AIAS of Sophokles, translated by James Barthelmess with Wayne S. Turney, original score by Sebastian Birch, choreographed by Gladisa Guadelupe, The Factory Theater, Directed by Scott Plate

When I was still teaching part-time at CSU, I had an office on the second floor, and Professor Barthelmess, Jim, used to pass by my open door on his way into the classroom. We would exchange pleasantries--both of us are Meyers-Briggs introverts-- and occasionally talk about our classes or other interests. I was teaching Theater History I, which included a lengthy unit on the Greeks, and Jim was teaching a classics in translation class, I believe.

Eventually, we chatted about our mutual admiration bordering on adulation of Sophokles and one day we discovered that we were both fascinated by what moderns call The Ajax. It is a highly unique play in that it has the only onstage violence in all of Greek tragedy, the suicide of Aias; and it has the only change of scene that takes place in the middle of a single play in all of Greek drama. Most "English Department" critics had decided that it is a deeply flawed play that lacked dramatic interest following the suicide of the central character barely halfway through the play. Those heady fellows decided that what they thought of as a too long argument over the corpse would be of no interest to modern audiences. (For more on this and related topics see my "Introduction to Aias.") We confessed to each other that we disagreed with those academics and that the play haunted us. We both wanted to do something more with it. The possibility of doing more with the play interested us both, and as people do we decided to have a go at translating it. But there was a problem. My Greek was less than rudimentary, but my major problem with the existing translations was that they were largely unspeakable. Either actors couldn't get them into their mouths, or audiences couldn't understand them on first hearing. Obscurity is anathema to me in the theater. Popular music notwithstanding, Aristotle's maxim that a tragedy must be immediately apprehensible to the listener is a good one. I thought I might be able to help Jim wrestle the English into something useful to a live English-speaking actor. At the time, I think I probably didn't expect anything to come of it.

Fortunately, Jim is much more industrious than I, and he got to work on translating the Greek. And a beautiful job he did, too. We discovered as he worked that when I found something less than clear in the English, that if we went back to the original, there was something overlooked in the Greek. Sophokles rose even higher in our esteem. After a few years, I became the dramaturg at the Cleveland Play House, and we made the push to finish the translation and I scheduled a staged reading of the script. Jim helped me arrange for a room in a large science lecture hall on the CSU campus instead of the Brooks. I cast the best actors from the company; we put up posters around town that I had made on my Mac, rehearsed a couple of times and read the play. Those posters were in large block letters and the A's were square. AIAS, looked rather like AIDS. And that may account for the larger than expected crowd. There were certainly a number of people who were puzzled that we were reading a Greek play that night. But they stayed and listened. And to my delight, they leaned forward to listen more carefully to the argument overAias' corpse. The dramatic tension intensified rather than dissipated. It was thrilling. But alas, my timing was off. I still have the form letter of rejection from the new Artistic Director of the Play House informing me that the play didn't fit into her plans.

It took another ten years before I could get a full production at CSU, and while it was a college production, the script was rivetting as I knew it would be. Even audience members who thought Homer was the central character on the Simpson's were drawn into the world of the play. Gene Hare knocked himself out with a spectacular, simple, workable design. Through the good offices of the Kulas Foundation, Sebastian Birch wrote a spectacular score; Gladisa Guadalupe of the Cleveland Ballet choreographed the piece as part of a special project for college credit, and Scott Plate directed. Another of my students Jennifer Petras, who has gone on to be a professional editor, taped the whole production with four cameras and edited a broadcast quality finished version. What more could I ask for?

The Aias of Sophokles, translated by James Barthelmess with Wayne S. Turney, Original Score by Sebastian Birch, Directed by Scott Plate, Choreography by Gladisa Guadalupe had it's World Premiere Performance May 15, 1997 at the Factory Theater, Cleveland State University, Cleveland, Ohio with the following cast (in order of appearance):

Athena .................... Evangelia Constantakos
Odysseus .................. George Spelvin*
Khorus .................... Dan DiCello
........................... Patrick Chees
........................... James Asmus
........................... Mark Gargiulo
........................... Raphael Rivera
Tekmessa .................. Kenyette Barnes
Aias ...................... Doug Rossi
Messenger ................. Keith Kornacjk
Teukros ................... David Crighton
Menelaos .................. David Samuels
Agamemnon ................. Randy Wines