Hecuba, May 29, 2005

Saturday night, I attended the play "Hecuba" at the Kennedy Center. This play is a Greek tragedy written by Euripides in 425 BC. As advertised, the play was very tragic and very sad. It was extremely well done, by the Royal Shakespeare Company, but in the end, it was still a tragedy that left everyone feeling pretty horrible. Because I have season tickets, I sit near the same group of people most of the time. ALL of the women were of one mind about this play -- they did not like it. The play is about a woman whose last two remaining children were killed, and then in an act of revenge, she killed two young boys of the man who killed her last son. Everyone lost in this play. However, the play was a morality play -- about the morality of the time. It was a play whose message was that killing was hurtful, although killing for revenge was not only acceptable, but honored. It seems to me that society still believes that revenge killing is a good thing, so I am not sure how far we have come in the past 2500 years. In those days, when armies conquered a people, they killed all of the men and many of the children as well. The women were made slaves. Euripides tried to show that making the women slaves, and killing their children were wrong, and created great emotional pain and suffering. However, he still believed that slavery was okay, in general, and that if a woman's children were killed, revenge killing was right and honorable. Even now, the play was very thought provoking. I was not affected by the tragedy; I had read the play before going, and I knew what to expect. I found the morality of the play to be very interesting. It is also interesting that Euripides was permitted to stage such a play at that time.