Ancient Greek Tragedies

This compassionate, personal, and illuminating work of nonfiction draws on the author's celebrated work as a director of socially conscious theater to connect listeners with the power of an ancient artistic tradition. For years Bryan Doerries has been producing ancient tragedies for current and returned servicemen and women, addicts, tornado and hurricane victims, and a wide range of other at-risk people in society.

From the moderator of The New York Times philosophy blog "The Stone", an audiobook that argues that if we want to understand ourselves, we have to go back to theater, to the stage of our lives.

Blood, gore, thrills, chills, and romance abound in these plays by three of the great Greek authors. Included are "Medea" by Euripides; "Antigone" by Sophocles; and "Agamemnon" by Aeschylus.

You are born to a king, but marry a tyrant. You stand helplessly as he sacrifices your child to placate the gods. You watch him wage war on a foreign shore and comfort yourself with violent thoughts of your own. You play the part, fooling enemies who deny you justice. Slowly, you plot.

Inspired by the mythic house of Thebes, Sophocles’s defining Greek tragedies follow the fates that befall three doomed generations.

We might think we are through with the past, but the past isn't through with us. Tragedy permits us to come face to face with the things we don't want to know about ourselves, but which still make us who we are. It articulates the conflicts and contradictions that we need to address in order to better understand the world we live in. A work honed from a decade's teaching at the New School, where Critchley on Tragedy is one of the most popular courses, Tragedy, the Greeks and Us is a compelling examination of the history of tragedy.

A compassionate, personal, and illuminating work of nonfiction that draws on the author's celebrated work as a director of socially conscious theater to connect listeners with the power of an ancient artistic tradition.

"Physiology of the Opera" by John H. Swaby describes the opera and its actors in great detail - on the stage and behind the curtains. Excerpt: As an introduction to the dissertation upon which we are about to enter, such an antiquarian view of the subject might be taken as would tend to establish a parallel between the ancient Greek tragedy and the modern sanguinary Italian opera, the strong resemblance therein being displayed of Signor Salvi trilling on the stage, to the immortal Thespis jargoning from a dung-cart.