Euripides is tricky. On the surface, his plays look like open, heartfelt tragedies, full of sorrow and anguish. Inside, as many directors and actors have disconcertingly discovered, they're full of ironies and logic-chopping arguments that detonate undesired laugh lines in the wrong places. An ally of the Sophists, those experts at winning their cases with false arguments, Euripides is a master at playing both sides against the middle—nowhere more so than in his Hecuba, a sardonic, blood-chilling lesson in the futility of revenge. The widowed queen of Troy, dethroned and enslaved by the conquering Greeks, finds herself trapped on the shore of Thrace when the homebound Greek fleet is becalmed there. She's compelled to sacrifice her last surviving daughter, Polyxena, to get the winds going again. Agamemnon, who does the compelling, sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia for the same reason on the way to Troy: What goes... More >>>