Two and half millennia ago, the comic Greek playwright Aristophanes questioned the lengths to which men will go for sex, and the resulting play remains hilarious and pertinent today. Lysistrata depicts a sex strike and seizure of funds by a pan-Greek alliance of women striving to end the Peloponnesian War. Last weekend, UW-Milwaukee Theatre staged Ranjit Bolt’s wonderfully raunchy 1994 English adaptation.
The play is a composite of Greek conventions and modern language and ideas. In a production full of beautiful, ritualistic song and dance, Bolt’s clever script fostered the audience’s understanding that much of the human experience of gender exists across time and culture. In a memorable number, the men sung about their worst fear: becoming servants, not only to their former lovers, but to the men who replace them. The women, likewise, showed their complexity in a song about their own longing for sex: “I can’t afford to listen to my heart / A leader who longs to be a tart.”
Fantastic performances and stunning production values made this student show a joy to behold. As Lysistrata, Lizzie Peavey-Uetz was a strong leader opposite David Stein’s swaggering Magistrate. Zoe Schwartz’ Myrrina and Kris Anton’s Kinesias added pathos as a genuinely loving couple temporarily kept apart by the struggle for peace.
Chen Chen’s costumes delighted. Again per ancient Greek convention, all performers wore masks, and the men, comically large phalluses that poked out from under their tunics and were replaced by painfully erect variants as the strike continued. The women sported an interesting blend of Greek and modern garb (think togas with fishnets).
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Rebecca Hamlin’s scenic design and Stephen Roy White’s lighting worked in perfect tandem to further the allusions to the Greek stage. Wide-eyed sun and moon gobos marked the passage of long, sexless days and nights, and scrim silhouettes of marching soldiers and galloping horse puppets aptly suggested the encompassing war.
Complex yet defined by fantastic ensemble work on all fronts, UWM’s Lysistrata was a gleeful foray into the long-waged battle of the sexes aptly summarized in the men’s surrender: “Life’s hell without you and hell with you too.”
