The Gods of Comedy: Author’s Note
The Gods of Comedy is dear to my heart for a number of reasons.
As a student, I was insufferably academic. I was drawn to literature, music and art the way a bee is drawn to honey, and no matter what other disciplines I explored, the attraction to the arts was undeniable. It was part of my DNA. From age 8 onwards, I read everything I could lay my hands on; I studied music incessantly (I became, and remain, an enormous fan of Italian bel canto opera); I tried sculpture until I realized I wasn’t very good at it; I read thousands of plays (knowing from an early age that I wanted to go into the theater); and by age 15, Homer’s The Odyssey was my favorite book.
What could better ignite a young scholar’s love of literature than the works of Homer? The literary critic Northrop Frye says that all scholars are either Iliad critics or Odyssey critics, depending on their predisposition to tragedy or comedy. I was always drawn more to The Odyssey thanks to an inborn love of comedy that I still can’t explain.
Looking back, it would have been grand to have been a Classics major in college and learned to read ancient Greek so that I would now have a shot at reading The Odyssey in the original. As it worked out, I double-majored in English Literature and Music Theory; but in my Junior year I took a course in Greek Literature in Translation from the great Classics scholar Richmond Lattimore. At that time, Lattimore’s translations of Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides were the standard texts for ancient Greek literature in the English-speaking world.
(Once, as a Junior, I had the temerity of inviting Lattimore to a play I’d written for Class Nite – the night of bacchanalian revelry where each class wrote and produced a play lampooning the faculty. Mine involved a Mexican village, a whorehouse and a church, and by the end of the evening, the shy and self-effacing Professor Lattimore was rolling his eyes and looking at me as though I was insane.)
Fast forward 25 years, and I was sitting in my study thinking about what to write next, when I turned and picked up the wonderful new translation of The Odyssey by Emily Wilson. First I read the terrific Introduction and Translator’s Note. Then I continued to the text itself, and within 100 lines, I was reading this:
With that, [Athena] tied her sandals on her feet,
The marvelous golden sandals that she wears
To travel sea and land, as fast as wind.
She took the heavy bronze-tipped spear she uses
to tame the ranks of the warriors with whom
she is enraged. Then from the mountain down
she sped to Ithaca, and stopped outside
Odysseus’ court, bronze spear in hand.
She looked like Mentes now, the Taphian leader,
a guest-friend.
Within a few more lines, Athena, in her disguise as Mentes, meets Telemachus, Odysseus’ son, and Telemachus says
“Good evening,
stranger, and welcome. Be our guest, come and share
our dinner, and then tell us what you need.”
And suddenly it struck me that here, in the ways of the Greek gods, was the kernel of a stage comedy.
To the ancients Greeks (at least as represented in their literature), the gods were always among us. The gods were not ghosts, visiting us from the past. And they didn’t live in the skies or in some ethereal or psychological world that we couldn’t see and feel. Greek gods were a bit like the heroes in the Marvel Universe. They lived nearby in different neighborhoods, and they joined us in our adventures at their will.
In the case of the gods of ancient Greece, they lived in a specific place: on Mount Olympus, which is a real geographical location on mainland Greece near Thessalonica. They kept an eye on our comings and goings; and whenever they felt the need or the desire, they stepped down off their mountain and mingled among us. We see this behavior in the early lines of The Odyssey that I just quoted, where Athena disguises herself as Mentes and joins Telemachus at his home in Ithaca. And we see it again and again throughout the two Homeric epics, then in Catullus and a myriad of other Greek sources.
So what struck me that day was the idea of writing a comedy set in the present where the gods of Olympus come down from their mountain to help a mortal who is in trouble. In the end, I named her Daphne and decided that she was having trouble with her career and her heart at the same time.
As the plot thickened, she became a Classics scholar who had just returned from a summer in Greece. And, being a Classics scholar, she calls on the gods of ancient Greece to help her in her troubled state, and lo and behold, they walk in the door. The trouble is that the two particular gods who come to help her are Dionysus and Thalia, the gods of Comedy. And being the gods of Comedy, as opposed to the gods of Wisdom or Tragedy, every time they try to help her, they manage to make matters worse. They just keep tripping over themselves despite their good intentions.
What struck me then and continues to nag at me whenever I think about the history of comedy (which is most of my waking hours, I’m ashamed to say) is why aren’t more plays written about gods and other supernatural beings? What better place could there be than the theater to represent the extra-normal? Think of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where Shakespeare creates an entire fairy kingdom, and where Oberon, the King of the Fairies has merely to say “I am invisible,” and he becomes invisible right in front of us. Then, just two lines later, when other characters walk onstage and don’t see him, he creates theater magic by being there (to the audience) and not being there (to the other players onstage) at the same time. Only in the theater could this stroke of genius be so effective.
I was also attracted by the idea of writing a play set in the modern world of Classical Literature as a kind of farce, because that’s how comedy, at least in Western Literature, got its start. The first comic playwright in Western history was a Greek named Aristophanes, but his comic political surrealism never really caught on after his death in 386 BC. Two hundred years later came the first truly great comic playwright, Titus Maccius Plautus, a Roman who wrote in Latin, who more or less created dramatic comedy as we know it.
When we read Plautus, and certainly when we see him in production, we realize that his plays, though highly sophisticated, aren’t primarily psychological studies of dramatic types, or implied comedies with roots in tragedy whose inheritor is Chekhov. Primarily, they’re farces, filled with mistaken identity, old men longing for young women, young sons wanting to escape their parents, knockabout drubbings, verbal complications, pirates, courtesans and lots of sex. It is no coincidence that early in his career, Shakespeare adapted one of Plautus’s comedies, Menaechmi, and called it The Comedy of Errors.
This is all to say that in developing the idea of having two Greek gods come down to visit a modern-day mortal, it seemed entirely appropriate to set this comedy in the Classics Department of a liberal arts college where other-worldly hijinks felt especially natural.
I only hope that this play is a small but worthy addition to the tradition of stage comedies with other-worldly concerns like Amphitryon, Blithe Spirit, and Visit to a Small Planet, where visits from gods, ghosts and extraterrestrials adds to the likelihood of onstage joy.