On January 29th and 30th, the walls of Armstrong Browning Library resounded with the original Latin text of a second-century BC Roman comedy. The Baylor Classics Department, in collaboration with Baylor’s chapter of Eta Sigma Phi, performed Plautus’ Casina as a part of their yearly tradition of performing Greek and Roman plays in their original languages.
Casina tells the story of Lysidamus, an old man desperately in love with a young slave girl, to the consternation of his wife, Cleostrata. Their opposing plots to marry Casina to their favored slaves involve hilarious hijinks that culminate in a ridiculous wedding. Cleostrata dresses up her male slave as Casina and sends him to the wedding as the bride; let us say that Lysidamus and his slave Olympio exit the play without much dignity left.
The staging of such a show presents inherent difficulties. The Classics Department chose to perform in a language that almost no one speaks, leaving the audience only with visual clues. The plots and themes of Roman comedy are also somewhat uncomfortably situated on a Christian campus. Unlike last year’s Antigone, which portrays the triumph of devotion against corruption, Casina puts to the stage lecherous old men, wedding nights gone wrong, and characters whose passions always trump their morals. In other words, the project might initially seem a complete fool’s errand.
I have been involved with these shows every year, from timidly working the teleprompter for Cyclops to starring as Antigone and helping to direct Casina. These shows, and the people who make them happen, have been one of the brightest highlights of my undergraduate life.
Samantha Wren, who played Cleostrata in Casina, told me, “This is what I look forward to most out of spring semester.” In fact, she started her Classics minor because she was enthralled by Cyclops. “Performing a really old play in a dead language just feels really special,” she said. It’s not just from the students’ side, either. Dr. Jacqueline Jones, a co-director of the play, said, “[Directing] brought me so much more joy than I was expecting. It’s been absolutely delightful to work with all of the students.” An experience so unique and singular must bind people together.
One motivation of our forays into theatre is undergraduate interest. Dr. David J. White, another co-director of Casina, said, “I’m always astonished and gratified by the enthusiasm of the students for doing this.” We always throw the show together in one and a half weeks, which is an incomprehensible miracle to me. Within one week, we go from tripping over unfamiliar words to delivering dramatic monologues. And somehow, in the middle of all that hard work, we have time to laugh until we cry, design and create a set, and stay on top of our courseloads. “The secret,” Dr. White said, “is getting the students invested, so that it’s their play and not my play that they’re doing.” We receive no course credit for our endeavors; we do it only out of passion for the subject, and that passion is palpable. Not such a fool’s errand, then, after all.
For students who have been reading and translating these plays, performance is a chance to interact with the material in the way it was meant to be experienced.
The benefits go beyond the blessing of community; Dr. White described the play as a “pedagogical exercise.” For students who have been reading and translating these plays, performance is a chance to interact with the material in the way it was meant to be experienced. Isaac Bostic, who played Lysidamus, explained, “This is the closest I feel to living in that time. You’re talking like real people would have talked.” We students get to live in ancient Greece and Rome for a moment and feel a bit of what they might have felt. And on a more practical note, memorizing texts has been shown to be beneficial in language learning .
To translate a work is to change it fundamentally. And so, this one time a year, we don’t.
There’s also philological backing for keeping the original text. Translating comedy is notoriously difficult, and Plautus’ work is no exception. So much of comedy relies on wordplay, something nearly impossible in translation and usually inelegant when achieved. The original work and each translation of it are, simply put, different works of art. The phrasing, the word choice, and even the music of the words themselves are all intentional choices on the part of the artist. To translate a work is to change it fundamentally. And so, this one time a year, we don’t.
But why should anyone care to see a play they cannot understand? If we actors do our job, the audience should understand more than they expect. Wren described to me how her mother is still able to pick up the general ideas and emotions at play, and my own family has a similar experience. Dr. Jones noted, “Many of my students…were still able to follow a lot of the action just because it was so well acted.” Like an opera, it is a lesson in the tradition of storytelling. Dr. Jones explained it as a multicultural experience, saying that we all “need to be able to experience things in cultures very different from our own.” That is what these plays offer us: the ability to compare our culture to another, to recognize commonalities and differences. And most of the time, what we discover are not differences, but rather what Bostic called “the similarities in the human experience, the understanding of love and misery.” These plays offer a supreme example of stepping into another culture, since we must bridge 2,000 years of separation. It is a difficult but endlessly rewarding exercise.
Human nature is deeply troubled, twisted, and ugly sometimes. The comedic aspects of it help us understand that better.
If we care about the continuity of the human experience, we also should give a nod to the continuity of comedy. Both Wren and Dr. White mentioned that Roman comedies show us the same kind of plot we would see in a modern sitcom. The same stock characters appear, the same misunderstandings and misdirection. “A lot of the humor that we get in Plautus has directly given us a lot of our conventions of modern comedy,” Dr. Jones said. And modern comedy bases much its humor in the ridiculous aspects of humans themselves. “It’s not terribly deep,” said Dr. White, “but it says a lot about human nature.” And human nature is deeply troubled, twisted, and ugly sometimes. The comedic aspects of it help us understand that better.
This is our justification for performing somewhat raunchy and problematic comedy on a Christian campus. The Roman world was a violent world. Slavery was normal, sexual violence was common, and the hierarchy of society was unjust. Casina does not shy away from these facts. “We shouldn’t pretend like these things never happened,” Wren stated. Bostic echoed her words: “Comedy points out to us problems and points out to us why we shouldn’t cause them.” We watch comedy, not just to laugh, but also to evaluate the actions of the characters. And in Casina, we see a subversion of the problematic elements of Roman culture, for the lecherous old man does not carry the day.
For Christians, there is an added level of importance to entering the world of Rome: Jesus was born under Roman rule.
Finally, for Christians, there is an added level of importance to entering the world of Rome: Jesus was born under Roman rule. Dr. White spoke about how this world of slavery and violence was the world the early Christians were dealing with. “What was it like for the early Christian church?” he asked. “What were the cultural assumptions that they had to interact with?” The plays that we put on answer those questions. They give us a window into the ideas that the early church had to dismantle in order to preach the Gospel. And they give us a window into how vastly the Gospel has changed the world in the intervening millennia.
As she was praying before our final performance of Casina, my dear friend and co-actor Rachel Jageman laughingly said, “Lord, may even this honor you.” I, for one, believe that prayer was answered in spades.
