compilations

The Greek Plays

Pieces include:

  • The Persians (Aeschylus)

  • Iphigenia and Other Daughters (from Euripides and Sophocles)

  • The Trojan Women (Euripides)

  • Helen (Euripides)

  • Lysistrata (Aristophanes)

The Greek Plays 2

Pieces include:

  • Ajax in Iraq (from Sophocles)

  • Kissing the Floor (Sophocles)

  • Penelope (Homer)

  • Mercury's Footpath (Euripides)

  • The Oresteia (based on Aeschylus' trilogy Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and The Eumenides)

Plays

A Narrow Bed

Loved by audiences and critics nationwide, this compassionate and reflective play about two women coping with loneliness and loss was also successfully presented Off Broadway. The women are the last members of a rural commune founded in the 60's. One's husband was killed in Vietnam and she still clings to his memory. The other's wisecracking husband is hospitalized and dying. Both women find the courage to accept their "narrow bed" and get on with their lives.

Ajax in Iraq

Past and present collide in Ellen McLaughlin's mash-up of Sophocles' classic tragedy Ajax with the modern-day war in Iraq. The play follows the parallel narratives of Ajax, an ancient Greek military hero, and A.J., a modern female American soldier, both undone by the betrayal of a commanding officer. Athena, goddess of war, coolly presides over the whole. Inspired by material collected from interviews with Iraq war veterans and their families, Ajax in Iraq explores the timeless struggle soldiers face in trying to make sense of war.

Helen

In this fresh take on Euripides' tragicomedy, Helen never went to Troy but spent the war fought in her name in an Egyptian hotel room waiting for her husband Menelaus to come find her and take her home. In her odd exile, Helen receives visits from Io, a mythical figure who was once turned into a cow, and the goddess Athena, who informs her of the devastation that Helen's empty image has wrought upon the world. Bewildered by her strange escape from her own story, even Menelaus' final arrival cannot save Helen from the legend that has grown far larger than the woman who inspired it.

Iphigenia and Other Daughters

This three-play cycle is a modern retelling of the fall of the House of Atreus. It follows the children of Clytemnestra and Agamemnon, siblings who are both players in the family tragedy and victims of it. The cycle of blood and vengeance seems inescapable until the final reunion of a lost sister and brother brings the bloody family saga to its mystical and unlikely end.

Lysistrata

This fresh, fast-paced comedy, inspired by the Aristophanes play, follows Lysistrata, an Athenian housewife, who calls for the women of Greece to help end the Peloponnesian War. She proposes a radical plan: all Greek women must refuse to engage in love making until the men see reason, lay down their arms and come home to lay down with their wives in peace. The women agree to make the sacrifice and all hell breaks loose as men wander the country in an agony of unsatisfied lust. Will Lysistrata and her crew accomplish what the politicians could not?

Oedipus

A plague grips the city of Thebes. Desperate to save his people, King Oedipus sends a messenger to the oracle at Delphi and discovers that the city's salvation lies in finding and punishing the murderer of the former king, Laius, who was brutally slain by a stranger at a crossroads years ago. When Oedipus orders a manhunt, he unknowingly sets the wheels of his own destruction in motion. This lean, contemporary version brings a new, poignant power to this primal work that is the cornerstone of Western drama.

The Persians

In this moving and poetic adaptation of Aeschylus' drama, Queen Atossa and her subjects anxiously await news of their King Xerxes' expedition to Greece. What they hear is inconceivably horrifying: the vast Persian Empire has fallen, with an entire army lost. Now the scant survivors of a catastrophic campaign, including Xerxes himself, must find a way to continue to live in the shattered world they once called home.

The Trojan Women

In the wake of their devastating defeat, the women of Troy, all now widows, wait on the beach below the ravaged city to be claimed by their Greek conquerors as slaves and concubines. Though the war is over, exile and degradation lie ahead and the fates of these women, including Queen Hecuba, her daughter Cassandra, the doomed, mad prophetess, and her daughter-in-law Andromache, widow of the great Hector, are still in the balance.

Tongue of a Bird

Maxine, a search and rescue pilot, returns in midwinter to her childhood home in the Adirondacks. There she conducts a search for a girl who, while on a field trip in the mountains, was abducted by a stranger in a black pick up truck.