BMCR 2025.01.30

Seeing theater: the phenomenology of classical Greek drama

, Seeing theater: the phenomenology of classical Greek drama. Oakland: University of California Press, 2023. Pp. xvi, 247. ISBN 9780520393080.

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Scholars of Greek drama are limited in their data to everything but the drama itself. The kind of amphitheater in which the performance took place, the script according to which the performance was ostensibly given, the performance’s festive and historical context, philosophical critiques, incidental clues in other diverse texts, and miscellaneous archaeological evidence shed light slant-ways on what it must have been like to attend or play in a dramatic performance without themselves reproducing those experiences. How can we see what they saw? How can we see what they saw in the way they were seeing?

Naomi Weiss’ Seeing Theater: The Phenomenology of Classical Greek Drama seeks to get at the irreproducible experience of visuality of fifth-century BCE Greek theater by engaging every extant category of testimony left to us of Greek dramatic culture. Against a predominantly philological tradition, Weiss advances persuasive close readings of several tragedies, comedies, and satyr-plays alongside analyses of vase paintings and other material evidence. By way of centering the spectatorial experience modeled and invited by these objects (i.e., the phenomenological valence of dramatic culture), Weiss finds an intentional instability of representational correspondence. Seeing Theater argues that a ‘slippage between actuality and virtuality’ (p. 30) is a frequent if not central feature of the experience of Greek drama. For Weiss, the problematization of Aristotle’s ‘this is that’ (pp. 7-10) paradigm of dramatic pleasure engages the spectator as a co-participant in the meaning of the performance; because both what and how one is seeing are conspicuously mediated by the formal features of the performance or object, one’s responsibility for the visual significance of the performance or object and active role in meaning-making are distinctly amplified and foregrounded.

The book is laid out in four chapters which focus respectively on the construction of space in tragedy and comedy and particularly in the prologues of Aristophanes’ Acharnians and Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus (Chapter 1), the instability of seeing “bodies, masks, costumes and props” (p. 79) in Aeschylus’ Theoroi, Aeschylus’ Suppliants, and Aristophanes’ Birds (Chapter 2), the representation of pain in Sophocles’ Oedipus the King and [Aeschylus’] Prometheus Bound (Chapter 3), and the discursive phenomenological relationship between three fifth-century pots depicting theatrical scenes and the visual culture of Athenian theater itself (Chapter 4).

In Chapter 1, Weiss develops the destabilizing function of visual status and construction of dramatic settings in Greek drama. Reconstructing both what and how the characters of prologues see, she argues that characters act as internal spectators and orient external spectators to dramatic space. Verbs of seeing, suggestive deictics and more in the Ajax, Electra, Clouds and Peace (among others) model identification of the setting for the audience while vivifying the active and unstable character of that identification. Weiss’ work with Aristophanes’ Acharnians focuses on the spatial hybridity and fluidity of the setting, which is ‘amalgamate[d]’ (p. 57) especially in terms of Pnyx assembly-space and theatrical space by Dicaeopolis’ spectatorial posture at the opening of the play. Oedipus at Colonus’ prologue dramatizes the construction of its setting by way of Oedipus’ blindness and dependence on Antigone to ‘see’ Colonus. Not only Oedipus’ blindness but what is visible and what is not visible (and to whom) are, naturally, key themes of the tragedy—Weiss persuasively integrates her phenomenological analysis with these themes. In both Acharnians and Oedipus at Colonus, the tensions of the spectator’s ‘actual’ location in Athens are brought into critical dialogue with the overlapping and particular ‘virtualities’ of the dramatic performance such that the work and activity of seeing on the part of the spectator is itself made visible.

In Chapter 2, Weiss engages satyr-play, bell-krater, tragedy and comedy to elucidate a perceptual instability with respect to players and objects (costumes, props) which populate dramatic settings. In Aeschylus’ Theoroi, tension between the actual and virtual is given shape by a satyr chorus’ mimetic mismatch against votive satyr masks. The mismatched costumes and props of the Suppliants’ Danaids undermine the clarity of their Greek or non-Greek identities and, therefore and relatedly, their relationship to King Pelasgus. In Aristophanes’ Birds, ‘the gap between actual and virtual’ is ‘made obvious’ (p. 107) by the relentless porosity of man and bird in the dramatic narrative and in the representational work of the actors themselves. In all three, internal spectators model what it is to see—the satyr chorus (p. 83), Pelasgus (p. 93), and Peisetaerus and Euelpides (p. 111-2)—and the insecurity of the act of seeing.

Chapter 3 turns to the phenomenological status of pain in Greek drama, to which I will return below. But Weiss’ most unique contribution comes in Chapter 4 with the exploration of three fifth-century Attic pots. Each krater depicts ‘mid-performance’ scenes which expose the representational act, both of the krater’s painter, of theatrical representation itself, and of the spectator’s phenomenological implication. The choice of a painter, for example, to represent figures as ‘actually’ the characters or objects which must have been only represented in dramatic performance (e.g., a sphinx represented without indications of costume) or as ‘virtually’ those characters or objects (e.g., a satyr represented with indications of costume), sometimes on the same pot, visualize the slippage of the actual and the virtual on the same representational plane.

Seeing Theater successfully engages Greek drama as its object of analysis. Where other studies may favor tragedy or comedy, Weiss’ close intertextual work with tragedy, comedy, satyr-play and their illumination by pottery successfully draws out deep currents of phenomenological continuity. Without eliding important boundaries and with persistent attention to the cultural and material specificities of each generic tradition (to the extent that they are accessible), Weiss foregrounds diverse modes of representational destabilization and spectatorial engagement. The breadth of genres engaged will make this study one of particular utility for scholars from every discipline seeking to engage the experience of Greek drama as an aesthetic, social, and political phenomenon.

The book’s phenomenological frame is at its strongest where the theoros is closest to hand. In the Introduction, a cup-krater with two choroi—one of men and one of dolphins—oscillates between man-chorus and dolphin-chorus with the movement of its use (p. 25). Not only is blind Oedipus exactly as dependent on Antigone to see the dramatic space as the spectator (who equally cannot ‘see’ anything without the construction of Colonus in Antigone’s speech), he is also, if only nominally, sitting upon the same bathron the spectators sit upon (p. 73). These spectatorial experiences of the performance/object powerfully indicate the intentional instability of representation that Weiss develops throughout the book. That seeing is something more (and more demanding) than straightforwardly apprehending what is ‘actually’ there is necessarily problematized in both instances because the negotiation of the visible (and what can be made visible) is explicit and conspicuous. Both cup-krater and prologue evince that Greek drama reveals something tricky about seeing which spectators must navigate before seeing can take place at all.

What Oedipus sitting and the movement of the cup-krater have in common, analytically speaking, is the incontestability of the spectator’s experience (i.e., the phenomenological point of the contact between the spectator and the object). The audience was sitting and was dependent on Antigone to see the ‘laurel, olive, vine; and thickly feathered / nightingales throughout [producing] sweet sounds’ (p.71). When one drank from the cup-krater, both its interior and exterior were visible to its user. These certainties (relative though they may be) bolster Weiss’ argument that ‘the audience is aligned with the blind Oedipus… through a form of bodily empathy based on their mutual seated positions’ (p. 73) and that the visual elision between man and dolphin ‘encourages an unstable mode of viewing’ (p. 25). These readings point us toward and meaningfully reframe structured experiences of sensation we are beyond doubting (until such time as we discover fifth-century Athenian audiences were actually standing). In each case, the gap between the drama or object’s invitation to ‘particular responses and forms of involvement’ and the ‘potential impact’ (p. 165) of that invitation is narrowed by the perceptual necessities of the play or object’s form. The invitation begets the impact. You cannot drink from the cup-krater without man becoming dolphin; you cannot attend Oedipus at Colonus without seeing and not-seeing with Oedipus. The solidity of these experiences answers the methodological frustration of the irreproducibility of experience which so plagues the study of Greek performance traditions—indeed, they suggest the possibility of a phenomenology of classical Greek drama in lieu of an experience of classical Greek drama.

But that the force of Weiss’ argument is predicated in large part on the experiential clarity of any given performance/object’s complication of spectatorship obscures the success of claims which depend less on a specific and attested arrangement of people and things and more on the possibility of certain spectatorial responses to dramatic material. Chapter 3, “Pain Between Bodies,” leans (perhaps necessarily) on this latter possibility. Pain, the vivification of suffering, and the difficulty of seeing suffering captured by δυσθέατος (‘hard to see’) in Oedipus the King and Prometheus Bound develop an instability of perception through intercorporeal experience. Weiss’ readings and her attention to configurations of deinon and idein across both plays stand on persuasive and evocative philological grounds—at least insofar as the internal seers of both tragedies articulate their own seeing, to spectate suffering is difficult because of the sympathetic response to pain spectating can precipitate.

But whether the visceral and sympathetic experiences of these internal spectators indicate something about a phenomenology of classical Greek drama is less certain. Opening with reference to contemporary theater and film studies, Weiss consistently imagines an audience’s ‘intercorporeal response’ (p. 126) to representations of pain as an always-latent possibility. But, unlike examples in which representational instability is necessarily coincident with the object of analysis, it is principally the possibility of sympathetic identification that links invitation to response. Unlike in Chapters 1, 2, and 4, the destabilizing relationship between the perceptual object and the experience of the spectator here hinges less upon what the performance or object necessitate and more what the body might do should sympathetic spectatorship be modeled for it. Insofar as the sympathetic iteration of participatory spectatorship is illuminated not by reference to its material attestation in antiquity but by reference to the fact that performances can affect the contagion of pain across so-called dramatic boundaries and that our bodies can relate to performances in this way, Weiss’ phenomenological findings in this chapter may speak more to a transhistorical phenomenology than a phenomenology specific to fifth-century BCE Greek culture. For these reasons, Weiss’ warning that her subject ‘pushes against the frame of representation arguably more than any of the other bodies, spaces, and objects discussed in the rest of the book’ (p. 128) may undersell Chapter 3’s difference in kind.

These complications lie downstream of the fact that any phenomenological inquiry into any ancient cultural tradition will necessarily stand on evidentiary ‘residues’ (162). Which residues will serve as persuasive grounds for the explication of the almost definitionally ineffable may vary from reader to reader. But Weiss’ study nevertheless does not fail to rise to its ambitious charge: in a wide, sharp, and assiduously researched set of engagements spanning the better part of the fifth-century Greek performance tradition, Seeing Theater attunes us to a consistent set of problematizations of the instability of perception and of representation across the Greek dramatic genres to indicate, as much as possible, the active quality of Greek dramatic spectatorship.