Austin in ’69
It would take a city like Austin to consider remounting a work that evoked Greek tragedy in New York in 1969. It would take a group like the Rude Mechanicals to set out and do a performance the way that the Performance Group presented it back then. Of course, when it happens here, it’s absolutely celebrated, and it has nothing to do with the weird factor in Austin, but is related to the excellent talents of its local artists.
The Bacchae is a difficult work on its own, and Euripides’ version of it is not one of the most popular Greek classics, but when it’s done right, it’s pretty extraordinary. To do it right, it almost always necessitates a retelling, in order to help place the play in a context that an audience can enter into. Otherwise, it’s watching a version of a lost ritual, and it’s sometimes interesting, but in a very academic way. But the Greeks had a need to make the audience feel something deeply, and to move them in ways that they would never forget. The purpose of these plays, after all, was more in line with ritual than with entertainment, and the audience should expect to be transported.
The ideas were appealing then, and it’s easy to see why they were appealing in 1969, but to stage them today, in Austin, it’s not easy, and it forces the audience to ask questions as they are going through the rite. Fortunately, for those who are already ritually inclined, this doesn’t take anyone out of the space, and in fact helps to enter it more deeply. And visitors from out of town had the chance to be transported from the idea of their Austin luxury hotels into another space, one that looked like a theatre, but was in fact, quite out of time.
Ecstasy means to be outside of oneself, and it is the Greeks who gave the language the word, and also the idea. The Rude Mechanicals have undertook the task of making this visible, and like everything they do, it made for an amazing evening in a history of the same.
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