Who Will Speak for the Children?

Peter Sellars's Children of Herakles gives theatrical shelter to refugee kids lost in the system.

By Randy Gener

History doesn’t often repeat itself; but it rhymes.—Mark Twain

Although it deals with a subject of timeless pertinence—the spoils of war—the Herakleidae, or Children of Herakles, by Euripides, rarely appears on anyone’s list as one of the greatest hits of Athenian drama. Classical scholars do not regard it as one of the strongest among the extant works in the Greek repertoire. In particular, A.W. Schlegel, in his too-influential “Lectures of Dramatic Art” of 1808, dismissed it, along with Euripides’ Suppliant Women, for what he described as plot deficiencies and poorly drawn characters. Both plays are about the tragic plight of refugees and displaced war victims seeking asylum, but Children of Herakles is troubled by abrupt shifts of tone, a traffic of abstracted personae and a strange, schizoid structure that seems to subtly undermine Euripides’ original purpose in writing it—that is, to praise democracy, inspire patriotic sentiment and instill a war-ravaged people with confidence in themselves and in the government they have created. The drama, to make matters worse, survives only in a mutilated and interpolated version. So why bother to revive it?

“Because this is a good time to catch American democracy, and because the Greeks invented theatre as democracy,” says director Peter Sellars. “Why do I turn to Euripides? To see if democracy is working. And because this play speaks to the refugee situation so powerfully.”

A savior of obscure and dispossessed plays, an iconoclastic artificer of classical theatre, a self-styled champion of cultural activism, Sellars has rescued this little-known, early tragedy by Euripides from the musty void of forgetfulness and linked it to the moral, ethical and political consequences that war poses. Using a slightly tinkered-with English-language translation by Ralph Gladstone, Sellars’s current production of the play has already traveled to the RuhrTriennale Festival in Bottrop, Germany; the Romaeuropa Festival in Italy; and MC93 Baubigny, near Paris, where it closes Dec. 1. A slate of U.S. performances begins Jan. 4 at American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Mass.

Originally performed before Athenian citizens, most likely between 430 and 425 B.C. (thereby placing it during the lifetime of Pericles in the early years of the Peloponnesian War), Children of Herakles belongs to the elaborate cycle of Greek legends that chronicles the terrible curse Herakles inherited at birth—perpetual exile and subjugation, a great misfortune that he bequeaths to his sorry descendants, who are forced out of their native Argos and find themselves continually displaced, since every city throughout the Greek world has closed their borders to them.

The bastard son of Zeus and the mortal woman Alcmene, Herakles was a superhuman figure, popular to the audiences of Euripides’ time but alien to today’s audiences, who are more familiar with the heroic exploits of Oedipus, Perseus, Odysseus and Agamemnon. Cursed by Zeus’s jealous wife Hera, Herakles was banished by his cousin and ancient enemy, Eurystheus, the savage king of Argos. After years of constant drifting, Herakles died in agony upon a pyre in Trachis. But Eurystheus continued to pursue Herakles’ outcast children, who were accompanied by the elderly Iolaus (Herakles’ companion-in-arms) and the bitterly resentful grandmother, Alcmene. Eurystheus was determined to exterminate them all. Euripides’ Children of Herakles begins when the refugees seek shelter at the Temple of Zeus in Marathon (where a handful of noble Greek men defied the groveling battalions of Persia), and a passionate appeal is made before the Athenian assembly to give them sanctuary from state-sponsored genocide.

“I am an American citizen, living in this country, who feels that we have to save what this country stands for,” Sellars declares during an interview in late August in New York City prior to the production’s German debut. We talk early in the evening in a tree-lined pocket-park in Soho, and our conversation continues as we take a subway train to the Upper West Side. “Living in Los Angeles, I have watched my friends arrested by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Services, and they were deported for life,” he says, vigorously shaking his head without mussing a single trademark spiky hair. “It is incredible, and there is no recourse. They cannot be reviewed by any judge or any court. There are thousands of people in INS detention centers, which make the refugee detention centers in Australia look benign. It’s truly shocking. The United States has the most vicious immigration sanctions of any country in the world. The immigration laws are abusive, and the conditions are terrible.” 

Statistics back up Sellars’s view of the INS as jailer and prosecutor. According to the INS itself, the number of foreign minors it has apprehended and held in detention has climbed rapidly in recent years, tripling to more than 5,000 in 2001. The average age in custody is 15, but according to advocacy groups that assist asylum-seekers, some are as young as 18 months. About 75 percent of refugee kids are boys and 25 percent girls.

According to the 2001 U.S. Committee for Refugees, these immigrant minors, part of a rising tide of 35 million refugees or internally displaced persons worldwide, were caught in the crossfire of armed conflict and human rights abuses and are fleeing from genocide, torture, forced military recruitment and child prostitution. In some cases, the families themselves are the source of abuse. The majority of uprooted people come from Sudan, Afghanistan, Palestine, Colombia, Congo-Kinshasa, Angola, Iraq, Burundi, Burma, Sierra Leone, Kosovo, East Timor, Chechnya, Liberia, Nigeria, Uganda and Zambia. By early 2001, there were more than 13 million people uprooted by years of war, repression, civil unrest and politically induced humanitarian emergencies.

“The events after Sept. 11 have made the refugee situation all the more horrifying, needless to say,” Sellars goes on, “Yet if you question any of this, you’re perceived as being not patriotic.”

Just as he did in his earlier productions of Greek classics—Ajax by Sophocles in 1986 and The Persians by Aeschylus in 1993, using Robert Auletta’s translations—the 45-year-old director has assembled an international acting ensemble (from Romania, the Czech Republic, Indonesia and the U.S.) to help reclaim Children of Herakles from centuries of misreading and neglect. His production, Sellars says, aims to abstract the content of the ancient play, raising questions about the possibility of honor, human rights and retribution in contemporary political life. Except for a few small alterations (“President” replaces “king,” and “Allah” is used instead of “Zeus”), Euripides’ text has been left intact. Dominated by a neon-lit, rectangular corral, evoking a detention center or a refugee camp, the stage for the production makes room for the musician Ulzhan Baibussynova, who sings and performs traditional music from Kazakhstan. Sellars’s elegantly bare production does not shift the play’s action to a modern-day setting (as did The Persians, which was relocated to present-day Iraq, and Ajax, which took place in the Pentagon). Nor does he bring to bear the wild, bristling search-and-seizure directorial style that placed an enfant terrible stamp on, say, his space-age version of Handel’s Orlando for ART, his Russian constructivist take on George Gershwin’s Funny Face, his chair-toppling A Seagull, his Figaro set in New York’s Trump Tower and his Don Giovanni set in the cocaine-strewn streets of Spanish Harlem. 

Grounded in scholarship and historical imagination, Sellars’s quintessential modus operandi is to load and layer a classic play with a daring visual mise en scène that does not necessarily relate directly to the text. The flamboyant distancing effects allow him to de-mythologize a subject and to visually expose—(why not say it?) to deconstruct—contemporary social and political issues. 

Indeed, in Children of Herakles, the costumes range from high-powered Armani-type suits and military fatigues to ordinary street clothes and black Muslim shawls. Instead of a tottering old man, a dark-haired young actor portrays the character Iolaus as a zealous invalid in a wheelchair. Actor Julyana Soelistyo (The Golden Child) doubles as the young maiden Macaria and the elderly Alcmene. The final chilling scene, when the fallen head-of-state Eurystheus, dressed in an orange jumpsuit, is brought in chains to a microphone behind clear Plexiglas, deliberately resonates with echoes of the war crimes tribunals in Nuremberg and at The Hague. But considering the showiness of his previous work, the apparent restraint—the humility—with which Sellars has approached Children of Herakles (at least based on the early run-through of the play that I saw in New York City before the production went to Germany) seems quite remarkable.

On the face of it, Sellars’s less-ornamental presentation sends a clear and direct message about Euripidean relevance. Children of Herakles turns a spotlight on the difficult problem of refugees and internally displaced peoples; it explores and questions the limits of democracy’s role in the world-wide crisis of diaspora. Through the process of theatrical metaphor, it exposes stunning correspondences between 5th-century B.C. Athens and our own global society. “The beautiful thing about Greek theatre is that it is poetry, not the newspaper,” Sellars expounds. “It includes everything in its poetic continuum. Always when you are doing an ancient piece, you feel that double tension. You are aware of it being old and being new at the same time.”

The Greek epic plays are composed in the Homerian tradition of the bard, a performance culture that attests to the rise and fall of nations and heroes. “People have now figured out that Greek culture wasn’t homogenous—it came from Asia, Africa and everywhere else,” Sellars notes. “So this idea of Central Asian traditional music from Kazakhstan courses through the forms of Indo-European traditions. I need to touch that very rich tradition, to feel the spaciousness of this music, to inject a kind of metaphysics that is not an opera of emotion.”

Emphasizing the urgency of Euripides’ play is only part of the picture. Sellars has made several risky but immediately relevant choices, socially conscious gestures that strive to embrace the dynamics of community-based performance. At each stop Children of Herakles incorporates a chorus of refugee youth, recruited from the local communities of displaced peoples, a stand-in for the eponymous descendants of Herakles. During one poignant moment in the play, the refugees come down from the stage to thank audience members for granting them sanctuary. In each setting, the composition of refugee cultures differs. In Germany, the young kids were Kurds. In Italy, the teenaged refugees come from Rwanda, Columbia, Yugoslavia, Albania and Romania. In Paris, they include Moroccans, Algerians, Chinese and Vietnamese. 

In Cambridge, three human-rights organizations—the Carr Center for Human Rights, the Nobel Peace Prize?winning Physicians for Human Rights and the International Institute of Boston—are recruiting Boston refugees and displaced teenagers from Cambodia, Nep?l, Ethiopia, El Salvador, Somalia, Sudan and Brazil. These groups are also helping Sellars organize pre-performance discussions and first-hand testimonials. TV commentators and public figures who deal with foreign policy issues will be assigned speeches from Euripides that they will deliver during the play as concerned members of the chorus of Athenian citizens. After the performance, there will be screenings of documentary films shot in refugee centers from around the world. So even if Children of Herakles is one of the shortest plays in the Greek repertoire—it lasts 90 minutes, two hours at Sellars’s ritualistic pace—the entire affair at ART will be one long evening.

Certainly, the bluntness of plopping actual refugees in a play where they occupy a highly visible role on stage but seldom utter a word or break into song reverberates with profound meaning: In both the play and the real world, refugee children maintain an enigmatic silence at the center of the political turmoil and warfare. Vulnerable to abuses in their homelands, they often arrive alone either by crossing a U.S. border or passing through a U.S. port of entry with the assistance of distant relatives or smugglers. Guilty of nothing more than entering America illegally, one-third of unaccompanied child refugees in the custody of the INS (according to the Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children, an advocacy group) share prison cells with youthful offenders in juvenile halls, even when these INS-detained children are not deliquent. Although U.S. law grants them the right to pursue asylum, less than half of the children are represented by legal counsel; they are frequently denied access to the social and translation services. Many are deported without their claims for asylum ever being heard.

One Saturday evening in late October, Sellars and I rendezvous in a busy cafe in the Upper West Side before he returns to Italy, where he has had well-publicized meetings with young refugees from Rwanda and Cambodia. An ebullient Sellars reports that he has implemented some changes that hew even closer to Euripides’ original intent. Most notably he has recast Iolaus with a much older actor, the Czech Jan Triska. “I had abstracted Ioalus too much, and I just can’t cut that corner with Euripides,” he confesses. The chorus of TV commentators and public figures, moreoever, will be situated in front of the audience with microphones, like panelists. “This makes total sense, because TV people represent the public as spokespersons,” he says. “The play has more individualized chorus members and fewer big choral interludes.” Conceptually, the director hopes, his mechanism for the chorus will be emblematic of the spirit of representative democracy. “Today we have this notion that some theatre is political theatre—but in Greece, all theatre was part of the political system. It was like a government function. You couldn’t have government without theatre, because theatre was the place that let you go into greater depth than politicians were willing to go. So the Greeks made theatre as a practice for communities, a way to form a community.” In short, as Sellars sees it, theatre is a rehearsal for political life.

But is it also a rehearsal for democracy? Does it prepare proactive, informed and noble citizens? What is the value of truth, the necessity of justice and the role of dissent in a free marketplace of ideas? In particular, does Children of Herakles instill patriotic feeling and national pride in support of war? Or was the play written with something else in mind, something more cunningly ironic, something intended for a more sophisticated mind? Didn’t the scholar L.H. Greenwood, after all, observe in Aspects of Euripidean Tragedy that Euripides often “says one thing but means another”?

As it happens, one of the reasons Children of Herakles recommended itself to Sellars—and it is one of the reasons for the play’s underestimation—is its underlying ambiguity. Euripides was popular with ancient audiences because he liked to flatter Athens and its heroic past. So evident was his desire to seduce audiences with glittery special effects and surprising reversals that the comic poets mocked his work as katapugosune, “an easy lay.” But even in early works like this one, the seeds of his later, impassioned opposition to war were germinating. 

“What I love about Euripides is that he does make you proud to be an Athenian,” Sellars avers. “We watch the Athenians stand up for the rights of refugees, and we think, ‘Wow, we are this cool country. We’re not buckling. Our leaders are not operating out of fear. Yes, this is what this country stands for.’ Most of the play is positive reinforcement. They fight the battle and actually win.”

The play’s encomium of the noble Athenian spirit is certainly correspondent with American ideals, core values and sense of honor. “The play does not lecture people about how awful they are,” Sellars avers. “It says, ‘This is a great country’—great because it stands for generosity and freedom and liberty. We are beacons to the world. Every other country has turned these refugees away, but Athens alone said, ‘No. We stand for helping people in need. The gods are generous to us because we are generous to others.’”

But since no single protagonist dominates its action, a spirit of argument and analysis pervades the play—ultimately it is not a jingoistic work. Composed in the general manner of Suppliant plays, Children of Herakles follows certain genre conventions (it covers considerable time and takes no account of actual distance)—but it breaks with prevailing forms and practice by rejecting the tragic tradition in which the charcters tend to be larger than life and the chorus of protagonists it was named after deliver grandiose odes. An innovator who had a special taste for contrasting tone and mood, Euripides dealt with human emotions in a realistic way. He may have, during the later and oppressive decades of the Peloponnesian War, incurred the hostility of fellow citizens because of his denunciation of war and its grotesque futility, a recurrent theme that soared to mournful lamentation in The Trojan Women. “Children of Herakles is not a defective play,” Sellars says. “All those dopey textual commentators keep making judgments about it without actually seeing it.”

Euripides’ text in Children of Herakles is an incongruous mingling of myth, superstition, miracle, history and abject realism. What unifies it are two great debates. In the first half, Euripides tosses a wrench into the plot when an oracle suddenly expresses doubt about Athens’s victory in defending the refugees. According to the oracle, a virgin of noble birth must be sacrificed to assure triumph. A momentary impasse ensues—until Macaria, a daughter of Herakles, saves the day. Much like Iphigenia in Iphigenia in Aulis and Polyxene in Hecuba, Macaria comes forward and goes willingly and proudly to her death. According to Sellars, the sacrifice of Macaria, whom he has compared to a Palestinian suicide bomber, represents “the human costs of our global economy.” “All over the world, at this moment, people are being sacrificed,” he says. “In all wars, from Rwanda and Dresden to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, women and children are in the line of fire.”

The last half of Children of Herakles concerns itself with the aftermath of war and takes the form of another emotionally shattering debate. The despot Eurystheus has been taken captive and is dragged on in chains, a prisoner. The closing scene belongs to Alcmene. Crazed in triumph, bursting out in passionate hatred, she rails at Eurystheus, her family’s archenemy, crying out for his execution. But according to Athenian custom, a person who was captured alive may not be killed; the right of a prisoner to his life is just as sacred as the right of a refugee to seek asylum.

As for Eurystheus, he is passive and unmoved. Dark staccato voice amplified by a microphone, he calmly states that the blood feud in their family began before he was born—and that all his life he had been acting out of fear of losing his throne to one of Herakles’ children. 

“Children of Herakles is a very positive play, but it’s not exactly a tragedy, because the kids are ultimately liberated,” Sellars posits. “It is also very disturbing. You see at the end of the play that the old woman has been scarred for life. One of the really difficult things in the world today is watching political decisions being made under the influence of permanently damaged people. One of the most painful aspects of the Israel-Palestine conflict is that all these very damaged people are still making decisions. This play is a clinical recounting of the phases real refugees go through.”

In Euripidean drama, the quest for retribution and the pure exercise of power often result in a slovenly graveyard of victims, martyrs, monsters and heroes. His humanistic plays enact messy quagmires and perverse conundrums that logjam even the best of democracies. History is not the same as myth. “Democracies don’t want to get into complicated questions,” Sellars believes. “That’s why right now people are voting for these outrageous simplifications, when in fact it was never that simple, and it will never be that simple. The internal fiber of democracy is not in such good shape right now; it needs to be rewoven. That means human bonding, and every pair of hands counts. This is why I am making a space for real refugees on stage. I want to weave these dialogues of participation into a society of spectatorship.”

A Nation of Outcasts

A 15-year-old girl who escaped the civil war in Sierra Leone to join her father in the U.S. An 18-year-old girl from Somalia, whose baby sister was killed in the political chaos in Mogadishu and found herself passing through the refugee camps in Uganda before arriving to the U.S.

A young Kurdistan boy, also 15 years old, whose father was killed in front of him and his family when he was just five. An 18-year-old girl who suffered domestic abuse in El Salvador and in America. A 16-year-old Afghanistan boy whose family fled in 1993 to Pakistan, where he was a child laborer.

A 42-year-old therapist, originally from Iran, who spent eight years in jail for her antiwar activities during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s.

In Fairfax, Va., these six refugees from war-torn homelands are gathering together to share their stories of being uprooted by years of war, repression, civil unrest and violence—how they fled their native countries to save their lives and adapted to the culture of the new country where they sought asylum. Assembled in a semi-circle of black chairs on a white rug, these young people are performing in Children of War, the latest installment in Ping Chong & Company’s Undesirable Elements documentary-theatre series, which runs Dec. 5?15 at Theater of the First Amendment at George Mason University. Co-produced by the Center for Multicultural Human Services, Children of War will then travel to the National Child Traumatic Stress Initiative’s network of centers in Boston, New York City and Los Angeles.

Since its 1992 debut, Undesirable Elements has undergone several theme-specific permutations, such as Gaijin (which means foreigner) and Secret History (which focused on personal stories). Local communities sometimes determine the specific thrust of a production. In Charleston, S.C., for instance, race and slavery became dominating concerns. But by giving first-hand voices to refugees and immigrants in America, Children of War seeks to uncover the commonality of experience that war creates. “In the past, Undesirable Elements has had participants who were refugees and traumatized victims,” says Chong. “I know, being a veteran of this process, that it is incredibly healing to access your past and bear witness with your own testimonial.”

In preparing the script for Children of War, Chong conducted extensive interviews. On stage, the young refugees will offer personal information, family history, songs and reminiscences, often in their native tongue. They will be accompanied by an adult child-trauma therapist from the Center for Multicultural Human Services in Falls Church, Va. Born in Tehran, she has worked as a nurse-assistant in the frontlines of the Iran-Iraq war. “I wanted to include a therapist, another point of view that will deal with what it means to undergo trauma therapy,” Chong adds. “She will tell her own story and give another level of meaning to the piece. I am honored to have someone who can speak to the statistics and the methodology of healing, as well as having experienced being a refugee.” 

Although it may include information that deals with U.S. immigration policy, Children of War isn’t meant to be a political tract, Chong says. If anything, this oral history project gives a human face to the headlines, offering a kind of private microcosm to the reality of war. 

“Most Americans have a misconception that immigrants and refugees will take their jobs away,” the director says. “People connect to this show by bringing their own life experiences to it. In America, we’re very insular. This project is a way to open up dialogue, to create a bridge to understanding not just the experience of war but what it means to leave everything one knows and come to another world.” 

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