In less than a week, I start my second quarter at Portland State University. I have registered for three classes: Development of Dramatic Art I (aka Theatre History), Dramatic Writing II, and Intro to Theater Research. The first two classes are on Tuesday and Thursdays, and the last class is only on Wednesday. So basically I have Mondays and Fridays off, and no class on Tues/Wed/Thurs is earlier than 2pm. That’s pretty awesome.

I thought I’d talk a bit about my theatre textbooks, because honestly I have little else to talk about on this, the inaugural Theatre Thursday. You’d think I’d have more, but no, you would be mistaken.

First off, let me just say this: I had to buy the MLA Handbook. I am really disappointed that I had to do this. Somewhere out there are a handful of people who think citing things is the Pinnacle of Their Lives. Those people become writers of the MLA Handbook. Those people debate about the importance of the oxford comma. Those people drink wine alone at home with their cats instead of going to a bar. There is nothing wrong with that, by the way. But their output is the MLA Handbook, which, as far as I’m concerned, should be the only book burned.

Here are some photos and accompanying early reviews of my other textbooks.

hardcover? hot damn!

I’ve taken theatre classes for a long time now, and this is the first time I’ve actually had a theatre textbook. Usually we use anthologies, books full of different plays that are printed chronologically. You examine the history of theatre through the plays themselves. But this is a textbook! Good lord! Luckily, it’s not very thick. But it has pictures and infographs and bold chapter fonts and all the fixings. It kind of freaks me out, to be honest. I mean, theatre history is just a specific type of history, so it makes sense to have it come in a history book. Still. It creeps me out. I haven’t read a proper textbook in ages. Who knows, it might be easier to read than a shitty play. I guess we’ll find out.

Since Development of Dramatic Art I deals with the early, early stuff, I have a couple of Greek and Roman play books. Here they are:

Greek comedy and tragedy, at least the stuff you read in college, is pretty good. I think they had the play festivals for a reason, and the plays that survived did so because they were better than most other things. I haven’t read any Roman plays because I was taught from the get go that they were worse than Greek plays, when they weren’t just stolen outright from Greek playwrights¹. The plays in this anthology include: two Aristophenes plays, Lysistrata (of course) and The Birds; Menander’s play The Grouch; two Plautus plays, The Menaechmi and Mostellaria; and Terence’s play The Self-Tormenter. I’ve only read Lysistrata, and that was a long time ago, so I guess this is a good book for me to own!

Aaaand here’s the other half. Tragedy. A bunch of sad people being sad. Boo hoo and the like. So what’s interesting about this book is what’s inside: We got Aeschylus’ The Orestia and Prometheus Bound; then Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex (called Oedipus the King here; stuuupid) and Antigone; then Euripides’ Medea and the Bacchae (called The Bakkai here; sttuuuuuupid). THEN we have Seneca, who just rewrote Oedipus Rex and Medea, apparently. Very interesting! It seems like comedy was something one could branch out with, but tragedy was kept to specific subjects. Also, I hope we don’t have to read Prometheus Bound, because it is so, so awful.

"genius" is a bit much, book.

The Genius of the Early English Theater! Here’s a book absolutely no one except a theatre major would own. Seriously, no one needs to read Abraham and Isaac or The Second Shepherd’s Play, unless you were studying the history of pageant plays. And Everyman, too. Ugh. Fortunately they plopped Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and Macbeth in there for good measure. I actually haven’t read Marlowe or Ben Jonson, or Milton for that matter, so that’ll be nice. Unfortunately I have to plod through the pageant plays and read some theatre historian’s old, moldy opinion on how great they are. Faaantastic. It’s like going to your grandmother’s house and listening to her talk about how wonderful phosphoric acid is. Yeah yeah, grandma, maybe back in the 1920s, but come on now.

And last but not least, we have the one book for my Intro to Theater Research class (besides the evil MLA Handbook):

Oh man! Essays on the Historiography of Performance?! SIGN ME UP!

This class is going to kill me, I can sense it. All I have to do is get through it. Ten weeks, just ten weeks …

In reality, I enjoy having deadlines for reading plays, mostly because I won’t read them on my own, because, you know, Skyrim. Even though Greek plays can be pretty long and boring, the comedies are genuinely funny, and the tragedies have a lot going for them, though they do tend to ramble on a bit too long. I think maybe our perceptions of tragedy have changed in 2,500 years, which is interesting, because comedy has pretty much stayed the same. That’s why you see Lysistrata being performed all the time, because it’s funny, and because it highlights gender inequality in a funny way.

Lysistrata’s a pretty fascinating piece on its own, really. People in modern times like to use it as some sort of proto-feminist play, where women “get back” at the men, but really, most Greek plays written by men were about the contemplation of women, whom they, for the most part, considered very powerful and were even a little frightened of. A lot of Greek plays involve strong, powerful women (Medea) and relatively stupid or naive men (Oedipus, Jason). I think women had a place in the home back then that we just don’t recognize today. We see it as male suppression. But a lot of it was just safety; places back then were a lot more dangerous than they are today.

Either way, I don’t want to suggest that the world wasn’t patriarchal back then, but more that it was a different form of patriarchy than we see today. Just like tragedy was different back then, or religion, or the concept of tyrannical rule. Doesn’t excuse everything, but it’s important to see things from all sides, rather than just putting our modern bias on the past.

Well, that was quite the digression. Fortunately, I have lots of time to read plays, write essays, and hopefully write more blog posts, perhaps on the subject of women in ancient times, which I know relatively little about because all of the history written back then was written by men. I guess that says more about the world back then than anything I say now.