Consider the scene: It’s the first week of March 2003, and the world waits on bated breath for a war that seems increasingly inevitable. From New York to Moscow, newspapers overflow with dire news–diplomatic breakdowns at the UN, menace and bluster from Baghdad and troop buildups in Kuwait.

Suddenly, news breaks of a sex farce.

On March 3, theatre troupes and ad-hoc citizens’ committees from around the globe come out to stage productions of Lysistrata, a wild comedy by Aristophanes dating from 411 BC. The show is mounted in Karachi, Pakistan, in a production created by a women’s collective; in London, England across the square from Westminster Abbey; in Washington, D.C. outside of the White House; in Hollywood, California starring celebrities; in Patras, Greece in the original Greek–all told, over 1,000 productions staged worldwide.

Conceived by two New York actresses and peace activists, propagated primarily via the Internet, and calculated to steal precious headline space from the war machine, The Lysistrata Project was a very modern sort of protest–yet one taking its text from a decidedly uncontemporary play.

But to the protestors–and to the media outlets who gave it extensive coverage–it was all perfectly a propos. In Lysistrata, the women of Athens see a war they disagree with and (to make a pun Aristophanes would have loved) refuse to take it lying down. It’s a piece of theatre speaking across the centuries, arguing with wit and craft across the millennia against unjust and ill-timed aggression.

Part of what made the March 3rd protest startling was that it was born in America, and American political theatre is often considered a vanishing or vanished breed. But for Aristophanes and the rest of the Big Five dramatists of the Athenian democracy–Aeschylus, Euripides, Sophocles, and Menander–there was no such thing as political theatre. Very simply, theatre was politics.

In 5th century Athens, "Comedy and tragedy are both very political…and both very embedded in the political life of the city," explains Timothy Power, a classics professor at the University of Washington who’s written extensively on the theatre of the ancient world.

One example of that embeddedness is that when one of the biennial drama festivals rolled around–festivals that took place in the center of the city for audiences of up to 20,000–one very wealthy Athenian would be assigned to bear the cost of outfitting each production. It was part of his civic duty, and it cost him about the same as another of his occasional civic duties: outfitting a full warship for battle.

Meanwhile, the less well-off Athenians were rounded up to appear in the choruses of the shows. The whole tradition of theatrical festival wasn’t just state-run; it was considered central to Athens’ burgeoning democracy.

"The key thing about ancient theatre and politics is that these plays were effectively commissioned by the state and put on in front of the citizens," says Hugh Denard, editor of "Didaskalia," which covers ancient performance. The audience and the performers "are the same people who are day by day going into the assembly and voting on questions of policy…so theatre acts as a kind of constant education for the democracy."

Indeed, Aristopanes during his career was given several awards by the Athenian government for giving useful civic advice through his plays, although the Athenians didn’t really listen to him when it came to the folly of the war. When Lysistrata appeared in 411 BC, the Peloponnesian War had been going on for 19 years. Athens was the aggressor, trying to expand its empire at the expense of rival city-states like Sparta and Corinth.

"Athens is this powerhouse of democracy," says Denard of the "fervent" political period. "And this is the weird thing. Here’s a democracy forcing its democratic prerogative to rule the rest of the world as an empire." Bad news: "She loses. Then there’s tyrants, there’s an oligarchy, and that is the end of real free Athenian democracy for a long time."

What exactly were Aristophanes’ thoughts, it’s difficult to say. When writing Lysistrata, it’s possible he was declaring himself fervently against the war; or perhaps he was ambivalent about the war but was fervently opposed to the system of democratic assembly propagating it; or maybe he just thought the premise of Athenian women withholding sex was too hilarious to not use.

So perhaps the politics of a given play, like whether or not it’s any good, is simply in the eye of the beholder.

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You could certainly say so about the 16th and 17th centuries, when Shakespeare and his contemporaries learned to tread lightly when dealing with politics; there was a lot more at stake than bad reviews.

Ben Johnson figured this out early in his career when, as co-author of something called The Isle of Dogs, he was tossed in the slammer for sedition–indeed, the play was considered so slanderous to the authorities that all of London’s theatres were closed for several months.

Johnson’s career recovered because he got smart, and so did Shakespeare. Both were writers who danced wittily around their political subject matter, creating what Gail Kern Paster at the Folger Shakespeare Library calls "a kind of encoding of political speech in dramatic form."

She cites Johnson’s Sejanus, "a portrait of Rome with a very negative portrayal of an absentee Emperor, which can certainly be read…as at least as having a sort of criticism directed to the king." At the time, that would have meant King James, and if Sejanus was meant to satirize him he seemingly didn’t notice–James was happy to have Johnson write masques for him a few years later.

The director Tina Packer is one of Shakespeare’s notable contemporary interpreters, and she finds the same kind of wry subterfuge throughout the canon. Like in The Winter’s Tale where Paulina challenges Leontes, and kind of almost calls him a tyrant, and defies his threats to burn her alive.

"She says it is a heretic that makes the fire, not she that burns in it," Packer explains. "Now, King James was burning a lot of witches at this point, so it was a very political point to make vis a vis women and the monarch…but James probably wouldn’t see it because he thought of himself as a very wise monarch and wouldn’t associate himself with Leontes. [But] I think if you were somebody who was really thinking about, should we be burning all these witches? Is this not a bit rough on these women that are getting burned? Is our argument altogether sane? Then maybe you would see that Shakespeare thinks it’s a heretic that makes the fire.

"If you don’t want to think that, then it’s just a conversation in a play."

We might guess at what Shakespeare thought, but, like Aristophanes, the guy didn’t write prefaces to make this stuff explicit. As Paster points out, this means that anyone can say they know what his politics were–and many have.

"Certainly there was a feeling in an earlier generation that Shakespeare was a kind of conservative spokesman for authority, a spokesman for order, and that the plays are really a kind of celebration of things as they are," Paster explains "Then that generation was challenged…by critics who are themselves politically left, who say not at all, that his theatre was an oppositional institution."

Libby Appel, director of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF), is settling in right now to direct Richard II. She figures that "there’s never been a writer more politically astute than William Shakespeare." His plays, she says, are loaded with political content; indeed, whole chunks of Richard II were so controversial that they weren’t allowed to be performed until after Queen Elizabeth died.

"Richard II is completely political–in fact, during Queen Elizabeth’s time…the deposition scene in the middle of the play was not permitted to be performed, because it was too scary a prospect, to show the public the ability to depose a monarch."

But for her, says Appel, all that is beside the point.

"The play is about a hell of a lot more than that, and that’s what constantly draws me to Shakespeare…as much as the play is about the politics of power, it is far more a story of the struggle of an individual."

Interestingly, Appel’s OSF is currently producing a much lauded political play, David Edgar’s Continental Divide: Daughters of the Revolution, and she views it similarly to how she views doing Richard II.

It’s "thrilling," Appel says, to be doing political theatre, but even more thrilling "are the deeper issues. These question of principles, the question of family, the question of life’s journey."

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Whether Edgar’s play heralds a brave new age of political playwriting in the United States is a question we’re holding over till later in this series. Suffice it to say that when asked to name the most politicized period in American theatre, historians don’t often say today–usually they say the 1930s. In the decade of the Depression, art became politics in a more explicit and more aggressive way than it had before, and theatre was right at the forefront.

"The whole decade began with a lot of Workers Theatre productions in union halls, shop floors, all over the place," says Bruce McConachie, a co-editor of "Theatre for Working-Class Audiences in the United States, 1830-1980." He names Clifford Odets union-hall drama Waiting for Lefty as "perhaps one of the better results of that sort of work. But people were definitely engaged in political theatre all across the country, all across the spectrum of class."

The Workers Theatre borrowed tactics and motivation (the use of theatre as a challenge to the bourgeois order) directly from Russian theories of agitprop. Among the rallying cries of the workers theatre was "Art is a Weapon."

When the Federal Theatre Project was born, as a Works Progressive Administration initiative to create jobs for artists, it borrowed theatrical methodology from The Workers Theatre, a fact which did not go unnoticed when the anti-communist House Un-American Activities Committee swung into action later in the decade and hauled in FTP director Hallie Flanagan for questioning (leading to the classic exchange in which one representative asked Flanagan whether Christopher Marlowe was a communist).

But, McConachie says, the political fervency of the era wasn’t limited to The Workers Theatre and the FTP. He names playwrights like Lillian Hellman, John Howard Lawson and Robert Sherwood. "Even playwrights like [S.N.] Berhman, who writes drawing room comedy," McConachie explains, "can’t avoid the politics of the day."

The late 1960s was another important period for political theatre in American history, when theatre artists aligned themselves with the successive social movements that pushed themselves to the forefront of the national conversation. Explains Northwestern theatre historian Tracy C. Davis, the late 60s saw "theatre aligned with an anti-Vietnam war movement, and a radical critique of racial politics in the US, and also a radical critique of gender politics."

It was a time when groups like Bread and Puppet were born, spilling out onto the streets in "peace parades," to bring their message directly to the people who they felt needed to hear it–borrowing ideas of theatre-as-social-agitation from Brecht, and from The Workers Theatre. "You can see how much theatre did play a part in" that period, says Packer–who notes a similar role played by the Berliner Ensemble in the fall of Communist Germany. "All the alternative theatre groups were out in the streets, making what was maybe somewhat simplistic theatre but nevertheless very dramatic theatre."

We know that Lysistrata did not end the Peloponnesian War, nor did The Lysistrata Project stop the war with Iraq. So was it the landslide of anti-war plays produced off-off-Broadway that ended the Vietnam War? Probably not. But theatre will continue to take its place in politics, and vice versa.

Next time we’ll try and figure out just what kind of politics theatre tries to do.

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Part 2: Politics, Propoganda and Theatre

Part 3: How political is the American Theatre?

Part 4: World Politics and Theatre