Aristophanes’ Frogs has been updated by the Classic Stage Company. Read the full review here.
(thanks, Nick!)
The play is “Old Comedy After Aristophanes’ Frogs,” and in it David Greenspan has, figuratively speaking, built himself a framework out of “The Frogs” and the Old Comedy conventions, then sprayed it with a machine gun. The bullets are topical references, mostly to American politicians and the Iraq war. There is, for instance, a point when the chorus vividly (and rather crassly) describes pumping President Bush full of water, a sort of torture victim’s revenge.
It’s a brash, ribald vision, one that draws blunt parallels between the decline of Athens as witnessed by Aristophanes and what Mr. Greenspan sees as the end of the American era. And sometimes it’s quite funny.