On the one hand she is clearly an idiot. See: pretending to be pregnant with a helmet when she wasn't the day before

But then she is all sexy and confident and manipulates Kinesias like a boss

Not to mention being pretty much head of the tribe and a mother and argh

So tempting to make her just a comedic character but I think she matures through the play and maybe while she doesn't have anyone to play up

to she is actually pretty smart. How do I play manipulative and comedic and all of these different things at once?!

I have the horrible feeling that no matter how I play it Aristophanes will still want to punch me in the face.

Want people to be genuinely worried that she will crack with Kinesias, before it gets hilarious.

Maybe I should just strap a phallus to my head to take care of the comedic element and play her as mature. I might look like a dickhead...

I have the feeling that'd be along the lines of most of this humour. ffs

/touches Teach me oh mighty Meli, mistress of all the Classics! \o/ How do you see her?

loooove yooouuuu /huggles I thought so too- as far as some of them like Lampito go, they're still quite stereotypical and I want to make

Myrrhine at least vaguely developed and interesting because she already doesn't have such an obvious stereotype to wriggle out of, y'know/

but at the same time I still want her to be the slightlh hysterical one at the start because comedy. Maturing her through the play?

And there are lots of weird implications about her maturing while they abstain from sex, but I don't think she matures so much because of

the lack of sex as the addition of Sisterhood and Community and the examples set by the women taking everything over successfully...

or maybe I just think too much about characters I'm going to play

She's the one from the swamps who pretends to be pregnant with a helmet and is married to the poet and leads him on and yeah

...welp okay yeah I really don't think I can help you

I don't know Lysistrata very well /o\ I've read it once but that's about it

(although I am going to see it performed at the end of February so I might be able to help after that orz)

if you need historical or cultural context, though, I can definitely help you out there!

/late But aaah that's okay thank you for trying! <3 Could you let me know how she's played when you see it? (also, insert mad jealousy here)

Also please tell me all of the history! 8D

do!! er, it was written during the Peloponnesian war, a couple of years after Athens had done really really badly in a battle

(I think) (or something)

the important thing to remember about greek drama is that it was paid for and staged by the state-- the state government chose poets to

write plays for the religious/fertility festival (also important) that the plays were performed at

and also paid for citizens who couldn't afford it to see the plays, and taxed wealthy citizens to pay for the chorus, and etc

/rolls in all the delicious contexty goodness

actually, if no one's said this to you before, the best way to think about Greek comedy is as a cross between a pantomime and a

current affairs sketch show