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July 29, 2007
A weblog about the politics and affairs of the old and glorious City of Albany, New York, USA. Articles written and disseminated from Albany's beautiful and historic South End by Daniel Van Riper. If you wish to make a response, have anything to add or would like to make an empty threat, please contact me.
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Where’s My Dung Beetle?
An ancient production teaches us what we need to know today
Last July 10 The Wife and I made our third annual visit to Sandgate, Vermont, a place which I can say without exaggeration is one of the most beautiful spots on this planet. This gorgeous location hides in the hills somewhere between Bennington and Manchester, about an hour and forty minutes drive this year.
The reason for our yearly excursion is to catch the Mettawee River Theatre Company’s summertime production, outdoors on the lawn of the Sandgate United Methodist Church. The company has been together for 31 years, and I can’t tell you how many years they’ve been performing annually outside the Church in Sandgate, but it’s been a long time. I do know that the players look forward to the Sandgate performance as much as the audience does.
1877 Methodist Church At RightThe audience has to bring its own chairs and blankets, not to mention picnic baskets and bottles of fine wine. This is classy, we’re talking rural splendor here. About seventy five to a hundred people get to see the performance. We arrived about a half hour early and set up nice and close to the action, but people were still arriving after the play started at 7 PM.
This year the play was an obscure classic from the year 421 BC, Peace by Aristophanes. Here’s how the Metawee Company describes the play:
PEACE was written by Aristophanes to celebrate a brief respite from the war that plagued Greece throughout his lifetime, in the 4th century BC. It is about a feisty man who flies to Mount Olympus to complain to the gods about the situation on earth. Unfortunately the only way to get to Mount Olympus is to venture a precarious trip on the back of a monstrous dung beetle. When he arrives, he learns from Hermes that the gods have fled, leaving War and Greed in charge and Peace buried under a trash heap. With much hullabaloo and the help of a chorus of farmers, Peace is rescued and an extended celebration begins!
That’s what you call a comedy. As you can see, those old Greek guys not only had a sense of humor, they could roll around in the gutter with the best of them.
The relevance of this play to today’s insanity is pretty obvious, demonstrating that “civilization” does not learn from its worst mistakes. The Greece of Aristophanes’ day was addicted to the supposed economic benefits of continuous warfare, a state of affairs that eventually led to exhaustion and the conquest of Greece by a succession of foreign powers. Indeed, the ecology of Greece has never recovered from this period, a drying up of the Eastern Mediterranean made much worse by relentless war profiteering.
Aristophanes’ Peace is a protest against the societal nicotine addiction to war for the sake of war. The Mettawee production took liberties with the text, throwing in a lot of modern references. But the plot was left intact, dung beetle and all. There was not much of the original that had to be changed to make this a current message for us modern fools.
As the play continued, night slowly fell. The effect of nature on the progress of the play is beyond description, you have to experience it yourself. As The Wife put it, “You couldn‘t pay somebody to make a backdrop as pretty as that.”
As dusk deepened and night fell, my trusty little camera was less able to record clear and focused photos, but I tried. I present here the most presentable pictures, they give a sense of how lovely is the entire event.
Mettawee’s masks and puppets are always fabulous. I loved the jowls on the main actor. And the dung beetle was quite a fine bit of basket weaving.
This guy is War. The Gods left him in charge.
And here is War’s mother, Greed. Get the point?
Where Peace Is BuriedWell, the gods may have abandoned Olympus to War and Greed, but there is one force greater than all the gods, which when united can never be defeated.
The performers recruited some of the children in the audience to help pull Peace out of the garbage heap where she had been relegated by War and Greed. As soon as Peace was raised, War and Greed simply vanished and we didn’t see them again.
And then appeared Plenty, the daughter of Peace.
The company returned to the now peaceful Earth along with Plenty. They immediately set to making a sacrifice to give thanks to Peace. But a sinister character appeared, looking to wheedle a portion of the sacrifice.
The Priest: Another Blurry Photo This was a priest, obviously of the pagan variety. Since I don’t want to get into any trouble, I will declare that this pagan priest has absolutely nothing in common with modern day priests, ministers, preachers, TV evangelists, rabbis, imams or gurus. I couldn’t get a good picture, but hopefully this will give a good idea of the character.
This priest was horrified that the hero was sacrificing to Peace, he’s been living well off the many sacrifices to War and Greed. Eventually the priest was chased off with a boot to the butt, with much merriment. Again, no comment.
And finally, the company decided to decline to make a blood sacrifice to Peace. And all were happy forever more. The end.
It was dark and time to go home, but first it was time to pass the hat. The Wife always snarls at me, “Give them more than that. Think of what a movie costs.” I pointed out that walking to the Spectrum leaves a smaller carbon footprint than driving to Vermont, but I ponied up anyway.
It’s too late to see them in Sandgate this year, but the Mettawee Company will perform a few more shows throughout the region, finishing with an extended run at Bishop’s Green at St. John The Divine in New York City in September. I highly recommend that you catch them if you can.
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