LYSISTRATA: Beyond Sex

DOCUMENTARY and STAGING

MacMillan Films Follow-up to Award Winning Film

We are producing a follow up to the award-winning PBS documentary WISDOM FOR LIFE: A Guided Tour of Western Philosophy, themed this time, around the ideas in Aristophanes’ masterpiece, LYSISTRATA.  In addition to the one-hour documentary, we have staged a live performance of a new adaptation of the play.

LYSISTRATA -- an absurdist comedy about the war-weary women of Athens who band together in a sex strike to end the Peloponnesian war – is the first time the West hit upon many new ideas.

One idea – the “crazy” notion that woman can participate in political life -- was to be picked up by Plato and would reverberate in the West from that time onwards. It is an idea that only today holds the promise of delivering sustained benefit to civilization.

Will woman be allowed to participate in political life without being vilified as Medusa? Will woman be allowed to create their own path without following in aggressive male models? Or will we continue to demonized powerful woman in all the scared male projections found in our Greek cultural inheritance?  Martha Stewart, Hillary Clinton, Condoleezza Rice – the jury is still out. The election of President Michelle Bachelet in Chile and of President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf in Liberia suggests that globally, the scene is set to have women participate.

To help us tell our story, we’ve researched an all-star lineup of Greek scholars including Victor Bers and George Syrimis from Yale, Elizabeth Scharffenberger from Columbia, Mary English from Monclair State, James Kalb from Hofstra, Jeffrey Hurwitt (the author of The Acropolis in the Age of Pericles), Jeffrey Henderson (the author of the only compiled translation of Aristophanes’ woman’s plays) and many others.

 LYSISTRATA: Beyond Sex is an exploration of the role of comedy and gender in democracy. The Greeks invented drama and constructed huge amphitheatres like the Theater of Dionysus in Athens as a caldron for new ideas – ideas that would be so mind-shattering and provocative to the democracy that they would create a cleaning catharsis – the same catharsis we seek when we bath our senses in modern drama. To help create our own catharsis -- the following brillant actors bring their genius to this timeless comedy.