Students perform reading of 'Lysistrata' to protest Iraq war
The Greek playwright Aristophanes would no doubt be surprised ? and probably flattered ? to know that one of his plays is still stirring debate over contemporary events more than 2,300 years after his death.The bawdy comedy Lysistrata, one of 11 surviving plays by the dramatist, was performed last night at the University and, in what was billed as the "first-ever worldwide theater event for peace," at more than 1,000 locations around the world.As part of the N.Y.-based, antiwar Lysistrata Project, an 18-member cast of students, faculty and community members staged a dramatic reading of the play, in which the women of Athens and rival Sparta decide to withhold sex from their husbands until the men end the Peloponnesian War peacefully.An audience of more than 100 members from the University and community filled the lobby of the new Carl Icahn Laboratory to capacity, lining the walls around the production area after all seats were taken.The hour-long play, which used as props only a small wooden box and, for the Acropolis, the hollow, room-sized Frank Gehry sculpture bubbling from the middle of the lobby, was "staged" level with the audience.