Ancient Sun, Modern Light is a curious record of recent attempts by a number of theater companies to update, in performance, Greek drama. Marianne McDonald, of the Department of Theater at the University of California, San Diego, begins her book with a report on Japanese dramaturge Suzuki Tadashi’s triple bill of The Trojan Women, Clytemnestra, and The Bacchae as performed at the Los Angeles Olympics Art Festival in 1984. With a Kabuki flavor, The Trojan Women paralleled Troy as Greece’s victim with Japan “as America’s victim. The degradation of Japan by America during [!] and following World War II . . . insidious imposition of American culture . . . banal popular song . . . vulgarity and bland technological homogeneity . . . the destruction of art and taste.” In the Noh-flavored Clytemnestra (the text was a Suzuki pastiche), “Clytemnestra stabs her children as they are locked in an incestuous embrace.” This showed “the position of women in modern Japan.” In the Bacchae Dionysus dismembered Pentheus “just as the Japanese cartels are dismembering American industry.” “The Japanese,” we are to gather, “make an attempt to understand the ‘other,’” whilst the West does not bother to reciprocate.
Next, Peter Sellars staged Robert Auletta’s version of Sophocles’ Ajaxat La Jolla in 1986. It was set at the Pentagon. Ajax was a Sioux, who had earlier raped Athena—at once “sexist and racist (Athena is played by a black woman).” Ajax’s wife, Tecmessa, was a Latin woman, from a leftist