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TheaterNovember 2007 Faded virtues by Brooke Allen On Iphegenia 2.0 at the Signature Theater, The Misanthrope at New York Theater Workshop, The Dining Room at the Keen Company, Dividing the Estate at Primary Stages, and The Seagull at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. What makes a classic? Everyone has his or her own ideas on the subject, but two obvious criteria are universality and timelessness. When a work created two hundred or even two thousand years ago still seems applicable to our own lives then it surely merits classic status. In literature, archaisms of language and custom too often distance the uninitiated reader from the work, obscuring the very universality that has preserved it for so long; in the theater, not only language but costume and accent can have this alienating effect. How do directors, writers, and translators deal with the challenge? The stories of the brutal Bronze Age warlord Agamemnon have proved peculiarly inspiring: from Aeschylus to Euripides, from Nietzsche to the young men who gave their lives at Gallipoli during the First World War, each generation reinvents and reinterprets the Homeric tales in light of its own situation. Our own is no exception, ... This article is available to subscribers and for individual purchaseSubscribe to TNC (Print and Online editions) Subscribe to TNC (Online only) This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 26 November 2007, on page 51 Copyright © 2008 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/faded-virtues-3682
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Already a print subscriber? click for online access by Brooke Allen On Jerry Springer: The Opera at Carnegie Hall, The Lifeblood at the Phoenix Theatre Ensemble, New Jerusalem at the Classic Stage Company, and Two Thousand Years at the New Group. by Brooke Allen On the revival of Mark Twain's Is He Dead?, the Steppenwolf production of August: Osage County, and the return to Broadway of Harold Pinter's The Homecoming forty years after its debut. by Brooke Allen On Rock 'n' Roll at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre, The Farnsworth Invention at the Music Box Theatre, Pumpgirl at the Manhattan Theatre Club, and Speech & Debate at the Roundabout Theater. by Brooke Allen On Gypsy at the St James Theatre, Boeing-Boeing at the Longacre Theater, and The New Century at Lincoln Center. by Brooke Allen On In the Heights at the Richard Rodgers Theatre, Almost an Evening at the Theatres at 45 Bleecker Street, Parlour Song at the Atlantic Theater, and The Four of Us at Manhattan Theatre Club. by Brooke Allen On Conversations in Tusculum at the Public Theater, The Cherry Orchard Sequel at LaMaMa ETC., Gray Area at the Barrow Group, and Next to Normal at the Second Stage Theater. New from The New Criterion: ‘Free speech in 
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