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Euripides' OrestesAuthor(s): Paul SchmidtSource: Arion, Vol. 7, No. 2 (Summer, 1968), pp. 311-313Published by: Trustees of Boston UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20163136 .

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EURIPIDES' ORESTES Paul Schmidt

It is a special pleasure to experience the greatest of all acts

of translation, the presentation cm a stage of a classical Creek

play. To know that a long trail of words can stretch over

hundreds of years to make people move and talk, weep and

die before us! In how many studies and classrooms, I wonder, is it made clear that the only reality of a play text is the

physical presence of people and the sound of human voices? How often is it clear that at a

given passage of text a hand

outstretched, a head turned away, a shriek of horror, or the sound of tears was intended by Euripides, depended upon by

Sophocles? How many readers can hear the flutes and the drums behind the lines of verse they read, or see the torches and the gold? Whatever else these texte may be in critical

usage, they are primarily and essentially play texts, and the

theater is their locus Ordinarius. I often have the feeling that many scholars too easily deny

the meaningfulness of theatrical performance. And yet the

essential, the ultimate humanity of these texts is finally to see those figures, to see Antigone, Oedipus, Orestes, stand in front of us and talk to us. And to see them is to realize how

profoundly they were intended to represent us, to be like us, and to make us feel like them. That feeling comes often as a shock. Even at the mildest, we murmur: "I didn't think Orestes was so tall..."

We can accept the idea of production more easily, I think, if we consider it an extraordinarily rich means of translation.

At every step in the preparation of a production, the director must make decisions that are, ultimately, textual interpreta

tions. Working with a translation of the text (and see now how enormous are the responsibilities of that translator), he must reconstruct the meaning of an author in a dimension

beyond words. His task, and the actors', is the reconstruction of what we may call the symbolic indexes of the text?those features of its language which He outside the lexicon and the

grammar, and which comprise the prosodie features of the text, as well as its social and physical, its spatial and temporal environment. Symbolic indexes, because in this specific the atrical environment the aim is not the reconstruction of historical reality?theatrical or contextual?but the con struction of a

psychological model, as it were, which is true

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312 EURIPIDES* ORESTES

both for the characters of the play and for the play's audi

ence, at whatever point in history. And in this requirement, I beHeve, we see the ultimate test of the word-translation of a play text. The actor must derive from his text a tone of

voice, a stance, a gesture, the simulacrum of an emotion. And his text must provide this. The language of a

play text can

not be a language of the library, of the dictionary. It must be a language of the mouth, a

language for the ear.

This production of Orestes* was staged outdoors, in the

courtyard of the Architecture building on the campus of the

University of Texas at Austin. I went to see it with some de

tachment; I had played Orestes in a production of Arrow smith's text several years ago at Harvard, and had a smug feeling that the play had seen its definitive production.

What I saw was a rather striking example of how classical Greek plays were designed to be performed within a form

ally defined geographical space that includes both players and audience; that the "performance" is indeed an action that occupies that space totally and involves all the com

ponents of that space. In a modern proscenium theater, the convention is two-dimensional; the darkened spectators are an abstract entity before which a succession of tableaux are elevated. This Orestes, outdoors in that courtyard, was some

thing else. The courtyard is deep, a Renaissance rectangle, with three

stories of the building rising on three sides and an open loggia, onenstory tall and with a balustraded roof, closing the fourth side. The center of the court is paved and has a pool.

A low platform had been built in front of the loggia, and a

dancing floor on the ground in front of it. The audience sat on both sides of the pool facing the platform, where the main action of the play was performed, but the "entrance to the

palace" was the main door to the courtyard, opposite the

platform and the loggia. The audience thus sat at the door of the house of Atreus watching an action in the forecourt of the house, with the road to Argos visible beyond the loggia.

The action of the play occurred at different times on the

platform, within the loggia, on the roof of the loggia, in the

* A production by the Texas Union Theater Company, May 1968, of William Arrowsmith's translation; staged and directed by Douglas Dyer, with music by Mary Truly and costumes by Abbie Mitchell.

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Paul Schmidt 313

pool (in a marvelously funny bathing scene), and within the house at windows over the heads of the audience. How clear

ly this production had understood the concept of ancient

"'participation'' in the action of the play?an action not

merely of ritual identification, but of physical proximity, of

filling an assigned physical place within the structure that contains the dramatic action.

The other brilliant fact about the production was Douglas Dyer's scrupulous attention to the different voices that Ar rowsmith carefully indicates; the actors were able to lean on the tones of voice in the text The commercial supercilious

ness of Apollo, the back-country dialect of the messenger, the low-camp Oeole of the Phrygian slave, the fraternity house ingenuousness of Pylades?all these gave a sureness to the actors' work and a clearness to the meaning of the action.

Trained singers and dancers in the chorus, and marvelous music by Mary Truly?the choruses, then, frankly sang and

danced, and their dancing mimed the metaphors of the text

they sang. A splendid example of how the various compon ents of tne performance?words, movements, and music? reinforced one another in explaining the text.

Let us have more of this kind of performance of the Greek

plays?careful and intelligent elucidation of a multidimen sional meaning, so that the complex clarity of the play is

made appara?t.

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