Never underestimate dead white males. Especially the ones in togas. In May and June, five Greek plays will be running simultaneously in the Washington area -- "Electra" at MetroStage, "Hecuba" at the Kennedy Center, "Medea" at the Washington Shakespeare Company, "Jason and the Argonauts" at Synetic Theater and "Perfectly Persephone" at Imagination Stage.
Cultural lefties who condemn the Western canon as irrelevant in our multiculti global society and hope for dead white European males to go the way of the quatrain, should consider the selections made by D.C. theater companies. These Greek (and Greek-themed) plays feature strong women -- juicy roles that many say have not been trumped in 2,500 years.
"Medea is one of the ultimate roles for an actor," says Delia Taylor, who will play the infanticide-minded royal at the Washington Shakespeare Company starting June 6. "It is something you have to build up to in your career, a part you have to almost earn. I cannot imagine doing Medea when I was just starting out. So few female characters are as powerfully written as Medea."
If the part is sometimes considered one-dimensional, well -- that's the old double standard at work again, she believes.
"If women like Medea and Hecuba were male, they would be considered heroes," Miss Taylor says. "But because they are women, they are known as cold-blooded murderesses. Every time I mention that I am playing Medea, someone says, 'Oh, the woman who killed her children.' No one brings up Jason's behavior or his callous abandonment of her."
Euripides (484-406 B.C.), the author of "Medea," "Electra," and "Hecuba," was no smugly superior white male. He was, rather, a cave-dwelling loner who preferred contemplative solitude to the political and social gossip so dear to his fellow Athenians.
True, the tragedian was also a reputed woman-hater, perhaps smarting from at least two disastrous marriages to straying wives. Yet his plays, far from being misogynist, are instead deeply humanist studies of victims of oppression -- particularly women and slaves -- with whom he appears to have identified.