During Spring Quarter, the Stanford Arts Institute will be profiling the 2014–15 Honors in the Arts cohort. This interdisciplinary honors program allows students in any major to complete a capstone project integrating arts practice or theory with another field of study, To learn more, visit artsinstitute.stanford.edu/honors.
Over 2000 years after Euripides’ 405 B.C. premiere of The Bacchae in an Athenian amphitheater, seniors Jake Friedler, adapter and dramaturge, and Laura Petree, director, will be staging bacchae, an immersive, modern-day adaptation of the tragedy on campus as part of their Honors in the Arts joint project.
The Bacchae’s original storyline follows the aftermath of the royal family of Thebes’ disownment of their deity-relative Dionysus. Friedler and Petree’s adaptation makes the play interactive by incorporating structured improvisation and allowing the audience to partake in, choose and shape the storyline.
For instance, Petree worked with actors on character development, using a process she had developed since the beginning of her undergraduate career. The process begins with what Petree calls “exploring the character’s center.”
“It’s about figuring out the physicality before the psychology of the character, learning to unlock yourself from your own psychology and letting the center of your body tell you what to do,” Petree said.
One of Petree’s theories on character development she cultivated through baccahe is allowing the actors to experience boredom within their characters.
“There’s a strong desire in actors to entertain and perform,” Petree said. “I’d rather allow the characters to sink in comfortably—and for that to happen, the character would’ve had to experienced boredom to become divorced from the sense of being a character, so the actor doesn’t always need to perform.”
This character development is particularly important, since the characters, after meeting at Cantor, will separate into 10 different storylines, which audience members will need to choose to follow until the cast members and the audience reconvene at the Clark Center. Because each storyline features structured improvisation, this requires the actors to have deep knowledge of their characters—but also be able to interact with their audience.
Along with close character-audience interaction, Petree and Friedler play with the idea of mythic time within bacchae—Petree said, “Even though they are repeating the action of this play time and time again, there will be some continuity and distortion of time—characters may be able to remember an audience member from another night.”
Petree said, “I don’t think [contemporary immersive theater] is being done very well. A lot of audiences are stand-ins, like props for the actors, and it’s like, ‘Don’t pretend I have agency in this world when I really don’t.’”
The decision to allow audience members to affect bacchae, then, is partially in response to Petree’s stance on contemporary immersive theater, but also stems from her desire for each member of the production crew to have autonomy.
“Where we’re at with theater is still very much a director’s theater,” Petree said. “In American culture, the director is viewed as God—other people are living up to their vision.”
Petree’s disagreement with this view led her to formally take on the role of “facilitator,” rather than director, of the recruited crew of over 60 members.
“There are so many moving pieces in this show,” Petree said. “It’s great to set things in motion and step back to let it happen.”
“There are so many moving pieces in this show,” Petree said. “It’s great to set things in motion and step back to let it happen.”
Friedler called the production process an experience in liberation.
“An existentialist spirit plays into our creative process,” Friedler said. “No director is going to tell you what to do. You always have a choice. We talk about not so much as creating a play, but creating a world, and in order to create a world we need to have parts that are totally autonomous, that don’t just have one god.”
Production for the bacchae performances began this spring quarter, but beforehand the two researched classical scholarship surrounding The Bacchae, Ancient Greek cult practices, queer theory, feminist theory and performance theory to inform their reinterpretation of The Bacchae. The project has taken the two on what they call a “sabbatical.”
“The really great thing for us has been being able to prioritize this over everything else,” Petree said. “If we felt guilty, we’d say we were on sabbatical and made this the most important thing in our lives.”
The research not only culminated in the final production, but also a paper Petree wrote at the end of fall quarter on the theory of their adaptation; another paper of Petree’s at the end of winter quarter on the twist ending Petree and Friedler conceptualized through the lens of feminist theory; and a lecture Friedler gave to the cast his and Petree’s research and adaptation.
Among the choices Friedler and Petree have taken in reinterpreting The Bacchae is emphasizing the queer undertones between Dionysus and Pentheus, king of Thebes and cousin of Dionysus.
“I think the relationship between Dionysus and Pentheus is really sexually charged, and a lot of adaptations of The Bacchae have overlooked this, or have allowed this to remain subtle,” Friedler said. “I believe that in the time this play was staged, the homoeroticism would have been obvious, and so approaching it from a 21st century lens, I thought it was worth highlighting.”
Another creative decision Friedler and Petree made was casting the Dionysian cult of women called Bacchae who, in the original The Bacchae, have little presence in the play.
“In the original play, Dionysus has liberated the Bacchae, but our actresses had their own ideas—they said they had their own function in this world,” Friedler said. “It was initially hard for me to let that be, but for me to impose my vision of how things should look and sound for the play would be to ruin my vision of liberation and autonomy.”
As a result, the women of the Bacchae begin at an entirely different setting from the rest of the play, only converging with the rest of the characters at the end of the play. Each night, audience members can follow the Bacchic cult as the actresses partake in structured improvisation that may change from night to night.
“At first, I didn’t feel like I could write anything for them and we originally thought we’d want their speech to be intertextual,” he said. “Ultimately, we decided that if we wanted to truly represent the idea of liberation, it would be to liberate them from all structure and allow them to create themselves and their own world within this world.”
It was only through seeing the rehearsal process this quarter that Friedler wrote in the twist ending of the adaptation, one which gives the women of the Bacchae agency and frees them from Dionysus.
Petree and Friedler also noted the similarities between the Bacchanalia celebration of Dionysus and modern-day raves, the role of Dionysus and the role of the DJ in “ruling” the scene.
The gods are still alive, even if we call them different things,” Friedler said. “We still have this inexplicable spirit—and we still honor it, even if we don’t have the vocabulary for it anymore.”
“Festival cultures look like religious rituals, which to me is one of the biggest messages of The Bacchae—the gods are still alive, even if we call them different things,” Friedler said. “We still have this inexplicable spirit—and we still honor it, even if we don’t have the vocabulary for it anymore.”
bacchae will officially meet at Cantor Museum on May 20 at 8 p.m., May 21 at 9 p.m. and on both May 22 and 23, double-headers at 7 p.m. and 9 p.m.
