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Banned: The Licentious Lysistrata
Written around 411 B.C., Greek playwright Aristophanes’ comedy stages its lead character Lysistrata’s successful attempt to persuade women from Sparta, Beoetia and Corinth to withhold sex from their husbands and thereby bring an end to the Peloponnesian War.The play’s lively plot, ripe with sexual innuendo, (including oversized phalluses), a memorable heroine and statements about the idiocy of military violence have given the play a somewhat timeless appeal, and it remains a favored Greek Classic among modern readers and audiences.
Written during a historical period of great social and political unrest in Athens, the play calls into question the grounds of the war against Sparta, but it also carefully distinguishes this war from the battles fought against barbarians. When Lysistrata emerges from the Acropolis at the play's end, her final reproach emphasizes that Greece and Sparta worship the same gods, occupy the same land, and yet kill one another indiscriminately while barbarians continue to threaten Greece from the outside.
Subtleties aside, Lysistrata has come to be considered a classic anti-war play in the modern era, and the play’s anti-war sentiments, coupled with blatantly sexual subject matter meant it was subject to increased scrutiny during the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries.
In Greece, the play was banned on two separate occasions. First, performances of the Lysistrate were banned by Nazi occupation authorities in 1942. And then again, in 1967, the ruling military junta in Greece banned Lysistrata, presumably due to its autonomous and antiwar themes.
The play was also banned from the U.S. mails under the Comstock Law of 1873. Officially known as the Federal Anti-Obscenity Act, this law banned the mailing of "lewd," "indecent," "filthy," or "obscene" materials. The ban was lifted in 1930.
However, even in post 1930’s America, the play has continued to exert a certain social and political presence. A modern version of the play was adapted into a Mozart-like opera in the 1960’s, but its performance was canceled when the tenor was drafted into the army four days prior, and the opera’s director became nervous about the play’s anti-Vietnam war protest libretto.
More recently, Lysistrate became the focus of a peace protest initiative entitled The Lysistrata Project, in which readings of the play were coordinated internationally in response to the Iraq disarmament crisis, March 2003.
-Sophie KalKreuth
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