The shortening here is reasonable, although the age of the choruses is definitely underplayed. In the first encounter between the choruses, the women’s chorus successfully fends off the attack on the Acropolis by men’s chorus. The most significant change Einhorn has made to Aristophanes’ text is the curtailment and liberties he has taken with the choruses and their songs. Look at how many statues have had their penises chopped off.” I have appended a few quibbles with some minor inaccuracies at the end of this review. If you keep walking around like that, someone may try to cut you short. Einhorn simply changes this to: “Nor will I pretend to be a lioness he has caught in the forest.” Or, when near the end of the play the Athenian and Spartan delegates have arrived at the Acropolis in full tumescence and they are told to cover themselves lest a “herm-cutter” see them, Einhorn capitalizes on what is a common condition of ancient statues and writes, “You’d better be careful. As much as I enjoy this image, it certainly demands an explanatory note. For example, when Lysistrata swears the women to an oath of abstinence, she includes on the list of prohibitions that they will not “crouch like the lioness on a cheese grater” (l. For the most part, he has made good choices. Einhorn has subdivided the play into ten scenes, several quite short, which makes for an appropriately fast and lively pace.Īs a consequence of prioritizing performance, one of the most obvious adjustments Einhorn makes is to eliminate almost any historical or cultural reference that would require a footnote. It is clear in fact that his adaptation focuses on performance values, and his main objective is to come up with a version of the play that will work best as a staged production, enjoyable by all. In all fairness, Einhorn never explicitly says that rescuing Lysistrata from the pruderies of a by-gone era was his primary motivation (although the cover, showing a statue of Aphrodite wearing a strap-on penis, might suggest otherwise). Indeed I suspect that Einhorn was not familiar with either Jeffrey Henderson’s 1996 translation or Sarah Ruden’s from 2003, 1 because his introduction implies that all the versions of Lysistrata he had seen or read were rather tame and staid, whereas Henderson and Ruden are neither by any stretch of the imagination. He writes in his introduction that he used a computer program to see a literal translation of the Greek, and also consulted “several very old translations of the play.” He doesn’t specify who those translators were except to say that one of the translations came from the Victorian era. Einhorn is a playwright and the artistic director of Untitled Theater Company #61, based in New York. Edward Einhorn’s play is an adaptation of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, not a translation.

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