Humanities on Stage

Suicide Mission
David Powelstock’s seemingly impossible task was to make The Suicide funny. But as it turned out, the assignment wasn’t quite as hard as the title of the play might suggest.

A professor of Russian language and literature in the Department of German, Russian, and Asian Languages and Literature, Powelstock wrote a new translation and adaptation of Nikolai Erdman’s classic Soviet-era satire. Powelstock’s version of The Suicide, produced by the Brandeis Theater Company, ran February 9 to 19 at the Spingold Theater Center.

The biggest challenge for Powelstock was making the Russian brand of humor resonate with an American “What we have is the text, but we don’t always know who is saying what, and there are no stage directions,” Muellner says. So Muellner’s students set out to learn as much about Greek theater as possible in order to make highly educated guesses about dialogue and staging. “We tried to inform ourselves about every aspect of Greek theater and the productions in Athens,” Muellner says. “Figuring out how the tragedies were performed is a complex process of reconstruction. We wanted to do something as precise as we could.” audience. In some instances, that just wasn’t possible.

“I had to take a fair amount of creative liberty,” Powelstock says. “There were some Russian jokes that simply weren’t going to work no matter how you translated them. The previous translations were very faithful and sounded like translations.”

The Suicide tells the story of Semyon Podsekalnikov, an unemployed Russian whose wife thinks he wants to take his own life. She tells a neighbor, and word spreads. Before long, he is besieged by people from a variety of discontented groups who want him to turn his suicide into a gesture on their behalf.

Tragedy Plus Time
The Bacchae may be a well-known Greek tragedy, but for students in classical studies professor Leonard Muellner’s ancient Greek drama class last fall, it was also a mystery.

As the students quickly discovered, preparing a script for the Brandeis Theater Company’s spring production of Euripides’ classic about the Greek god Dionysus entailed much more than simply translating Greek into English.

Although accessing The Bacchae text, which was originally written on scrolls made from the stalks of the reedy papyrus plant, is just a quick Google search away, the play no longer exists in its complete form. Salient details required for a faithful production have been lost through the generations. So Muellner’s students set out to learn as much about Greek theater as possible in order to make highly educated guesses about dialogue and staging.

“We tried to inform ourselves about every aspect of Greek theater and the productions in Athens,” Muellner says. “Figuring out how the tragedies were performed is a complex process of reconstruction. We wanted to do something as precise as we could.”