about the (re)making project

Please feel free to take the plays from this project and use them freely as a resource for your own work: that is to say, don't just make some cuts or rewrite a few passages or re-arrange them or put in a few texts that you like better, but pillage the plays as I have pillaged the structures and contents of the plays of Euripides and Brecht and stuff out of Soap Opera Digest and the evening news and the internet, and build your own, entirely new, piece--and then, please, put your own name to the work that results.
But, if you would like to perform the plays essentially or substantially as I have composed them, they are protected by copyright in the versions you read here, and you need to clear performance rights. For professional performance rights, contact Thomas Pearson of International Creative Management at tpearson@icmtalent.com or 212-556-56600. For amateur performance rights, contact Libby Edwards at charlesmeeplays@yahoo.com.
- Charles Mee

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Agamemnon 2.0

by C H A R L E S L . M E E


Based on the play by Aeschylus





Darkness.

The earliest light of dawn.

A small campfire.

Silhouetted against the dawn light we see:

four men in long, floor-length gray coats--

Herodotus, a quadriplegic, in an old wooden wheel chair
Thucydides, a dwarf, or double amputee
Homer, blind, with round, wire-rimmed dark glasses
Hesiod, an epileptic; tremors run through his body from time to time for
which he must sometimes pause to bring them under control.

A long silence.

HERODOTUS
When I was a boy,
all this was open field.

HESIOD
There's some comfort
in the memory of it.

THUCYDIDES
If it's true.

HERODOTUS
I was here.
I know it to be true.

THUCYDIDES
What one remembers
and what is true
are so seldom the same.

HERODOTUS
These days,
even now,
you can look out from here
and know which of these farms
is recorded in the Domesday Book,
and which of them came later.

HESIOD [smoothing over the tension]
Once, on this familiar spot of ground,
walked other men and women,
as actual as we are today,
thinking their own thoughts,
feeling their own passions
now gone as utterly as we ourselves
shall be
like ghosts at cock crow.

[Homer steps forward out of the darkness,
the light catching his glasses.]

HOMER
One time
long ago
not far from here
the poet Simonides
was gathered with his friends
for dinner at a palace in the hills
across this valley.
Simonides stepped outside onto the terrace
for a moment
for a breath of air,
and in that moment
an earthquake
shook the villa
and brought it to the ground.
All Simonides' friends were crushed to death,
their bodies mangled and torn apart,
not even their own families could recognize them.

But Simonides could picture in his mind's eye
just where each one of his friends had been sitting,
and as he recalled them one by one
their bodies could be
pulled out from the rubble and identified.
And from this moment
came the beginning
of mankind's desire to remember
exactly
how the world has been
at one moment or another.

And so Simonides
instructed his friends
how to build their own palaces of memory,
how to build each room
how to furnish these rooms
with the faces and figures of their friends,
events of their lives,
their treasures,
books, poems,
each room given things of singular beauty
or distinctive ugliness,
to make them vivid
unforgettable
memories disfigured,
faces splashed with paint
or stained with blood
each moment suspended
in this geometry of memory, thought
and feeling.

HERODOTUS
Ten years ago,
the sons of Atreus
Agamemnon and Menelaus
left this spot
for Aulis
where they sailed for Troy
in search of Helen,
stolen from her husband Menelaus
and taken home to Troy by Paris.

HESIOD
Like any slave

THUCYDIDES
or piece of property.

HESIOD
It's a sort of love story--
or a thousand love stories
all knit up in one
this story of these men
and their love of entangling themselves with women
take this one,
leave the other at home,
throw this one away,
take another one instead,
rape this lot
or murder all of these....

HERODOTUS
One thousand ships
An army of determined men
Set forth to bring her back

HOMER
like fiends of hell

HERODOTUS
and to destroy the Trojans
for the wrong
they had done
sheltering Paris
even as he assaulted
all trust
that is the only true shelter