Fifty-nine: Giving Frogs Legs

The origin of Frogs-Reimagined came while I was visiting Athens.  A group of faculty and students from Stockton were there in order to participate in a conference at the University of Athens and we were visiting the Acropolis. One of my faculty members, David Roessel, assigns to his students who go to Athens the task of going to the Theatre of Dionysus and reading from a play, and he let me know that it would not be a good show if a dean failed to complete this same task. 

So the student and I found a spot to sit in the theater and began to read from sections of Aristophanes’ Frogs. As I was reading I was struck by how wonderful the play was (particularly the obvious similarities between Dionysus/Xanthias and Don Quijote/Sancho Panza – Cervantes must have known the Aristophanes play!), and for the rest of my visit to Athens I was wandering around the city thinking about how the play could be adapted to the modern world – even contemplating setting it at a soccer game. [Of course, I didn’t know that Nathan Lane had already done a modern adaptation with Stephen Sondheim’s music, or I might have given up on the idea before I started.]

I made the mistake of saying to David that I was thinking along these lines, and he immediately said that we needed to develop a new version for ourselves and workshop it, as they say in the business, on the island of Rhodes the following summer. The only thing that was necessary before we could follow through on this would be for me to write something that we could workshop. To put pressure on me, he booked the rooms for six or seven people who would be there to work on the play. Clearly, I needed to write a new version of Aristophanes’ Frogs, which I thought would be a very daunting task.

The question I needed to grapple with was how to make the play accessible to the modern audience – how to give Frogs legs in today’s world.   In this regard there were two considerations to be dealt with. 1) The first was the question of what might have equivalent freight in modern society to that of tragic theatre in the Athenian world. The second, related question was how does one handle all the Choruses in the play, as this is an element that is alien to much modern drama? And this is a particularly significant question, after all, because this is a play that is named after one particular Chorus – Frogs.

1) The Modern Equivalent for Tragedy

Athenians put considerable stock in their theater, and tragedy was the most highly prized of the theatrical forms. They clearly believed that it had great social significance. If someone were to be brought back to provide important social commentary and promote the social welfare, it would be the playwright who everyone considered to be the father of tragedy.

Who, then, would have a similar social location in today’s society? To what do we ascribe equivalent significance to that of tragic theatre in Athens? Who has influence comparable to the tragedian of the Ancient world?

The Nathan Lane production (adapted by Sondheim and Burt Shevelove) came up with Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw, but actually I think this really doesn't work as a pairing. While Shakespeare may be even more celebrated in literature and theatre than Aeschylus, he doesn’t have a hold in the social imagination, in the way that an Aeschylus or a Euripides would have done in Ancient Athens. Similarly, Shaw’s plays don’t have the influence of Euripides’ or Sophocles’ plays. Shaw is one of many modernists, and he doesn’t necessarily stand apart from Ibsen, Strindberg, Brecht, O’Neill, and Samuel Beckett.  In short, the Shakespeare/Shaw pairing is altogether too high class to really work, in my opinion.

Instead, I felt I should focus on songwriter and popular music. Music has the kind of hold on large segments of society, and, in the 1960s at least, seemed to be socially transformative.  And, just as Greek society was undergoing transformation, and those who could speak to earlier generations (Sophocles and Aeschylus) no longer spoke to later ones – who looked to Euripides – the same thing is true in the modern age.  The music of the 60s was quickly superseded and even scoffed at in the 70s and 80s, and then retrieved once again in nostalgia. This is often seen in terms of genre shifts. Blues becoming rock, becoming psychedelic, then glam rock, funk, punk, New Wave, heavy metal, grunge, hip hop, gangsta rap, alternative, etc., etc., so any rendering of the competition among artists represented in this play has to take into consideration these shifts.

For me, at least, the death of Lennon was a turning point, one that provides a divide between the socially conscious music of the 60s and early 70s, and the more commercially based music that followed. The end of the Beatles and the death of John Lennon provided a divide between before and after, which made Lennon the likely person that Dionysus would want to bring back to life.

And some of this is nostalgia, of course. The point that Dionysus makes at the beginning of the play, that tragedy has lost its way and is no longer as strong as it once was, and no longer as able to be influential as in the days of Aeschylus, is a point that all music lovers instinctively make. A lot of people claim that their music is the most compelling, and those who came before and after are barely worth mentioning. And music has the same element of competition embedded in it that tragedy had in the ancient world. Competitions would occur as tragedians would put on their plays and viewers would vote on which was their favorite. Clearly the music charts and the markets perform a similar function in today’s world (not to mention X Factor and the reality talent shows), and artists view themselves as being in competition with others, wishing to secure a larger hold on the public than other artists, wishing to be seen as stronger than those who came before.

Added to this, though, there is a degree to which in the modern world no one who comes to the fore has a lasting presence. Modern music embodies Andy Warhol’s idea of everyone getting his or her fifteen minutes of fame. So the competition that Aristophanes creates between Aeschylus and Euripides, cannot be replicated in the modern world, except by taking up a somewhat arbitrary selection of a Lennon on one side, and a composite group of artists on the other. To fill this bill I selected – Jim Morrison from the Doors, Freddie Mercury from Queen, Poly Styrene, Marvin Gaye, Tupac Chakur, and Amy Winehouse.

And to make this work, I combined all of these individuals into one, self-transmogrifying character that I called Mr. Mojo Risin’ – this is an anagram based on Jim Morrison – which comes from his song LA Woman. So MMR symbolizes an alter-ego of the collective artist.  Originally, I started with 9 incarnations, but whittled it down to 6, owing to the need to shorten the play, and to make the difficulties of creating music for each character, which my brother and I were doing, less daunting.

The other device I needed to make the play work was to come up with a character as a replacement for Dionysus. It occurred to me that the person would be an artist who had concern for the social impact of music and was a political activist of some sort. This could be one of two people, I felt, either Bob Geldof or Bono, so I combined them into one character, Bonoff, son of Yeats. Once this character was in place, Xanthias, the slave, could then be represented as a common roadie, and I thought I would get considerable mileage out of that. Finally, Hercules, who provides directions to the underworld, just had to be Elvis, who has been seen several times on both sides of the Styx since 1976.

2) The Chorus

There are three types of choruses in Frogs—Reimagined.  The first I wanted to be of a rock opera format, with a back and forth between Bonoff and the Frogs as they cross the River Styx to the underworld. This I hoped would have a Tommy-like feel, or Peter Gabriel’s Genesis (i.e. from Foxtrot or Nursery Cryme).

The second chorus is witnessed as Bonoff and Xanthias are searching for Aquafrog’s (Pluto’s) palace. They come across a chorus of initiates. These I wanted to be a cross between a 19th century Utopian community and the Woodstock crowd from 1969.  The music was intended to sound like a number of different bands/people from that era from Jethro Tull, to Janis Joplin, or the band Renaissance.  Whereas the first chorus represents the performers, the second one emphasizes the worshippers.

Finally, the third type of chorus is the most untraditional. It endeavors to blend the two previous ones and break down the barriers between actors and chorus. Essentially, the character of Mr. Mojo Risin’ is comprised of the members of the Chorus, so each of the actors who plays a part in the contest between Lennon and Mr. Mojo Risin’, comes out of the chorus and returns to it. This suggests that these artists themselves are a creation of the chorus, and that if these ones weren’t chosen they might have been replaced by others (and the play itself might be reworked so that in different performances different musicians came to the fore).

Anyway, that’s the play in a nutshell. It has a Doors-like piece called “The Mend”, a funk piece called “Tongue in Groove”, a Madonna-ish piece called “Like a Nun”, a punk piece called “Cereal Killer”, a Freddy Mercury number called “Iron Chef” – and so on. It ends with “News from Nowhere” (title of a William Morris Utopian novel), which is a send up of Lennon’s Imagine. And there’s more besides.

The play will have its first airing at Stockton College in the spring of 2014. And then, who knows?