For the most part, he has made good choices. Einhorn has subdivided the play into ten scenes, several quite short, which makes for an appropriately fast and lively pace.Īs a consequence of prioritizing performance, one of the most obvious adjustments Einhorn makes is to eliminate almost any historical or cultural reference that would require a footnote. It is clear in fact that his adaptation focuses on performance values, and his main objective is to come up with a version of the play that will work best as a staged production, enjoyable by all. In all fairness, Einhorn never explicitly says that rescuing Lysistrata from the pruderies of a by-gone era was his primary motivation (although the cover, showing a statue of Aphrodite wearing a strap-on penis, might suggest otherwise). Indeed I suspect that Einhorn was not familiar with either Jeffrey Henderson’s 1996 translation or Sarah Ruden’s from 2003, 1 because his introduction implies that all the versions of Lysistrata he had seen or read were rather tame and staid, whereas Henderson and Ruden are neither by any stretch of the imagination. He writes in his introduction that he used a computer program to see a literal translation of the Greek, and also consulted “several very old translations of the play.” He doesn’t specify who those translators were except to say that one of the translations came from the Victorian era. Einhorn is a playwright and the artistic director of Untitled Theater Company #61, based in New York. Edward Einhorn’s play is an adaptation of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, not a translation.

Lysistrata cliff notes