Dear Friends,

This workshop of THE BACCHAE is the third collaboration between The Public Theater and Stanford University. In previous years, we have only been able to speculate on the results of our collaboration; now, in our third year, we are already reaping wonderful fruits.

PASSING STRANGE, the remarkable new musical by Stew and Heidi Rodewald which was our first collaboration with Stanford, enjoyed wildly successful runs in Berkeley and at the Public last year, and now has an opening date on Broadway this coming February.

YELLOWFACE, David Hwang's sly and idiosyncratic look at race in America, our second collaboration, had a successful run in Los Angeles this past spring and is set for its New York premiere at the Public later this month.

We theorized that the cultural and intellectual environment of Stanford would be a rich environment for the development of new works for the theatre that were original, intellectually complex and aesthetically ground-breaking.

It's nice to be right. This has been a brilliantly successful venture for the Public, and we are deeply grateful to Stanford for their collegiality, support, and collaboration.

May it continue for many years to come.

About The Bacchae

by Nicholas Rudall

Euripides wrote The Bacchae at the end of his life, when he was living in artistic exile in Macedonia. We have no clear evidence of when or where it was first performed. But it would be a mistake to assume that this was not a play intended for the eyes and ears of Euripides' fellow citizens. Athens is dying. It is the end of the Peloponnesian War. Rational democratic government has failed. The Bacchae is a play rich in themes, and one of its most disturbing is the inadequacy of rational human government in the face of the ecstatic Irrationality of Dionysus.

This is a political play. Nominally, the polis in question is Thebes. But one cannot escape the pervading sense of a dying Athens. While there is evidence that cult worship - especially of Sabazius, an Eastern incarnation of Dionysus - was on the rise in Athens at the end of the war, it would be a reduction of the scope of the play to assume that the political targets were contemporary or specific. The play is about the inadequacy of human response to the incomprehensible. It is about the necessity of submission and the futility of resistance to divine power. It is finally, and perhaps prophetically, about the imminence of destruction.

It is a haunting play. Its images of sexuality and violence disturb when seen in performance and often linger in the mind. This is partly because they are so graphic, unusually so in Greek tragedy, and partly because they are often tinged with unexpected emotional and situational colors. The sexuality is ecstatic and secretive, ambiguous and voyeuristic. The violence is savage and divisive, animalistic and human. And both the violence and the sexuality sometimes are touched with a cruel humor.

The central figure of Dionysus is a remarkable creation. Sprung from a mortal woman and from Zeus, Dionysus is a god in human shape. His first entrance was almost certainly into the stage proper rather than onto the theologeion on the roof. He was visibly a god amongst men - perhaps quite unexpectedly for the Greek audience. He was god and man, male and female, smiling and savage.

It is in this nexus that the play is most incomprehensible to a modern audience. Because the matter of the play is divine, because its structure arcs like a moral fable, because, therefore, or contemporary response will seek for dogma and scriptural truth in a fable, we often ask the wrong questions. We want to know who is right. We assume that right will be the provenance of the god. But the punishments he inflicts upon Pentheus, Agave, and above all Cadmus have little to do with what is "right." When it comes to human fate the truth lies in the awfulness and majesty of the divine, not in an inappropriate desire for a just balance.

This pervading sense of human impotence in the face of a cruel and inevitable tide of events must have mirrored the mood of Athens as its world collapsed. The Bacchae is, in the end, a document of human folly. Dionysus lacks mercy. And to assume that human wisdom and human rationality are forces that can resist him is a monumental mistake. Pentheus has been a good, competent, and thoughtful king. Cadmus trusts him. But Pentheus's reason cannot comprehend that insignificance of man and the majesty of god.

Euripides has often been called a rationalist, a playwright who excelled in the workings of the mind, who celebrated logic and rational argument. It has been fashionable, therefore, to view The Bacchae as a recantation in his old age. That reduces the play's massive scope - much as to view The Tempest as Shakespeare's farewell to his art reduces the magic of that work. The Bacchae is at once a celebration of the power of the irrational and a cry for the need for submission to it.

A Statement on the Bacchae

by JoAnne Akalaitis

The translator Nicholas Rudall wrote that 'The Bacchae' is a play "rich in themes... one of its most disturbing is the inadequacy of rational human government in the face of ecstatic irrationality of Dionysus." I might add that when this is propelled by a cult of woman (who in this play are essentially demented "groupies"), it is even more disturbing. The mysterious power of woman in a community is potentially alluring, sexual and threatening. Jack Straw and Tony Blair have recently remarked that they could not "communicate" with Muslim women in total chador in the U.K., which I read as they are simply scared of them.

This is a play where no one wins; the hideous murder of Pentheus, the wrenching grief of Agave, and the demented triumph of Dionysus are devastating. I have always felt that 'The Bacchae' is the one play in the Greek canon that we have no rational mechanism to internalize. There seems no way to get over it. I would like to investigate that.

Plot Summary

Dionysus, son of Zeus, seeks vengeance on Thebes, the city of his birth and site of his mortal mother Semele's cruel and horrible death. Leading his army of women into the surrounding mountain glens, Dionysus casts a spell on the city's females, who abandon their husbands and fathers in order to engage in forbidden revels. When the young and highly repressive king Pentheus discovers that his own mother Agave has given herself over to this upstart god of wine and erotic joy, he declares a state of war, despite the very stern warnings of Cadmus, the former king and the famed prophet Teiresias. Incredibly, Dionysus' unarmed women defeat Pentheus' formidable royal army. When the king meets the god in a face-to-face confrontation, the result takes on a horrible logic all its own. Hitting the voyeuristically inclined young king where it hurts, Dionysus lures him into the glens where, at the very site Semele's destruction, he is seduced into disguising himself as a woman in order to watch the forbidden orgies unabated. Unable to resist the sexual lure of the Maenads' holy eroticism, Pentheus attempts to join in only to be torn, literally limb from limb, by the frenzied Bacchae. The following morning, Cadmus discovers the terrible aftermath: the still-raving Agave dancing through the woods, her dead son's head clutched in her hands. Now joined by Teiresias, the former king forces his daughter back to her senses and the horrifying realization that not only is her son dead, but that Agave herself was "amongst his butchers."

The Public Theater at Stanford

The Public Theater at Stanford, a collaboration between Stanford University and the Public Theater, creates new theatrical works, supports emerging and established artists, cultivates new audiences, and fosters innovation and diversity in the arts at Stanford and in the American theater industry. The residency program provides support to groundbreaking artists by bringing them to Stanford's campus to workshop plays currently under development at The Public. Playwrights engage with students, faculty, and community members through a robust series of discussions, workshops, and other special events. The partnership includes a co-commissioning program to invigorate the American theater by creating a steady and vibrant stream of new work and a fellowship program aimed to increase diversity in the arts by offering career development in the theater industry for undergraduates and post-graduates affiliated with Stanford's Institute for Diversity in the Arts (IDA).

The Stanford Arts Initiative

The Stanford/Public Theater Partnership is part of the Stanford Arts Initiative. The Stanford Arts Initiative is re-imagining the way we see, teach, and experience the arts today and the world tomorrow. The initiative builds upon Stanford University's strengths at the intersection of arts, science, and technology, while creating a shared language that bridges cultures and understanding. At the initiative's core, the Stanford Institute for Creativity and the Arts (SICA) is fueling collaborations between the arts and other disciplines through diverse programs, performances, and campus residencies.

The Public Theater

Founded by Joseph Papp as the Shakespeare Workshop and now one of the nation's preeminent cultural institutions, New York's Public Theater is an American theater in which all the country's voices, rhythms, and cultures converge. Under the leadership of Artistic Director Oskar Eustis and Executive Director Mara Manus, who is a Stanford alumna, The Public remains dedicated to producing new plays, musicals and productions of Shakespeare and other classics. Over 250,000 people annually attend Public Theater-related events on its many stages -- six at 425 Lafayette Street including Joe's Pub, and Shakespeare in the Park. The Public has won 40 Tony Awards, 135 Obies, 39 Drama Desk Awards and four Pulitzer Prizes.