What the Ancient Greeks Knew About Anger & Justice

Duke Today

What the Ancient Greeks Knew About Anger & Justice

“The Fury” weaves together ancient myth with recent and current events in an exploration of women’s anger, a subject that was central to much of ancient Greek theater. Devised and directed by visiting artist Blair Cadden, the play arose out of Cadden’s personal effort to understand her moments of rage and to use it for positive purposes.

”We're trained to suppress it or call it something else,” Cadden said. ”Anger is ultimately a positive emotion because unlike despair, which says things are terrible and there's nothing we can do about it, anger says, things are terrible and we should fix it.

The play will be performed Friday and Saturday in Sheafer Lab Theater in the Bryan Center, but shows are sold out.

Photos by Bill Snead/University Communications

student actors during rehearsal: a man talks to a group of women formed in a circle.
student actors during rehearsal of The Fury: A young man talks to a group of women formed in a circle
student actors during the rehearsal: A female actor is yelling at another character.
student actor during rehearsal. A single actor reads a note dropped on a ground

The play was developed by Cadden, who collaborated with the student actors and others to draw upon their own personal experiences to complete the script. “The process was really interesting, because we started in the fall with drop-in workshops, which ended up meaning that we had a lot of different collaborators come through, but not always all at the same time,” Cadden said.

”So there are a lot of ideas that were dropped in by different people who joined us briefly, and then sometimes those ideas would get picked up by the next group of people and get built on or molded.”

Read more about the play on the Theater Studies website.

 

 

student actors during rehearsal: the actors are on the floor following a scene of rage