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Lysistrata
27 June 2020 @ 9:00 am - 5:00 pm
Written By: Aristophanes
Directed by Megan Dansie
Very funny play, that should be subtitled “The sex strike”. The women stop a war by depriving the men of sex. A translation that is probably by Oscar Wilde.
Ages are fairly flexible (late teens onwards). We encourage diversity of ethnic background. The material is bawdy.
Spartans require comic Scots accents (blame the translator).
BOOKINGS: playreading@adelaiderep.com
AUDITION DATE: Saturday 27 June from 9am-5pm at the ARTS Theatre (53 Angas St, Adelaide).
PERFORMANCE: Performance will be filmed Saturday 21 November 2020 and film release date is Saturday 28 November 2020.
Rehearsals will be held at the ARTS Theatre on Angas St in Adelaide City.
| Role Name | Gender | Stage Age | Role Information |
| Lysistrata | Female | A grand, intelligent, alluring woman, Lysistrata organizes a sex strike not only in her hometown of Athens but in Sparta as well, all in the hope that the men of Greece might peacefully end the bloody, costly Peloponnesian War. She is something of an idealist, and very witty. | |
| Calonice | Female | The fun-loving Athenian woman is the first to respond to her neighbor Lysistrata’s summons at the beginning of the play. However, she conforms more to Athenian gender stereotypes than her neighbor does. She loves soft, fancy garments, and she would rather walk through fire than abstain from having sex. She even slanders her own sex as being superficial, lazy, and unwise. That being said, once she joins Lysistrata’s cause sheproves herself to be sharp-tongued and fierce: she serves as the women’s spokesperson when they swear their Oath to abstain from sex, and she wields a chamber pot in the fight against the Athenian police. | |
| Myrrhine | Female | The conventional Athenian woman Myrrhine arrives guiltily late to Lysistrata’s summons at the beginning of the play, but once there she promises to do anything to end the war, even to cut herself in half like a mackerel—but then she immediately cries out “On with the War!” when asked to abstain from sex. Lysistrata soon persuades Myrrhine to take part in the sex strike, however, and indeed Myrrhine goes on to support the cause by fiercely wielding a blazing lamp against the Athenian police. Toward the end of the play, the fate of Lysistrata’s plot practically rests in Myrrhine’s hands, as she takes the most active role yet in seducing her husband Kinesias and then denying him satisfaction. | |
| Lampito | Female | A brawny representative Spartan, Lampito is the first woman to support Lysistrata’s plot for peace. While the Athenian women seize the Acropolis, Lampito returns to Sparta to organize a sex strike of her own. Per an Athenian ethnic stereotype—and like all the Spartan extras in the play—Lampito comes off as something of an unsophisticated, half-witted bumpkin who speaks a degenerate dialect of Greek. Scottish accent preferred. | |
| Ismenia | Female | A pretty Boiotian girl who comes from an aristocratic family in Thebes, an ally of Sparta in the Peloponnesian League. She accompanies Lampito to Lysistrata’s summons, and remains in Athens as a warmly welcome hostage until Athens and Sparta make peace. She never speaks, but she does repel a policeman by brandishing “a huge pair of pincers.” | |
| Other women (5+) | Female | Younger to middle aged women. | |
| Other women | Older women Chorus. Can be “aged up” if needed. | Chorus lines will be divided between them, and sometime spoken in unison. Old women are fierce and no nonsense. | |
| Magistrate | Male | The embodiment of patriarchal authority, law, and order in Athens, he orders his squad of four police (or rather, Scythian archers, the Athenian equivalent of our police) to arrest the rebels, Although the Magistrate is bullheaded and loathes what he calls the “MORAL CHAOS” brought on by the women, he is also intent on understanding the women’s motives. Lysistrata tries to explain, but when the Magistrate becomes outraged by what he thinks is female presumptuousness, she and her cohorts shut him up by forcibly dressing him up like a woman. Later, the Magistrate takes even worse: when he urges a reinvigoration of the war effort, the women attack him until he staggers offstage. By the play’s end, however, even the Magistrate gets a little drunk and only plays at being an enforcer of the rules. | |
| Cinesias | Male | An Athenian citizen, Myrrhine’s husband, and the father of her baby boy. He approaches the Acropolis afflicted by a nasty attack of love (read: a painful erection) and attempts to seduce his wife, only to be led on and then abandoned. Toward the end of the play, Cinesias is part of the Athenian delegation that, guided by Lysistrata, brokers a peace with the Spartans. | |
| Spartan herald | Male | Scottish accent required. Arrives near the end of the play desperately trying to conceal an enormous erection, as the Spartans have also been sex deprived. | |
| Chorus of Old Men | Male | can be “aged up” if needed | Chorus lines will be divided between them, and sometime spoken in unison. The old men are comic, doddery types. |
| Other men | Male | Other men as police, Heralds, envoys, Athenians, Spartans, market loungers, porter, etc with some dialogue. |
