Quick thought

I think Euripides's play Helen should be revived, using lots of television screens to conjure a world in which the only "reality" is imagery. Alex Eaton should do videography. Elizabeth LeCompte should direct. I should dramaturg and (also) make all the money.

From the draft of my paper on Helen:

Reading the play’s first scene, Helen’s difficult-to-stage prologue about her sorry personal history and the “lives…lost in numbers,” I can’t help imagining her watching a TV news segment or documentary on herself and the recent devastation in Ilium. Images of fire and bloodshed have become the domain of television (and film) and would signal to the audience the degree of the gods’ cruelty. I should further suggest that television screens are especially appropriate in a play about surfaces and people mistakenly believing their eyes. On the Greek stage, Euripides can only conjure the vast landscape of his play—the ashes of Ilium, Helen’s family in Sparta, the Greek ships foundering on the ocean, the cave containing Menelaus’s soldiers and the Helen hologram, the inside of Theoclymenus’s palace, the ship where the Egyptian soldiers will be deceived and murdered by Spartan trickery—through a broad web of monologues and messenger scenes. Today, these worlds could all be conjured on the flat imagery of televisions that move across the stage like an extra set of eyes. The skepticism of today’s audiences towards the media would support the link between our own world of images and Helen’s.