Respite
Sooooo, after two and a half months of auditions, emails, flyering, rehearsing, costume-making, and general hysteria, The Birds is over. Not the Hitchcock version, but the Classical Greek comedy by laugh master Aristophanes. I produced The Birds as part of my coordinating gig for The Phrontisterion, Evergreen's one and only Classical Studies club. Each winter, the coordinators stage an Aristophanes play--last year they did Lysistrata, the year before that, The Clouds.
(Before I go any further, check out these awesome production pix--http://www.flickr.com/photos/rwhitlock/sets/72157603962243346).
All of Aristophanes' work is raunchy and hilarious, there's no doubt about that. But there's something about The Birds that separates it from the rest of his comedies, and from most comedies in general. It's not that it's necessarily tamer, though it's less saturated with sex than Lysistrata, but it has
no...climax. Or rather, no lesson. Comedies, although they always end happily, usually let their characters stumble a bit before ascending into success. Not so with The Birds. There's no moment of realization, at least not for the human characters--and this is perhaps why the play is so politically profound. While the line between man and beast gets blurred, man ultimately triumphs, making it a tragedy for the birds. After all, they sow the seeds of their own destruction and are wiped from the picture with a bird-basted banquet. If we are to glean any lessons from The Birds (really, if we're to avoid being eaten) we must first admit our own naivete in the face of elegant political rhetoric.
And what better time to be on our feet than election time?