Dire God of Joy

By T.E. Kalem

THE BACCHAE by Euripides

The Greeks placed man in a precarious magnetic field between what is aspiring, rational, noble and demigodlike in his nature and raw, tameless instinctual drives that would shame the beasts. That is the thematic core of The Bacchae. But the dramatic spring, common to ancient tragedy, is a test of implacable wills. A man pits himself against a god, a no-win situation. Man's hubris is crushingly rebuked by the divine imponderable, necessity. The tension is not in the contest but in the axiomatic revelation uttered by the chorus of the bacchantes: "Knowledge is not wisdom."

While that hardbought insight illuminates the current production at Manhattan's Circle in the Square Theater, the clash of wills between King Pentheus of Thebes and the god Dionysus is somewhat muffled, despite Michael Cacoyannis' incisive direction and his crisply idiomatic translation. John Noah Hertzler's Pentheus is less a king than a kinglet, a petty tyro tyrant, and Christopher Rich's Dionysus is no god but a godlet, a prancing posturer devoid of awe, might and mystery.

The self-righteous Pentheus denies that Dionysus is the son of Zeus and vows to wipe out his followers in Thebes. Dionysus appears incognito, and a chorus of Asian-women converts hymn the beatific peace of serving the god of joy. Pentheus claps Dionysus in irons. The god miraculously escapes. Despite the politic advice of his sage grandfather Cadmus (Philip Bosco), the blind seer Tiresias (Tom Klunis) and Dionysus' chillingly prophetic warnings, Pentheus speeds to his appointed doom.

Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad. Spying in women's garb at the forest rites of the maenads, Pentheus is beheaded by his own mother Agave (Irene Papas), who, crazed by Dionysus, takes her son for a lion.

As she bursts into view with her grisly trophy, Papas ignites the stage with Greek fire. She moves from dementia to horrified sanity to rending grief with 'hypnotic intensity. Let who will divide her best moments from her finest. Papas is priestess of another god--Euripides. --By T. E. Kalem

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