Iphigenia In Utopia

About the Book

The circumstances that led to the creation of this play were connected with the First International Symposium on Anarchism at Lewis and Clark College (Portland, Oregon) in February of 1980.

We had already approved a list of films to be shown, a series of art reproductions to be exhibited and a music program to be performed. But we still needed a theatrical work. Research in the field of anarchist-inspired plays had produced numerous titles, but all of them had to be discarded one by one due to some "defects": an excess of characters, a lack of English translations, and a negative tone in their texts.

It was thus proposed, at one of the weekly meetings in 1979, that we would try to write an original play ourselves.

When the deadline arrived, we had only two plays to choose from: Howard Zinn' s Emma, and my own Iphigenia in utopia. None of them were selected by the reading committee: Zinn's play, inspired by and dedicated to the memory of Emma Goldman, did not suit our purposes due to the historically correct but psychologically negative impact that inevitably would have confronted the audience with the sad problem of violence in the anarchist tradition.

The present play was rejected because it was too long. According to Dr. Willis and the cast of the Theater Department, one month of rehearsal was insufficient preparation for the performance).

The committee, overall, did not like this play either. If two of the members were enthusiastic, another one noticed many inaccuracies in the comparison of my characters with those of the Greek tradition, while another colleague considered that I was "agonizing too much over the problem of violence". In his opinion, anarchism, after all, was a revolutionary movement. The conclusion was that since there was only one month remaining, it was too late to perform a play, so the theatrical program was reduced to a dramatic reading of a one-act play. Retrospectively, it occurs to me that perhaps my goal in writing this play the way I did was not realized or not clear enough. A creative work is never completely objective, even though it is based on a classical character who has no shadows.

Ever since Euripides, many authors have dealt with Iphigenia very differently. Some make her die, a victim of sacrifice. Others make her survive and the designated victim being is replaced at the last moment by a providential animal. I wanted to make her an anarchist who is revolting against Fate, against paternalism, against superstition, against violence, against tradition, against the clergy and against the reasons of state that called for her death. The example was suggested to me by a friend, a true princess in real life, who was destined by her father (a real king) to marry another king for reasons of state and who, without being an anarchist, refused the arrangement simply because she did not love her suitor. Whether or not she was already in love with the man whom she ended up marrying, despite the fact that he was a divorced, merely bourgeois (not aristocrat) man who was probably even a Jew (she is a Roman Catholic), it took courage and a strong personality to behave like this in real life.

I transformed Orestes and Pilades into co-conspirators, into liberators of people (they run an underground non-violent guerrilla). My revolutionary characters make statements that I borrowed from Sacco and Vanzetti's letters, as well as a declaration taken from the Haymarket Affair's trial proceedings. Yes, I violated history, geography, and tradition, but so did Jean Racine and many others before or after him when dealing with the character of Iphigenia. I uncovered several hundred plays, poems, ballets, operas, paintings, frescoes, drawings and films inspired by Iphigenia. A large number of them abandon and/or "betray" the tradition as much as I did.

The genius of the great creators of myths, whether religious, literary or otherwise, is such that any deviation from their message should be interpreted as a variant, as an echo, as an homage, not merely imitation, or worse, treason. Anyway, who says that if Euripides had lived in our times, he would have revered the cruel Gods of tradition?

Or, living in the 20th Century, would he not imagine a feminist, committed, active and rebellious Iphigenia, such as I did myself?

About the Author

The author was born in Italy, where he lived until his early twenties before emigrating: Switzerland, Brazil, United States, France, etc. He is a retired college professor and has published several books in the field of literary criticism, biography, film studies, history, political thought, arts. He has studies a dozen languages and uses five of them professionally in his work as simultaneous inerpreter.