Tradition of Departmental Play Reading Continues Through Social Distancing
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 seemed a shame to let social distancing get in the way of such a fine tradition, so on April 18th the department hosted a remote reading, with participants Zooming in from as far away as Germany and Greece.
The play was 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 included faculty and students from the Classics Department, members of the Classical Club of St. Louis, and the translator himself.
