THEATER

THE PERSIANS
Adapted from Aeschylus by Ellen McLaughlin.
Directed by Ethan McSweeny. A National Actors Theatre production
through June 29 at the Michael Schimmel Center for the
Arts at Pace University, Spruce St. between Park Row and
Gold St. in Downtown Manhattan, 212-239-6200.

A new ‘Persians’ offers insight on new imperialism

A scene from “The Persians”

His name was Xerxes, and in his time, in his youth, he and his country, Persia, held sway over virtually the whole known world.

Why then do they, his own people, the Persians, what’s left of them, why do they cry: “You have undone us / God-mocking boy / Xerxes O Xerxes / You have destroyed us”?

Because, when setting out to crush the Greeks, those pitiful Athenians, once and for all, with his unstoppable army of 150,000 men, his navy of 600 ships . . .

“ . . . in contemptuous folly he sought to enslave even Nature. / Even nature, he thought, should bow before his mortal boy’s body. / And when the Hellespont shrugged off the first bridge he built across her back, / he commanded that an iron yoke of fetters be laid across the water / and that the sea be flogged for its rebellion.”

Thus Nature is mocked. Thus the Gods are mocked. And therefore do the Gods, through the outmanned Greeks in the battle of Salamis, destroy those 150,000 men, those 600 ships, and all of the once-mighty Persian empire.

“I got that [the flogging of the water] from Herodotus,” says Ellen McLaughlin. “Aeschylus didn’t know about that. At least I don’t think he did.”

Ellen McLaughlin’s adaptation of “The Persians,” a tragedy written by Aeschylus 2,476 years ago, has won high praise in its debut by the National Actors Theatre, a production now extended through June 29 at Pace University, a couple of blocks from City Hall.

Unlike Byron, or, for that matter, Xerxes, Ms. McLaughlin didn’t have to swim the Hellespont, but for all that, there was, for her, a bit of hell in creating this script.

She had previously put her hand to six of the plays of Euripides, notably a 2002 update of “Helen” that Jean-Paul Sartre might have envied, wisecracks and all; but “The Persians,” a drama not amenable to wisecracks, was her first one-on-one with Aeschylus. And it wouldn’t have taken place if the United States hadn’t proceeded into war against Iraq three short months ago.

“I was commissioned to do it very, very quickly when the war started,” says Ms. McLaughlin — the person who commissioned the work being N.A.T. founder and artistic director Tony Randall, whom she until that moment had never met.

“He wanted to do ‘The Persians’ right now, and he canceled the rest of his season. This, it turns out, is one of Tony’s favorite plays. When he started the National Actors Theatre he had 10 plays he wanted to do, and ‘The Persians’ was at the top of the list. Tony Randall is a very erudite and passionate gentleman, and this, now, is his response to a crisis in American diplomacy.”

Well and good, but Ellen McLaughlin, the tall, striking playwright/actress who first soared into view as the flying angel of Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America,” was at that precise moment in March moving house and home from her and her husband’s house in Nyack, N.Y., to an apartment in Greenwich Village.

“A temporary apartment in the West Village. We’re renovating our house in Nyack, so I was moving everything into the garage. Of course,” she adds dryly, “my husband” — musician, composer, performer Rinde Eckert — “was out of town. In Italy, actually. At an artists’ retreat, putting together a piece with two other artists.

“So there it was. I had two weeks to write the play. I also had bronchitis. I sort of didn’t sleep for about six days. No, we don’t have kids but we do have a dog, that’s enough responsibility. Three walks a day.”

Pressure seems to be endemic for playwright McLaughlin. She wrote “Helen,” breaking a writer’s block, in three straight 12-hour days.

In the two weeks she had for “The Persians,” she also first read “as many translations as I could lay my hands on, there are about nine, and then made certain to put all of them away before I went to work. They all have virtues, especially one by Edith Hall, but some are scholarly and literally unactable.” (Next season the Pearl Theater on St. Mark’s Place stages a different translation of “Persians.”)

The jury is in and the verdict is that Ellen McLaughlin’s “Persians” is not only actable but very well acted by Michael Stuhlbarg (Xerxes), Roberta Maxwell (his mother, Queen Attosa), Len Cariou (his late father, Darius), Brennan Brown (a messenger) and all the rest of the cast under the direction of Ethan McSweeney.

“It’s the best production I’ve ever had,” says Ms. McLaughlin, the self-categorized academic-brat daughter of an architect-editor-history professor father, a professor-and-novelist mother.

“Amazing to be with a [theater] company that doesn’t stint when it comes to the work. Tony? He comes around quite a lot. He loves taking part. I was too busy writing to be in on the casting — or the auditioning for all sorts of roles that I cut.”

For all her experience with Euripides, she found Aeschylus to be a different cup of tea and “The Persians” to be “a very difficult play — and I was having difficulty finding why it was so timely until I got inside it. Then I realized it’s one of the greatest antiwar plays of all time, right up there with ‘The Trojan Women.’ ”

Aeschylus himself (525-456 B.C.) fought against the Persians at Marathon (490 B.C.), at Salamis (481 B.C.) and in two other history-changing battles.

“What I like about the Greeks — all three of them, Sophocles, Aeschylus, Euripedes — is that they’re unsentimental about war. They understand it,” she says. “All three were war veterans. What we know about Aeschylus is that on his tomb it states he was a veteran of Marathon. He had no interest in being remembered as a playwright,” says — or conjectures — this latter-day playwright.

“And rather than do the easy thing, which would have been to write about the great Greek victory in the battle of Salamis, he decided to write from the point of view of the defeated enemy. It’s one of the most remarkable acts of compassionate imagination in all drama.

“I can’t think of anything including Shakespeare that equals it. Shakespeare was writing for patrons, whereas the Greeks were writing for the citizenry. Everybody in the audience had fought in, or witnessed, those battles.”

To Ellen McLaughlin, “The Persians” is a play “that warns us of the perils of conquest and imperialism — this rolling catastrophe of war, never-ending, soul-sapping, civilization-destroying. Never ends and does no good whatsoever.”

Where Persia was is now Iran. Where the Persian empire reached west and north is now Iraq. “The end will come soon enough,” says Darius, father of Xerxes, in Ellen McLaughlin’s take on Aeschylus. “Death is long and without music,” says the ghost of Darius. Darius the Great, builder of empires.