USA Projects

Thank you for your interest in my project. I want to create a giant 3 day-long cycle play, adapting all 32 surviving Greek tragedies. At the root, these plays offer the most perfect forum for exploring all of our recurring universal problems. I would be extremely grateful for your support, which will allow me to create the epic script for this project.

Recently, I have been adapting classic theater to make accessible and uniquely contemporary scripts that I can then bring into production with The Hypocrites, a theater company I started 15 years ago. For the past two years, I began work on adapting the seven surviving plays of Sophocles into one giant epic play - Seven Sicknesses. I chose to make this Sophocles script because I saw a through-line in the four non-Oedipus plays, and thought it would be interesting to have a cycle-play of all the Sophocles texts. I figured this would be a hard sell for any audience. The Hypocrites produced Seven Sicknesses this fall, in an epic four hour event, serving food to the audiences, and encouraging casual group conversation, building a little Greek loving community every night. It was an unexpected commercial success. Many audience members encouraged me to tackle the other two Greek tragedians. While contemplating whether to start with Aeschylus or Euripides, I realized that I should just do them both.

We have currently 32 extant Greek tragedies. Some stories overlap, so we are dealing with about 29 or 30 stories.

This script will be designed to be performed over three full days of drama, mirroring how the Greeks themselves presented these plays, at huge communal festivals. It will be something like the Lollapolloza music festival: 3 days of Greek Tragedy.

The first day would be the Greek plays that deal with Oedipus and the Seven Against Thebes.

The second day would be Herakles and the plays happening during the Trojan War.

The third day would deal with the fallout of the Trojan War, including Orestes and his journey. There are a few plays that don’t fit neatly into this structure, but with some massaging, it can be done.

I am trying to do what no one else in the history of theater has attempted. I may fail. But I think it is truly worth trying.

Thank you so much for your time. Have a good day.