Sex and War on the American Stage

Lysistrata in performance 1930-2012

Emily Klein

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135087722
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Drama
• Index: Literature

American adaptations of Aristophanes' enduring comedy Lysistrata have used laughter to critique sex, war, and feminism for nearly a century. Unlike almost any other play circulating in contemporary theatres, Lysistrata has outlived its classical origins in 411 BCE and continues to shock and delight audiences to this day. The play's "make love not war" message and bawdy humor render it endlessly appealing to college campuses, activist groups, and community theatres – so much so that none of Aristophanes' plays are performed in the West as frequently as Lysistrata.

Starting with the play's first mainstream production in the U.S. in 1930, Emily B. Klein explores the varied iterations of Lysistrata that have graced the American stage, page, and screen since the Great Depression. These include the Federal Theatre's 1936 Negro Repertory production, the 1955 movie musical The Second Greatest Sex and Spiderwoman Theater's openly political Lysistrata Numbah!, as well as Douglas Carter Beane's Broadway musical, Lysistrata Jones, and the international Lysistrata Project protests, which updated the classic in the contemporary context of the Iraq War.

Although Aristophanes' oeuvre has been the subject of much classical scholarship, Lysistrata has received little attention from feminist theatre scholars or performance theorists. In response, this book maps current debates over Lysistrata's dubious feminist underpinnings and uses performance theory, cultural studies, and gender studies to investigate how new adaptations reveal the socio-political climates of their origins.

Emily B. Klein is Assistant Professor of English and Drama at Saint Mary's College of California. Her work has appeared in Women and Performance and Frontiers as well as Political and Protest Theater After 9/11: Patriotic Dissent (Routledge, 2012).

1 Sophisticated or seditious?

Broadway, Gilbert Seldes, and Pablo Picasso (1930)

[T]he theatre itself is much less high-minded than those who keep a watchful eye on its purity; the stage has always cheerfully swiped whatever good stories were going.

Philip Pullman

The embattled story of Gilbert Seldes’ relationship with Lysistrata includes many different rivals and many isolated conflicts. Sometimes serious and sometimes ridiculous, the challenges that befell the show frequently made newspaper headlines in the early 1930s. In order to bring his adaptation to life on the stage Seldes endured multiple slashes to his script and the arrest of his entire cast. Actors and dancers were frequently injured in production. The show’s primary financial backer died unexpectedly two weeks before opening night. Even Aristophanes, himself, was named as a person of interest in a Los Angeles police warrant issued against Seldes’ nationally touring show. As the target of vice squads across the country, Seldes’ adaptation of Aristophanes’ comedy was constantly under siege. Yet, Seldes’ persistence rendered him one of the key players responsible for popularizing Aristophanes’ bawdy comedy in the US. In spite of the play’s explicit sexual humor, Seldes’ 1930 adaptation—the first English version to reach Broadway—won over critics and censors alike. His reputation for artistic discernment helped him ease a raunchy war-themed sex farce into the public imaginary. Moreover, by preserving the play’s carnal humor, Seldes’ adaptation pushed audiences to consider the corporeal connections between sexual love and war and their complex relationship to the power of words in this text.

Though politically and sexually tame compared to some twenty-first century versions, Seldes’ Lysistrata takes up questions of whose voices are privileged in the shaping of war histories and how notions of women’s citizenship are reconfigured according to shifting wartime gender roles. The female anti-war protagonist in Seldes’ Lysistrata, for example, is depicted as “not a real woman,” but a dangerous “intellectual” and “a woman who’s been disappointed in love and is trying to get even with the men” (91–2). While Seldes aimed to reimagine Aristophanes’ comedy in ways that would speak to Depression-era audiences, the adaptation tends to deal more with lingering social questions from the previous decade than with the much newer economic anxieties of 1930. As one reviewer put it, “the bawdy nonsense of the play tickled the public funny bone because [&] it was of the end of a prohibition era which baited sex as a lure for legit entertainment” (Billboard). The roar of the 1920s is most audible in the moments when Seldes’ characters wrestle with women’s changing roles in the public sphere and the effects of a distant war on domestic life. Seldes’ adaptation also grapples with one of the central tensions of Aristophanes’ text: how comedy (and blue humor, in particular) both reveals and obscures some of the most somatic, physical, and violent atrocities of war.

Seldes’ provocative Broadway production opened in June 1930. After initial censorship concerns were allayed by the placement of police officers assigned to “listening posts” in the auditorium, the show ran successfully for seven months in New York’s Forty-Fourth Street Theatre. Evidently, the play’s lewd nature was enough to attract the interest of authorities, but as theatre historian Ethan Mordden suggests, the notional sophistication of classical Greek theatre outweighed its potential for indecency. “Sophisticated wasn’t seditious—it was naughty. Lysistrata seduced—better, neutralized—suspicious cops. Entranced by the opportunity to Get One’s Culture In while enjoying a burlesque show, the public kept Lysistrata running” (129). In 1934 when Seldes published his successful adaptation alongside illustrations by his longtime friend, Pablo Picasso, this same friction re-emerged. Potential buyers of one edition were reassured that Picasso’s sketches exemplified the best of modernist representation and that only the uncultivated eye would find them “rotten” or “infantile” (Sandglass). While Seldes’ script reveals nuanced Depression-era anxieties about women’s changing roles and the costs of war, the unmitigated sexuality of Picasso’s simple line drawings offer a provocative visual backdrop against which Seldes’ rich text performs. Ultimately, the publication, like the play itself, stirred up questions about the middle space between elite and illicit cultural forms. It forced readers to reconcile their highbrow taste for classical theatre with the unadulterated persistence of Picasso’s erotic bodies on the page.

It is this tension between the high and low that structures Seldes’ relationship to Aristophanes’ text. The dire seriousness of war and the frivolities of sex are the carnal polarities that undergird the play’s plot, and onto these poles we can map some of the contradictions that made Seldes such an interesting textual interpreter. “I took good care that I injected nothing into the play,” he wrote, “because an old dead man named Aristophanes had put into that play more than enough for one play to carry. He said something of vital importance about a war and something interesting about sex. He had chosen the two subjects on which nearly all the world is either too prejudiced or too sentimental to think clearly, and he had thought clearly” (Kammen 168). Seldes’ yearning for the democratization of culture combined with his deep entrenchment in the bourgeois art world made him a paradoxical public figure. His desire to make popular art for the common man operated in complex relation to his calls for a more socially conscious theatre.

Gilbert Seldes: “A citizen first and a critic second”

Though Seldes’ name might not ring a bell with twenty-first century literati and culture vultures, 80 years ago he was one of the emblematic figures of the New York high-culture scene. As editor and drama reviewer of The Dial, accomplished cultural critic, journalist, radio and TV producer, playwright, documentarian and academic, Seldes was a prolific writer and an influential culture-maker. Because of his elite theatrical and literary connections, he was able to recruit a sophisticated entourage of supporters for his staging of Lysistrata. Yet, what is perhaps even more compelling about Seldes’ efforts is the fact that he quite openly rejected notions of the American theatre as a classed or culturally marked space at a time when many theatres were closing. He wrote in 1932, “Looking backward over the last few years and forward to some of the promised productions, I think I can see a reason why the stage has had to fight so hard to hold on. It is getting a little too special [ … ] what people are interested in is people” (Kammen 162). In the midst of the Depression, theatres had a hard time competing with the affordability and popularity of cinema, but Seldes sought to draw mainstream crowds back to the playhouse. He was a champion of cultural democracy and his affection for popular culture led him to regard “highbrow” as a term of derision. Although he worked in almost every imaginable realm of media and entertainment his attraction to the theatre stemmed from his belief that the dramatic arts need not be relegated to the somber and snobbish world of the “major arts.” “It is, naturally, as a counterattack on solemnity that I am going to found my theatre,” he proclaimed (Seldes, Lively 173). And with Lysistrata he did just that.

Seldes was born in Alliance, New Jersey in 1893 and came of age during a moment in which traditional American forms of cultural authority were in decline. A child of secular Jewish parents whose deep commitments to individualism and philosophical radicalism led them to take up residence in a rural utopian colony, young Gilbert was well versed in the language and literature of political and social critique. Though his upbringing on the farm commune was certainly unorthodox, mainstream culture in the early twentieth century was becoming, in some small ways, more ideologically aligned with the colony’s reformist beliefs. During Seldes’ childhood “progressives had measured social improvement and reform in moralistic terms,” but starting in the 1920s popular conceptions of the public good were more frequently grounded in matters of cultural access and equity (Kammen 4). With more women enjoying employment outside of the domestic sphere and more young people pursuing new educational and cultural opportunities after the end of World War I, American patterns of artistic and cultural consumption were in transition. Postwar technological developments also contributed to demographic shifts as immigrants and native-born Americans alike relocated to urban areas in search of work and opportunity. Geographic trends like the Great Migration in which African Americans from the rural South moved to northern cities like Chicago and New York helped to fuel new artistic movements such as the Harlem Renaissance. For Seldes and other cultural critics all these changes meant that a more diversified, enriched, and democratic cultural climate was becoming palpable. Seldes considered “the lively arts” or the mass media art forms at the heart of popular culture to be one of the most significant products of these social developments. He enthused about these changes in 1924:

Our life is energetic, varied, constantly changing, [in] our lively arts [ … ] the energy of America does break out and finds artistic expression for itself. Here a wholly unrealistic, imaginative presentation of the way we think and feel is accomplished. No single artist has yet been great enough to do the whole thing—but together the minor artists of America have created the American art.

Seldes, Lively 356

Despite his radical upbringing and his Harvard education, he was passionate about popular arts and culture and their far-reaching social power. “They create the climate of feeling in which all of us live,” he insisted (Seldes, Audience 4).

The minor post-millennial resurgence of interest in Seldes’ life and career, thanks mainly to the extensive biographical research of historian Michael Kammen, is grounded in the idea that Seldes has been robbed of his due credit as one of the foundational thinkers in the field of Cultural Studies. From the early 1920s to the end of the 1960s Seldes was not only an avid cultural producer, but also a high-profile public intellectual with a constant output of article and book length critiques. He earned the noteworthy distinction of being the first American dramatist to attempt his own adaptation of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata on Broadway, but he also made countless other contributions to mid-century life that have been strangely overlooked in the historical mapping of interdisciplinary fields like Media Studies and Cultural Studies.

To be sure, his friendships with the likes of Edmund Wilson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Pablo Picasso, and his vexed professional dealings with Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and Ernest Hemingway, arguably make him inextricable from any accurate cultural portrait of the first half of the American twentieth century. Yet, his long list of remarkable professional “firsts” makes these relationships seem almost paltry and incidental. He was both the first director of television for CBS and the first dean for the Annenberg School of Communications. In the midst of his work in these professional roles, he also served as a frequent columnist for the Saturday Evening Post, Esquire, and Vanity Fair and managed to pen more than a half dozen books including The 7 Lively Arts (1924), Your Money and Your Life: A Manual for the Middle Classes (1938), The Great Audience (1950), The Public Arts (1956), and The New Mass Media (1957). With such an expansive list of professional accomplishments in the worlds of mass communication and the arts, it is interesting to imagine how Seldes’ early years in the theatre may have contributed to his later successes.

Seldes’ first Broadway production was The Wisecrackers (1925), which concerned the professional and marital lives of bourgeois New York couples. In keeping with its subtitle, “A comedy about brittle people,” the show was understood by some to be a satire based on the members of the Algonquin round table’s “vicious circle.” With parodies of cultural figures like Dorothy Parker and George S. Kaufman as well as New York Times drama critic Alexander Woollcott and New Yorker editor, Harold Ross, the show spoke to a narrow audience of in-the-know Manhattanites and barely lasted through a two-week run. Times reviewer Brooks Atkinson called the play’s “assault on the citadel of waggery” a form of “lugubrious entertainment” (Bordman 278).

Although The Wisecrackers fell flat at the box office, its December debut on Broadway occurred during the same week as the Russian language Lysistrata’s performances by the Moscow Art Theatre’s Musical Studio. The fact that the two runs coincided may have been an important call to action for Seldes. While the Soviet production received accolades (in spite of complaints about the language barrier) Seldes’ show was a flop. Perhaps it was this failure that led him to attempt his own English adaptation of Aristophanes’ comedy on Broadway five years later. Ultimately, his version was so well received that its extended run and national tours helped it become the most financially profitable venture of Seldes’ life.

Seldes’ Lysistrata: “Unblushing and unrefined”

Seldes’ Lysistrata got its start when Horace Howard Furnace Jr., a distinguished Shakespeare scholar, and other socially prominent members of the Philadelphia Theatre Association (PTA) board decided to host Seldes’ play as the organization’s inaugural full-length production. Their mission (largely formulated and funded by Furnace, himself) was to present historically significant dramas from antiquity to the contemporary period. Seldes’ ver...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction – Power play: History, theory, and adaptation
• 1 Sophisticated or seditious? Broadway, Gilbert Seldes, and Pablo Picasso (1930)
• 2 Raced bodies/erased bodies: The Federal Theatre Project's Negro Repertory Lysistrata (1936)
• 3 Cold War cowboys at home on the range: The Second Greatest Sex (1955)
• 4 Spinning yarns: Spiderwoman Theater's Lysistrata Numbah! (1977)
• 5 Staging strikes and trafficking in trauma: The Lysistrata Project (2003)
• 6 Opting out and giving (it) up: The Uncoupling and Lysistrata Jones (2011–12)
• Bibliography
• Index