Remote Play Reading
The Washington University Classics Department has a long history of getting together and reading comic plays from ancient Greece and Rome. Sponsored by the department’s Classics Club and its chapter of Eta Sigma Phi (the national honorary society for Classics), the readings are usually held in the home of Tim Moore, the John and Penelope Biggs Distinguished Professor of Classics. It seems a shame to let social distancing get in the way of such a fine tradition, so on Saturday, April 18th, at 2PM Central Daylight Time, the department will host a remote reading, with participants Zooming in from as far away as Germany.
The play to be read is Mostellaria, or The Haunted House, a hilarious farce written by the Roman playwright Plautus in the early second century BCE and translated and adapted by Thomas E. Jenkins of Trinity University, San Antonio. Jenkins updated the play and changed its setting to San Antonio for a performance at that city’s Overtime Theater in 2013. For this reading, the setting has changed again, this time to St. Louis in 2020.
Readers will be faculty and students from the Classics Department, members of the Classical Club of St. Louis, and the translator himself. This reading will not be recorded but is open to everyone. Anyone interested in Zooming into some lively very old (and very new!) comedy should email Tim Moore at tmoore26@wustl.edu for Zoom information.
