"Thesmophoriazusae; or, What Women Want," is a satirical play based on an ancient Greek comedy of the same name.
“Aristophanes wrote this play in around 411 BCE," said Amanda Dawson, "and him and some other contemporary playwrights of the time sort of would poke fun at each other's work.”
Dawson is an associate professor in the Utah State University Department of Theatre Arts. She adapted the play with fellow professor Richie Call, who was also the director.
Dawson said that the original play revolved around a group of women who held Euripides, a contemporary playwright of Aristophanes, to account for his negative portrayals of female characters.
“The women say to him, you know, you've written us as these crazy characters, as Medea who kills her own children, as Phaedra who falls in love with her stepson, Elektra who is seeking revenge for all the things," Dawson explained. "So the women are like, 'You need to write us the way that we should be written.'”
When a group of women hold his cousin hostage, they make Euripides promise not to offend women going forward.
So, was this originally written as a feminist play? Hardly. Aristophanes lampoons Euripides and uses women to do so. But they are themselves the butt of his jokes.
The plot of Dawson’s adaptation is similar to the original, but in this retelling, the women compel Euripides to write female characters with range and complexity. By breaking the fourth wall and incorporating some clever meta elements, Dawson also points out the relevance of the play’s theme to contemporary society.
“We wanted to empower the women more by giving them agency to say this is who we are in the world,” she said.
As to the adaptation’s feminist agenda, there’s no doubt it could have gone farther. At the end of this version, Euripides only receives a slap on the wrist, as in the original.
The question the audience must reckon with is: Did it go far enough? Dawson herself had to wrestle with that one.
“When we were first talking about the adaptation," Dawson recalled, "I really wanted him to have some comeuppance. I wanted him to get it in the end, and I was trying to figure out for myself, is that something that Amanda wants, or is that something that serves the play well?”
Es Barnes performed the leading role of Micca, the most outspoken of the women holding Euripides on trial. At one point, Micca delivers a speech to her fellow women about the lies and rumors perpetuated by Euripides:
“'Tis not from any feeling of ambition I rise to address you, ladies, but because I long have seen and inly burned to see the way Euripides insults us all. There is he, calling us double dealers, false, faithless, tippling, mischief-making gossips, a rotten scent, a misery to men! Well, what's the consequence?”
Barnes said that while this adaptation confronts the misogyny from the original, women are still primarily a vehicle for commentary about men.
“Whether we like it or not," Barnes said, "the main character is not Micca. The main character is not the chorus of women.”
Even the adaptation’s most powerful moment, when women of the chorus demand authentic portrayal from Euripides, evokes mixed feelings for Barnes.
“My favorite line in the show probably is, ‘Write more than one woman in a scene, have them talk to each other, and have them talk about something other than a man,’" Barnes said. "I think that's relevant and important today, and ironic because there isn't a scene in this play that does not talk about a man or have a man in it.”
If that line sounds familiar to you, it may because it evokes the famous Bechdel test, used to measure female representation in works of fiction. Two named female characters, the test says, must talk to each other about something other than a man.
Even the adaptation fails to meet that standard, but what’s more, Barnes said, is that this seems to be symptomatic of a larger theme within the theater department.
“I'm an acting student," Barnes said. "I'm in my fourth year. I don't believe I have done a scene in three and a half years of professional acting training that has not been about a man or with a man.”
The imbalance, she said, is obvious.
“I assure you, because it happened this semester, that my male cohort members have done a scene with a man about a man that has nothing to do with women. That is the way that it is, and the way that some plays are just written, but it's also ridiculous and hard and frustrating and disappointing.”
Barnes said that she doesn’t hold it against anyone in particular, but that it’s hard not to feel discouraged by familiar structural patterns.
“I think Richie is a very capable director," she said, "and I think that he led the show well, but he's also a man. And who's to say that a woman wouldn't have done it just as well, if not better, and had the perspective that Richie cannot bring to it because he is a man.”
The original version of this play reinforces ugly stereotypes about women. It teaches the lesson that women cannot be trusted. The adaptation, on the other hand, teaches that women are profound individuals with agency who cannot be reduced to simple terms.
But there is a question this version fails to resolve in its performance and production: What will women have to do for that truth to be acknowledged by anyone but themselves?
View the full production credits for the show.
