High Humor: Comedy is all Greek to Second City founder Bernard Sahlins
-News etc., Comedy, Recommended Comedy Shows, Recommended Shows, Theater No Comments »By Dennis Polkow
“If Aristophanes were alive today,” says an elderly but still twinkling Bernard Sahlins, “he would be on cable television.” It may a seem a long way from the satirical ancient Greek playwright to the Second City some two-and-a-half millennia later, but Sahlins, a founder of Chicago’s legendary comedy troupe who is directing a production of “Lysistrata” this weekend, puts the timeframe in perspective: “Long before Second City, when I was directing ‘straight’ plays, including the Greek tragedies, Claudia Cassidy [then Chicago Tribune critic] wrote that I had directed the worst production in 2,000 years.” Well, she ought to know.
Sahlins says that he has always been interested in Greek drama, a love that was in part fostered by his time studying the classics at the University of Chicago, where he graduated in 1943. “A University of Chicago education was once described as ‘Casting imaginary pearls before real swine.’ But don’t use that.
“You know, the high point of Greek drama only lasted for about eighty-six years. The period of Sophocles, Euripides, Aeschylus and Aristophanes passed quickly and then there was nothing except street theater until the Middle Ages and the development of church plays. The era of the playwright, the individual dramatist, did not emerge again until the Renaissance and the phenomenon of the playwright as we think of it is a fairly modern phenomenon that really fully came about in the nineteenth century.” Read the rest of this entry »



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By Whitney Dibo