Given our recent preoccupation with Greek plays, and given the recent turns of fortune for Greece and those fleeing from even more dire conditions, this account of Aeschylus' The Suppliants performed in an ancient amphitheater in Sicily speaks to the incomparable relevance of the classical form.
Greek drama, with its open-air setting, calls for loud voices and outsized gestures; poetry transforms the shouting into oratory and dance lends the gestures a stylized grace. Syracuse is a magical place to do this. The theater rises next to a quarry with a curving cave that Caravaggio, who visited in 1608, compared to an ear because of its uncanny reverberation.
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