Teaching really woke me up, and I owe it all to Michael Kahn, who offered me this job at Juilliard. For them, it s not boring or old or stately or at all static. It s stimulating, intellectually and emotionally. And it is not just her students that share her enthusiasm for these classics texts. In a country that has grown numb from television and the pedestrian offerings of popular culture, Akalaitis believes that the hunger for these epic, wrenching plays is universal.
People love Greek drama.
People love serious productions, she says. Akalaitis pauses here. She considers her next words her final ones carefully, and when she speaks this time, she sounds less like a god and more like Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods to benefit humanity. These plays like The Trojan Women are incredible stories with enormous emotion. People say, Oh, the Greeks are just like us.