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Remaking Euripides
"I don't call what I do adaptations," Charles Mee has said of his work with classic plays, "We are all engaged in the process of reconsidering and re-creating the things that have been given to us by our lives and histories, and then seeing what can be made of that." Mee calls what he does "re-making." These re-makings include Big Love, his version of Aeschylus's The Suppliant Women; True Love based on Euripides's Hippolytus and Racine's Phaedra; and the Bacchae 2.1, based on Euripides's Bacchae. Mee's re-making takes him beyond the western canon: though the structure is from Greek myth, the text has been assembled from a variety of contemporary sources-including blog entries, political theory textbooks, and magazine articles.
In his Imperial Dreams Tetralogy-Iphigenia 2.0, The Trojan Women 2.0, Agamemnon 2.0, and Orestes 2.0 (available on his website, The Remaking Project, www.charlesmee.org)-Mee uses the fall of the House of Atreus to explore the dichotomy between politics and family. Iphigenia 2.0, based on Euripides's Iphigenia at Aulis, launches the cycle and is the inception point of the family's future troubles. The rest of the tetralogy traces the devastation of one family and two empires. Trojan Women 2.0, the next in the tetralogy, follows the stories of Euripides's Trojan Women and Hector Berlioz's opera, Les Troyens. Over the course of Mee's play, the Greek army claims the surviving Trojan women as slaves. Mee mingles this ancient story with modern accounts of women caught in war zones. The last two plays in the tetralogy, Agamemnon 2.0, (based on Aeschylus's Agamemnon) and Orestes 2.0 (based on Euripides's Orestes), return the House of Atreus home to deal with the consequences of the action in Iphigenia 2.0. In Agamemnon 2.0, a chorus of old men consisting of ancient writers Thucydides, Herodotus, Hesiod, and Homer, witness the victorious return of Agamemnon from Troy, as he faces his wife Clytemnestra, who intends to kill him in retribution for the sacrifice of Iphigenia. In Orestes 2.0, the revenge cycle continues as their son, Orestes, is put on trial for the murder of Clytemnestra.
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