Playing for Laughs

For assistant professor of Classics Robert Germany, one sure fire way to help students bolster their grasp of Latin grammar and vocabulary is to have them read Roman literature. Which is why Germany's Latin 102 class spent much of the spring semester focusing on one of the masterworks of Roman comedy, Plautus' Menaechmi (men-ike-me). But Germany's students did more than just read the play. They performed it, bringing to life an original translation by Germany himself with a semester-ending, script-in-hand reading in the black box theater in the Dining Center.

“There is so much focus on language in the class that it can kill the comedy,” says Germany.“The idea of the performance is that it repairs that breech and gives a better sense of the play as a play.”

Menaechmi tells the story of identical twin brothers who were separated as children and raised in different families, and has a madcap plot featuring multiple cases of mistaken identity. If that sounds vaguely familiar, scholars believe Shakespeare borrowed liberally from the play when he wrote his Comedy of Errors.

While the Latin 102 students played multiple roles in the performance, Germany took on the role of the senex, or old man--one of the many stock characters typically featured in Roman comedies. All of the actors took the stage wearing half-masks, which was a nod to the ancients' ideas about stagecraft.“All Roman comedy was masked,” says Germany.“But in Roman times they would have been full face masks. Masks are not as much an impediment to sound as you might think. If they are built properly they have a megaphone effect.”

Plautus wrote in the colloquial Latin of everyday speech and the play (whose lines would have been sung in Roman times) posed some challenges for Germany as a translator.“The hardest part was finding a way to capture all of the swearing,” he says.“They were constantly swearing oaths to ancient gods and heroes. But to have the characters saying ‘By Hercules!' or ‘By Pollux!' can be confusing for modern audiences.“Since all that is really going on is that they are speaking emphatically, I changed the words, in most cases, to ‘By god!' or ‘Good grief!' or ‘What the hell!'”

Also changed in Germany's translation: literary allusions to texts that would have been familiar to Roman audiences (but not to modern ones), and snarky references to the Roman theater world of Plautus' time, which had no permanent theaters, mounting productions instead on temporary stages.“These plays were the popular entertainment of their times,” says Germany about Roman comedy.

“Menaechmi is a wonderful play about family and identity, about what it means to have a particular identity in a particular place, and what it means to be a brother,” says Germany.“The students had a great time. They just really came alive with it.” His plan for future Latin classes: to translate and perform a different Roman comedy every year.

“The play was a really good experiment in“doing” classics in a public and non-academic setting,” says Latin 102 student Asher Reisman ‘11, who played one of the Menaechmus brothers. With so much attention paid to Latin grammar, says Reisman,“the living and still very accessible comedy of the text can be lost. This sort of exercise plays an important role in restoring it.”

“I think it was wonderful,” says Bryn Mawr student Mary Kathryn Dean about the performance, in which she played Peniculus, a friend of one of the twin brothers.“It really helped us to understand what we'd read in class, and Professor Germany's translation was really good. He stuck true to what the text was, but updated it a little bit and made it Bi-Co- centric which helped me understand the fluidity of translation. Latin really isn't as stuffy as it seems, and performing the translation really helped us see that.”

Also, says Dean, performing the work“was a good way to disguise studying as play time (no pun intended).“Professor Germany was so into the play, so excited, that it was hard not to have his excitement rub off on us,” she says.“Once we got going, we had a lot of fun.”

--Eils Lotozo