Chapter 24: The Great ... Again

“BOB, BOB, BOB. This won’t do. The idea of the play is solid, though it’s not true to the word of Homer. We could never sell this to the archon. Now, let me help you out some and we’ll come up with a hit,” Indougoles—’Just call me Doug’—my acting coach and story consultant said upon reading my latest effort.

“But this is what happened. That twit Homer messed it all up!” I insisted.

“Shh. Shh! Such words are sacrilege. Or heresy. Or something like that. Even if you think something happened differently than what Homer suggests, you don’t say anything. His is the official word and no other can be tolerated. Now, let’s get back to work on your vowel sounds. Open up and make them rounder so they will reach the back of the theatre. Alpha, epsilon, iota, upsilon, omega. Now, let me hear those sounds run trippingly off the tongue.”

I carried out the exercises, listening to my acting coach/story consultant’s instructions.

And, behold, I was chosen to be in the chorus.

THEATRE WAS the first place I discovered groupies. Every official in every government I’d known had a certain number of hangers-on, and there were always women who would cock an eyebrow at you in invitation to an assignation. But in theatre, there were women waiting in the wings, so to speak, for the stage to clear and the actors to unmask. Of course, the divos of the plays were the leading actors, but there were only three of those per performance. Depending on the play, there might be twelve to twenty in the chorus. After the actors and the choragus had taken their choice of the girls who threw themselves at us, the rest of the chorus helped themselves. There were always plenty to go around.

Girls loved the theatre and the actors. Poor girls, rich girls, young girls, old girls. Delphia. What a girl! They made it quite clear they wanted to attach themselves to the actors—preferably at the groin. You could just grab them by the pussy and they let you! They’d do anything for the actors.

I enjoyed my share of the groupies. In fact, Delphia and I were eventually married. She wasn’t technically a groupie. I’ll tell you about her sometime. But groupies were a phenomenon I did not fully understand. I chose one of my harem girls who was originally from Greece to explain to me.

“Bob, theatre is glamorous. Every girl thinks you’ll sweep her off her feet and carry her away to a fantasy world that is filled with applause and riches.”

“But it’s all fake!” I said. “We aren’t the famous people we play on stage. We aren’t nobles and kings. We have nothing but the script.”

“But you make it all look real. If you play a famous king on stage, you must be a famous king. If you play a great lover on stage, you must be a great lover. If you are seven feet tall on stage...”

“Then I must be seven feet tall. They don’t get the elevator shoes are like walking on stilts!”

“Exactly!”

“Then what should I do?”

“Take what is offered and try not to be cruel when she finds out you aren’t a famous king, or seven feet tall, or...”

“Or a great lover. Thank you,” I said.

“Oh, Bob, you are a great lover and I love you forever. Would you like me to be waiting off stage for you when you finish tonight’s show?”

“Now that, my dear, would be a wonderful idea.”

Well, I did enjoy the groupies on occasion, and sometimes I would discover one who was particularly outstanding and would fit in with my women. She would silently disappear into the infinity room, from where she would discover I was much more than I appeared to be on stage.

I’d quickly instituted a theatre program in the infinity room and many of the girls were quite taken with it. Females were not allowed on the stages at Athens until years later. There were exceptions, however, when plays about Antigone or Medea arose. No matter how you padded him, a male actor never carried the right presence onto the stage when playing a woman. In the infinity room, we had many plays and most of the actors were women. I got to be the gropee. Uh ... groupie.

I FUCKING loved Greece! And I loved fucking in the theatre. However that worked. I got my opportunity to appear onstage as an actor instead of a member of the chorus at last, and wouldn’t you know they asked me to play Odysseus! Comedy was on the rise and the great festivals of the City of Dionysia and the Lenaia now had comedies on every day of the performances, following three tragedies and a satyr. Most of the time, the three tragedies were by the same author. Often the satyr was also by that author. But seldom was the comedy part of the unity of the other plays. Playwrights were emerging who specialized in comedy.

The play I was in was a mockery of Odysseus and remarkably consistent with what Homer had written. I was okay with it, though I felt I added some interpretation to the poetry that pointed out how ludicrous the man really was. Much of the play was about the contest between Odysseus and Poseidon, and neither was shown in a very good light. Poseidon was depicted as a tentacled monster himself, attempting to capture and destroy Odysseus. Of course, no violence took place on stage. Each time Poseidon entered, he had fewer tentacles, proclaiming that Odysseus had cut another one off.

The chorus sat around drinking wine and saluting Dionysus as they sang about the blinding of the cyclops and how the crew were all drunk when the monster tripped and fell on a spear. I thought the play went very well, but we didn’t win the contest.

“NOW, BOB,” my story consultant and acting coach, Doug, said, “you can’t just bring actual women onto the stage. Not actual women. They could never stand the rigors of acting and are nowhere near strong enough to wear the masks and costumes. And their voices! The audience would know at once they aren’t real actors.”

“Doug, I’m tired of being told we can’t do something. If the play can’t be performed at the festival the way I want to do it, I’ll find someplace else to perform it,” I declared. Not that I had any real idea about where that would be. I admit, I was acting the part of a temperamental actor/director/playwright and doing it quite well.

“There’s an idea for you! Why not circumvent the whole festival rigamarole? You’ll never win a competition anyway. Your material doesn’t fit. You could self-publish your plays, as it were, and perform them anyplace you wanted,” he said. “Get your act together and take it on the road!”

“What? I can do that?”

“Even great Thespis himself did touring road shows. Oh, the regional theatres don’t seat 10,000 like the festival theatres do, but people in the sticks are crying for more entertainment. Put together your troupe of women and travel the countryside, performing wherever you wish.”

The more I thought about it, the better I liked the idea. We’d take our show on the road and perform off-Acropolis. It was a perfect solution.

I HAD a few hundred Greeks in the infinity room. I’d gathered them from the sailors at Troy and my journey as Odysseus. Most had joined me before theatre had become a big thing in Greece. There were festivals, but they were primarily religious, celebrating Dionysus the god of wine, women, and song—and ritual madness. The great festival of Athens was still called the Festival of Dionysus Eleuthereus. I had chuckled a bit to myself at the creation of the festival just beneath the wall of the Acropolis, which I had built. The part of the theatre that most closely resembled the ancient religious rites was the role of the chorus, singing and dancing like the Bacchae.

That was really the pinnacle of insult as far as I was concerned. The Bacchae were women, the priestesses of Dionysus (also known as Bacchus). They were the ones who drank the wine and danced into such a frenzy that they could tear a man to shreds. But were women allowed to be in the chorus that represented their role? Oh, no! Not the delicate fairer sex who would never drink to excess or fuck everything in sight or rip a man apart in a ritual madness.

I predicted we were coming to a day when women would reclaim the stage. And I was right! Don’t mind me jumping around the timeline a little to tell you that Medea by Euripides had already won the festival one year and it was a woman who played the wronged queen and wife of Jason. It would not be long before Aristophanes profaned the stage with his production of Lysistrata with a battling men’s and women’s chorus in which the women withhold sex from the men until they lay down their weapons and stop going to war. And that greatest of all the Greek theatre that has survived through the ages, Euripides’ The Bacchae celebrated the evisceration of King Pentheus of Thebes at the hands of the Priestesses of Dionysus. Women were about to come into their own as thespians, though men have attempted repeatedly to demean their participation.

I’ll get off my soapbox, to mix eras once again, and say the women of my harem loved the stage and the ability to set their fancy free with productions that especially emphasized the role of dance and music in the chorus.

I wrote and directed, usually taking a leading male role so I could be on the stage with my women. We built a touring cart that we could unfold to create a stage that resembled the festival theatres. We could roll into town in the evening and be ready to perform to our adoring audience before the sun was at its pinnacle the next day.

We selected shows for the first season and plotted a circuit of the outlying districts. It was an ambitious route, but Doug assured me he had sent ahead to each of the regional centers and they would be expecting us. I paid him his fee and we left.

We opened in Epidaurus,
We next play in Argos,
Then on to Patras.
Lotsa laughs in Patras.
Our next jump is Delphi,
Where the people are all wealthy,
Then Thebes, then Athens,
Then we open again, whence?
We open in Epidaurus!

Um ... Well, you get the idea. My apologies to Cole Porter. Those years were some of the best in my memory. By packing everything into the infinity room when we were out of town, we could travel faster than most people could. When we arrived in a town, we performed. It made no difference if there were a dozen people or a thousand. We gave the show our best. The girls, of course, hopped out of the infinity room only to perform and then were back home where they were safe and ageless. I could easily strike the theatre, stow it—making it look like I’d loaded it into a wagon with a horse pulling it rather than putting it in the infinity room—and then take off. As soon as we were in a safe location, I joined the girls for a post-show celebration that typically involved a lot of wine and a lot of sex.