Theatre: "Lysistrata"

No one understood a good penis joke better than ancient Greek comedy writer Aristophanes. Yet his play "Lysistrata," for all its bawdy humor, is about so much more than sex and giant penises. The women of Greece, desperate to stop the never-ending Peloponnesian War stage, stage a sex strike withholding themselves from their husbands until the men agree to stop fighting. While we laugh at the ridiculousness of the sexually frustrated men of Athens and Sparta, we see that, underneath the surface humor, Aristophanes had a lot to say about the forces of creation versus the forces of destruction -- a tension as present and problematic today as it was in 411 BCE. Book by Peter Buckley. Music by Roy Zimmerman. Directed by Laura Wayth.