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 212-556-5600. For amateur performance rights, contact Libby Edwards at charlesmeeplays@yahoo.com.
- Charles Mee

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Iphigenia 2.0

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





In the darkness,
we hear a male voice singing an ancient Macedonian folk song,
wailing,
almost keening.

Or Salpinx Call by Nederlanders Blazers Ensemble with Bie Deti Dallget by Arap Celolesakaj, Fatbardha Brahimi, Nazif Celaj & Nikolin Likaj.

Or the male solo from Music of the Turkmen from Primitive Music of the World.

Or it could be Dionisis Savopoulos and Sotiria Bellou sing Zeibekiko.

Or Nikos Xylouris sings the mournful San Erthoun Mana I Fili Mou.

Or the very sad song Ipne Pou Pernis Ta Pedia sung by Savina Yannatou.

An Old Greek Man sits in the shadows, whitewashing the walls.
Throughout the play he will continue to alter the space and prepare for the wedding.

Agamemnon enters by himself
in thought,
considering what he will say.
He walks slowly downstage
and stops directly in front of the audience.

When the music ends,
he takes his time speaking.]

AGAMEMNON
I see that there are acts
that will set an empire on a course
that will one day
bring it to an end.

Because, we see from the histories of empires
none will last forever
and all are brought down finally
not by others
but by themselves,
from the actions that they take
that they believe are right or good
or necessary at the time to do.

Sometimes they are brought to ruin
by no more than the belief
that something must be done
when in truth
doing nothing would have been the better course.

[quietly, the First Soldier enters to one side,
stands in silence,
listening to Agamemnon]

To be sure,
an empire
cannot refuse to defend itself from absolute devastation
and so it will arrange to have the capacity
for self defense.
It will preserve itself first from extinction
and, as well, from lethal damage or great harm
and then, too, from hurt and ill-treatment
that could, if left unattended, lead to devastating injury,
and, so by degrees,
an empire will reason itself to a need to be immune even
from insult
responding, finally,
to the anxieties and nightmares
that arise from within,
and so: striking out
at the phantasms of its own dreams.

Of course, it will know that a nation must protect its borders
and, in order to do that,
must secure its periphery
and so it will come to attend to conditions just beyond its
outermost bounds
and thus, by increments,
its interests will grow,
until they will have been extended beyond an ability to defend them.
They will have created new enemies along the way.
They will have created the causes of wars
where there were none before.
Even if an empire begins with no ambition
with no desire for conquest
no wish to grow
even so, it will feel it must grow or die
and so it grows
and thus it dies.
Ruin, it would seem,
is inherent in the nature of empire.

[and, as Agamemnon continues to speak,
another soldier
and then another
and then another
appear at the edges of the stage
listening]

Might this fate be avoided
or at least
postponed?
Might something else be done?
Are there no precepts to follow in this murky,
unpredictable world?
Often, it seems,
men of affairs think that moral laws
offer no useful guide to behavior
that they are not meant for the practical business of the world
forgetting
that moral laws are nothing more nor less
than the accumulated folk wisdom
of millenia of human experience.
And so it will happen
that some moral law of an unforgiving nature is violated--