Thursdays

3:30 – 5:00 pm

In person at the

BCC South County Center
343 Main Street

 Great Barrington, MA

9/23, 9/30, 10/7, 10/14 & 10/21 

Five Sessions 

This course is offered in-person in Great Barrington, MA. Please note that all in-person course attendees must affirm that they have been fully vaccinated when registering and must wear masks in class at this time. Thank you for your understanding.

Euripides was one of the great tragedians of the classical Greek theatre, sharing the honorific with Aeschylus and Sophocles.  But his plays are closer to the contemporary social and political idiom than theirs, and they abound with astute observations of human psychological complexity and divine irony. As in our previous excursions into Greek drama, we will review the origins and conventions of Ancient Greek theatre, discuss the myths and stories that permeated the culture, and read aloud portions of four of the seventeen plays of Euripides that have come down to us: Helen, Iphigenia in Aulis, Iphigenia in Taurus, and his masterpiece The Bacchae. 

Limited Registration: 20

Recommended Reading:  Translations by David Grene & Richard Lattimore of Helen, Iphigenia in Aulis, Iphigenia in Taurus, and The Bacchae are the preferred texts, but any texts with line numbering will suffice

After a career in medicine, Steven Somkin returned to his two real loves: playwriting and the ancient Greeks (his B.A. was in philosophy with a particular emphasis on Plato). An award-winning playwright, he has written 18 full length and a dozen short plays which have been produced in New York City, the Berkshires, and regionally. He is a co-founder and current leader of the now disbanded Greek Geeks, a group of intellectual misfits devoted to reading the plays of ancient Greece. He also serves as a docent in paleontology and biodiversity at the American Museum of Natural History. 

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