” and that no Athenian household will prosper unless it honors them.
And you wonder why scholars have concluded that the Furies got the short end of the deal? Or that Aeschylus’ play reflects the consolidation of patriarchal power? What’s fair about that? If there’s no true justice, how can there be lasting peace?
And yet how can we go forward unless all the revenging characters in this story agree to let the past go?
Austen’s adaptation squares this circle by introducing a young woman from the 21st century named Alice – an homage to Lewis Carroll’s most famous character but also an autobiographical signature, in a play where both Alice the character and Alice the author are tasked with making Aeschylus relevant for a contemporary audience.
An intern on an archaeological dig in Greece, Alice accidentally falls through a wormhole landing her in the middle of the conflict Aeschylus had described. The Furies task her with taking their side and describing it better, by advocating for them as their lawyer before Athena’s court.
She does a bang-up job by pointing out how much of the history The Eumenides left out.
An illustrative example: The Agamemnon whom Clytemnestra later killed had murdered her first husband and child, stolen her as his bride, murdered one of their children, and enslaved women during the Trojan War, taking one of those “slaves” home with him as his concubine.
“Women draw the short straw,” Alice says at one point, and “it’s got to stop.”
No wonder the Furies like her. She speaks for women then and now, criticizing sexist Greek gods while also taking shots at the Dobbs decision and non-disclosure agreements meant to silence harassment victims. This is, after all, a character we hear singing Christina Aguilera’s “Fall in Line,” insisting that women have a right to speak their mind.
“The Eumenides raises so many issues that are shockingly contemporary, involving the roles of women and men, war, mercy, and justice,” Austen said. “We’re seeing this play out all over the world.”
Finding Grace
For all that, Austen ultimately agrees with Aeschylus that we can’t move forward by being so consumed by our rage – however justified – that we can’t find common ground.
Perhaps that’s why her play, despite its contemporary vibe, preserves so many of Aeschylus’ original lines, some of them sung to classic American spirituals and folk songs (Austen noted that both she and Daniels love the musicality of Aeschylus’ play and that both had wanted to incorporate traditional American music into this adaptation).
And perhaps that’s also why Austen joins her precursor by ultimately endorsing compromise. Make no mistake: The Gracious Sisters is a decidedly feminist redo of a classic text. But it also upholds Aeschylus’ plea that we somehow learn to get along.
“It’s dictators who tend to be uncompromising,” Austen said.
“We’re living in a moment where we’re in opposition and aren’t talking, and that’s dangerous,” Austen continued. “Plays are about talking and trying to understand, which promotes compromise. Hopefully this play will make people think in a way that’s not too on the nose, while adding humor. Humor, like communication, promotes liberty.”
I asked Austen how one drew the line between compromise and capitulation. Can one exercise too much grace? Did the Furies give away the farm to make peace?
“While I’m always willing to compromise, I won’t do so when it comes to fundamentals like freedom and equality,” Austen said. What makes her Furies “gracious,” she added in a text to me the next day, is their ability to “graciously accept the smaller compromise for the greater gain.”
Yes, that means her Furies must accept that the justice achieved at Athens is rough, at best. But their willingness to move on ensures a future for all the world – and guarantees them a defined role within it, where they’ll be honored for being gracious rather than feared for being furious – thanks to a play that has truly heard their grievances, the better to honor their compromise.
“I’m an incurable optimist,” Austen said. “Every experience that each of us has on an individual level, in circumstances you didn’t expect, leads to connection,” she added. “It allows us to find each other as people rather than as part of a group or ideology telling us what to think.”
Maybe – just maybe – such encounters can give us a sense of how amazing grace can be.
The Gracious Sisters opens Friday and runs through May 21 at the Milwaukee Youth Art Center, 325 W. Walnut St., Milwaukee. For more information, visit https://worldpremierewisconsin.com/event/the-gracious-sisters-2/.
