Socrates Now or The Apology Project: From Greek Roots to Transnational Routes

Abstract

Since the 1980s, Greek American theatre practitioners have been making their presence increasingly felt in the theatre and performing arts landscape of the United States (U.S.). Their work evinces that Greek American theatre has come a long way from the Modern Greek Diaspora theatre, which began in Chicago at the end of the nineteenth century and flourished in several U.S. cities during the interwar period. The motives, springboards, and driving forces of contemporary Greek American theatre are markedly different from those underpinning the work of early agents of Greek American theatre in the U.S., whether individual practitioners, troupes, or companies. The aim now is not to serve the ethnic imperatives of cultivating the Greek language, spreading Greek culture, and staying in close contact with the ancestral roots. Instead of serving the centripetal forces of Greek history and tradition, as well as the idea(l)s of ethnic identity and belonging, the latest works of Greek American theatre artists are animated by the centrifugal energy of the desire for a reconfigured transnational and transcultural selfhood. Their commitments lie more squarely than ever before with extroversion, movement, mixture, and interaction. The present paper discusses Yannis Simonides’ Socrates Now (or The Apology Project) as an illustrative example of the new directions Greek American theatre has embarked upon in the last few decades. It places special emphasis on what this work reveals about the emerging trends in Greek American theatre’s reception of the Greek classics—the latter being the erstwhile core of Greek American theatrical activity in the U.S. We argue that Simonides’ Socrates Now offers an alternative understanding of Greek American theatre and (its) classical reception praxis by acting upon the will to assemble a viable and generative, performing and performable, Greekness from heterogeneous formal and conceptual elements, in line with an ethic that we shall call, after Vassilis Lambropoulos (2016), transcompositional.