A theater critic's letter to his students, past, present and future

Yes, I know you’re sitting at home, away from rehearsal, isolated from your collaborators and far removed from a live audience. You may worry that your skills are getting rusty, that your technique is losing the suppleness it may have only recently acquired.Let me tell you a story that some of you already know because we lived it together.

The theater of 5th century BC Athens was a forum for the collision of ideas, a place for the deepest issues of the day to be thrashed out in public. Against a backdrop of forces greater and more mysterious than any human being can comprehend, protagonists in ancient Greek drama are forced to make irrevocable choices, which reveal not only character but moral and existential truths.

I have a confession to make. I was not a theater kid. After hamming it up as the star of a fifth-grade play, I never acted again on stage. The idea of majoring in theater in college never even crossed my mind, not that my parents would have permitted it. I recall a few Broadway outings as a kid, but my love of theater developed in secret, through reading.

Fast-forward to my time as an assistant professor of drama at Brooklyn College in that week when classes finally reconvened after 9/11. “The Oresteia” was on the syllabus, and glimpsing the hand of fate, I proposed that we proceed as planned. I could think of nothing better than devoting the next few weeks to studying Aeschylus’ trilogy, which thrillingly dramatizes the nearly impossible demands that justice places on us as citizens.

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