Crazed Women (The Bakkhai)

Of the hundred or so plays Euripides wrote in his lifetime only nineteen survive. Not all of them won first prize at the festivals, but BAKKHAI did. “From the outset, it is essential to understand that in Greek theater, as in fact in Shakespearean theater, the self that is really at stake is to be identified with the male, while the woman is assigned the role of the radical other.” -Froma I Zeitlin “Intoxicatingly beautiful, coldly sordid, at one moment baffling, at the next thrilling us with the mystic charm of wood and hillside, this drama stands unique among Euripides’s works.” -Gilbert Norwood “… a tragic parody of a comic theme, which we have in THE BACCHAE [THE BAKKHAI], is really troublesome, and furthermore rare before our time and the great use of it by Samuel Beckett … THE BACCHAE makes it plain that some uses of comedy do not diminish tragedy or ‘relieve’ it but indeed augment it.” -Donald Sutherland “The most obvious influence of Euripides’s BAKKHAI on Christian mythology lies in its concept of Dionysos as the suffering Son of God.” -Arthur Evans “Sometimes Euripides seems like a religious man, and again, like a charlatan. Of course he was neither. He was a playwright.” -John Jay Chapman