The Oresteian Roots of Rescue Me; or, Legal Inoperativity

It is 15 April 2010, at around 7 p.m., and the audience began to gather in the crowded lobby of the New York's Ohio Theatre for a performance of Rescue Me. After ordering from a makeshift bar serving beer, we are released from the waiting area and into the theatre, forced to walk across the stage to reach our seats. The stage is flanked by columns of televisions with images of blue and white clouds on the screens. The set is spare, painted in earthy reds and adorned with gold embellishments. A neutral concrete wall standing at the back of the stage sometimes serves as a screen for projections. Floral motifs constructed from rudimentary mosaics are embedded in it. A blue staircase is stage right. At stage left is a door with ugly metal shutters like the kinds used to protect closed storefronts in cities such as New York or London. The stage looks like a scene restored from an archeological dig, and at the same time it smacks of a bar or social space in a subcultural setting. We are suspended between the ruins of an ancient Greek polis and the urban detritus of a twenty-first-century global metropolis.

In Rescue Me, Barall largely leaves the narrative architecture of Euripides' drama intact, with the exception of a few major innovations. The audience finds Iphigenia, the daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra (of the royal family of Argos) living in Tauris. Although Tauris is technically located in modern-day Ukraine, both Euripides and Barall identify it as in “the alien wilderness of Asia,” as one character in Euripides' play describes it.Footnote ¹³ Early in the play, Iphigenia recounts her backstory as a member of the doomed house of Atreus, a family plagued by cycles of vengeance and betrayal. She tells us that the gods ordered her father to sacrifice her in order to ensure victory in the Trojan War. However, the goddess Artemis took pity on her, tricking the Greeks by switching her body with the corpse of a deer and clandestinely delivering her to Tauris, where she now serves as high priestess to the goddess who rescued her. The Taurians practice ritual sacrifice of foreigners, and Iphigenia's job is to prepare victims to meet their violent ends.

Unbeknown to the heroine, her brother, Orestes (whom she believes to be dead), and his cousin-companion, Pylades, arrive on Taurian soil. They are hounded by the Furies, who want to take vengeance on Orestes for killing his mother (Clytemnestra), which he did to avenge the death of his father (Agamemnon), whom Clytemnestra murdered to avenge the (believed) sacrifice of Iphigenia. The Taurian king (Thoas) presents Orestes and Pylades to Iphigenia so she can to prepare them to be sacrificed. In a departure from the Euripidean narrative, Barall's Thoas offers Iphigenia release from her servitude if she will marry him, an offer she refuses. As Iphigenia prepares the foreigners for sacrifice, she and Orestes uncover their sibling relationship. The heroine determines to smuggle Orestes out of Tauris and return to Greece with him.

Because Barall preserves most of the narrative of Euripides’ original, her innovations are largely stylistic and formal: she uses the stage to play with Euripides’ text. Rescue Me stages the unique relationship among play, inoperativity, and emancipation. Agamben argues that through forms of play a thing can be “emancipated from its relationship to an end.”Footnote ¹⁴ Through play, one can bring about the “creation of a new use . . . [by] deactivating an old use, rendering it inoperative.”Footnote ¹⁵ That Agamben uses the verb emancipate is important. It is rooted in the Roman legal tradition of emancipatione (emancipation) described in the Law of the Twelve Tables, whereby the patria potestas—the power of an “ascendant” over a “descendent”—is ritually dissolved, resulting in the manumission (manumissi) or freeing of the child from the father's power.Footnote ¹⁶ As a transitive verb, emancipation serves as a link between a previous order, which in this specific case is structured by endless cycles of violence and the negation of Iphigenia's freedom, and a new one in which justice and emancipation become possible. Inoperativity, as I use it here, is thus not that which realizes freedom so much as it is a tool with which the conditions necessary for emancipation can be brought about through performance.

Rescue Me plays with its subject material in three key ways that set it apart from Euripides’ original. First, the characters are aware that they are in a play. They regularly wrangle over which direction a scene should take and even compare their version to other productions, as in one sequence when Artemis complains that she is “not a fan of” either Goethe's or “our particular version of this play” (47). Second, the performance uses postmodern forms of pastiche that include dance sequences, singing, popular music (such as indie rock and electronic dance music), video, and references to popular culture. Finally, Barall introduces Artemis as a central character who doubles as an onstage stage manager, whereas Iphigenia in Tauris lacks a divine presence until the end of the play. All of these elements ultimately result in Iphigenia's emancipation—both from the script, which would lock her into a new cycle of servitude, and from the cycle of violence that characterizes her family history.

Euripides wrote two Iphigenia plays: Iphigenia in Tauris (410s b.c.) and the posthumously produced Iphigenia in Aulis (405 b.c.), a prequel that recounts the story of Iphigenia's sacrifice.Footnote ¹⁷ Both plays were written and produced around a half-century after Aeschylus staked his claim to the story of ancient Greece's most dysfunctional family with the Oresteia trilogy (Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and The Eumenides [Gracious Ones]), which was first presented in 458 b.c.Footnote ¹⁸ It is first in the Oresteia that we find our first example of inoperativity in relation to the law.

Agamemnon traces Clytemnestra's murder of her husband upon his return from the Trojan War. The Libation Bearers follows the stories of their children, Elektra and Orestes, who subsequently murder Clytemnestra in the name of their father. Both plays end with ominous warnings that the law demands vengeance for acts of vengeance, as in Agamemnon, when the chorus of Argive Elders tells Clytemnestra that “he who has wrought shall pay; that is law,” or in the spectacular conclusion of The Libation Bearers, when a chorus of Furies rises from Clytemnestra's blood to exact justice/vengeance from the matricidal Orestes.Footnote ¹⁹ The problem in The Eumenides is thus how to stop the seemingly endless cycle of violence when justice (embodied in the form of the Furies) is defined as vengeance. To answer this question, Athena introduces a new, rational, deliberative system of justice whereby Orestes is placed on trial before a jury of his peers and is ultimately acquitted of the murder. The erinyes, or Furies, fearing the obliteration and supersession of the old law by Athena's new order, complain that “the House of Justice has collapsed” and twice say that the “Gods of the younger generation . . . have ridden down / the laws of the elder time, torn them out of my hands.”Footnote ²⁰ Athena circumvents an impending crisis by offering the Furies a role in her new system of justice: “In complete honesty I promise you a place / of your own, deep hidden under ground that is yours by right / where you shall sit on shining chairs beside the hearth / to accept devotions offered by your citizens.”Footnote ²¹ Athena's proposal does not “collapse” the justice of the erinyes so much as it renders the old law inoperative, giving it a new function in the court that she builds at the base of Ares’ hill.

In many ways the euphoric conclusion of the Eumenides can be read as a celebration of the shift from aristocratic fiat to popular judgment. Popular juries were a proud centerpiece of the Athenian legal order for nearly a century and a half before the Oresteia was first performed. (Indeed, Aeschylus was himself exonerated by a jury in the decades preceding authorship of the play.Footnote ²²) The great Athenian statesman Solon is generally credited with inventing the jury system near the beginning of the sixth century b.c.Footnote ²³ This innovation was embedded in a set of reforms that redistributed the consolidation of political power from the aristocratic council of elders, the Areopagus—named for “Ares’ hill” at whose base they indeed met—into relatively more democratic institutions that included, according to Aristotle's The Athenian Constitution, “what is said to have been the chief basis of the powers of the multitude, the right of appeal to the jury-court.”Footnote ²⁴ Despite the relative collapse of the courts in the intervening years, by the time of the Oresteia, public juries had been revived as a central component of Athenian life because of the Periclean reforms of the mid-fifth century.

The Oresteia retells this history as a triumphant tale in which the jury system introduced the hope of justice. Aeschylus depicts the transition from the previous order as nothing less than a revolutionary break from a system of retribution and violence to one of justice and equality. As Christoph Menke argues, in the Eumenides, “Law breaks with the violence of revenge by interrupting this merciless logic of the same, and thus an endless repetition, by the definitive character of its verdict. . . . The legal verdict does not answer a violation by repeating it. A legal judgment is not an equal deed but the deed of equality.”Footnote ²⁵ But the new mode of justice recounted on Aeschylus’ stage does not simply break off from the context or system of justice that preceded it. Rather, the previous justice is rendered inoperative and placed on display when the erinyes (Furies) are transformed into eumenides (Gracious Ones). Nicole Loraux argues that “the establishment of the Erinyes at the foot of the Areopagus indeed symbolizes the domesticated yet always threatening presence of terror and wrath in the city.”Footnote ²⁶ The terror and wrath of the erinyes are no longer an immediate threat to the city. Though “always threatening,” the threat is deferred; they now represent an internalized and controlled proximity and potential for “terror and wrath in the city,” but not its imminent actualization. Emancipated from their previous purpose as the Furies, the erinyes are preserved, worshiped, and displayed beneath the Areopagus on “shining chairs”; they are repurposed as protectors of both the city and the new order of justice.Footnote ²⁷ In other words, the erinyes are rendered inoperative.

Athena's solution relates to the relationship between inoperativity and the law that Agamben articulated in the context of an exploration of what the arrival of messianic time will do to worldly law in Christian eschatology. Agamben suggests that the arrival of the Messiah will not annihilate the law, as one might suppose. Rather, it will render the law “inoperative,” a process by which “I deactivate, I suspend the efficacy” of something.Footnote ²⁸ Rendering something inoperative does not make invisible or erase the material history that produced something in its present form. This is precisely what is at stake in the final instance of the Oresteia. Regardless of whether or not this new order is an improvement upon the previous one, the point is that Aeschylus uses the stage to show an audience how to suspend and redirect an old (and insufficient) model of law and justice without erasing the history that gave it meaning. The conclusion of the Oresteia trilogy allows an audience to see how a previously unimaginable new order of justice (and thus politics) becomes a reality. The Oresteia is thus a mythical origin story about deliberative, rational justice as much as it is a practical lesson in the revolutionary potential attached to the performance of inoperative acts. Rescue Me, and the Euripides play on which it is based, takes up where Aeschylus leaves off.

The Inoperative Body: Race Onstage in Iphigenia in Tauris and Rescue Me

Euripides’ play, which was written during a period of brutal internecine war a half-century after the debut of the Oresteia, lacks the euphoric optimism that concludes the Eumenides. Footnote ²⁹ Whereas justice is the question at the heart of Aeschylus’ play, Euripides’ play is largely a discourse on racial and cultural difference. Throughout, Euripides constructs and then deconstructs the identity of Greeks by comparing them with the “barbarian” Tauri. For example, in her opening monologue Iphigenia highlights the “savage” nature of her adopted homeland: “[Artemis] set me down / Here in this town of Tauris, this abode / Of savage men ruled by their uncouth king.”Footnote ³⁰ The Tauri are framed as a barbaric people, largely because they violate the taboo against human sacrifice.

Both this figuration of the Tauri as savages and Iphigenia's unlikely presence in Tauris were likely influenced by a short passage in Book IV of Herodotus’ histories, which provide lurid descriptions of human sacrifice in Tauris. Herodotus then links these practices to the story of Iphigenia: “The Tauri themselves claim that the goddess [to whom sacrifice is offered] is Iphigenia.”Footnote ³¹ Herodotus seems to confuse Iphigenia (a victim of sacrifice) with those who demanded sacrifice. But this slippage productively deconstructs the association of Greeks with civilized behavior, as Iphigenia's body indexes the fact that human sacrifice and, worse, interfamilial murder are not unknown to the supposedly civilized Greeks.Footnote ³² As Moses Hadas argues, Euripides’ “introduction of a barbarian [people] serves to bring certain unlovely Greek characteristics into relief.”Footnote ³³ Placed onstage in a Taurian context, Iphigenia's body becomes the nexus where the civilized (Greek)–savage (Tauri) binary begins to break down. Unlike the Tauri, who sacrifice foreigners, Iphigenia was supposed to have been sacrificed by her own father. As Thoas remarks, “O great Apollo, what barbarian / Would do the thing these Greeks have done!”Footnote ³⁴ The Greeks may describe the Tauri as barbarian for sacrificing foreigners, but what could be more barbaric than sacrificing one's own child?

Rescue Me subtly takes up this deconstruction of racial and cultural difference, updating it to address questions of Asian American racialization and U.S. national identity. The audience sees Iphigenia portrayed by Japanese American actress Jennifer Ikeda. Her Taurian counterpart, King Thoas, is presented as a hyperbolic embodiment of U.S. American pop culture. Played by white actor Leon Ingulsrud, dressed in a ridiculous, bright pink suit, Ma-Yi's Thoas displays the affect of the (U.S. American) King, Elvis Presley. Watching the visibly ethnic Asian Iphigenia struggle with a paradigmatically U.S. American king in scenarios wrought from U.S. popular culture promotes the notion that Iphigenia's life among the savages should be read as a parable for how some racialized immigrants experience life in the United States. But as quickly as this association is forged, Rescue Me displaces and even deactivates it.

Although written by a mixed-raced Japanese Canadian playwright, directed by Filipino American theatre pioneer Loy Arcenas, and performed by a multiracial cast, Rescue Me follows Ma-Yi's mandate in a way that pushes beyond a direct address to the question of “Asian America.” The narrative only passingly or obliquely gestures to Asia or Asian peoples and consistently refuses to allow a neat mapping of the Euripidean scenario onto a contemporary U.S. American or Asian American context. For example, as staged, Orestes and Pylades wear military fatigues reminiscent of U.S. military gear from the Vietnam Era. Thus, if the audience is asked to see Tauris as the United States, thereby figuring Iphigenia as a racialized, minortiarian subject in that nation, Orestes and Pylades suspend this association; they embody the paradigmatic image of the U.S. soldier engaged in militaristic adventures in Southeast Asia, figuring Tauris as a kind of Vietnam. The performance invites audiences to understand Iphigenia as an “Asian American” at precisely the moment that it deactivates and repurposes any fixed meanings that might attach to the category of “Asian American,” undoing the political and geographical distinctions between places in Asia and the United States. Both race and nation thus become so troubled and compromised as to make them look as if they could become inoperative, or at least illegible within existing structures of social meaning. This process is at its height in the play's deployment of the racially marked body.

In order to see how embodied forms of social meaning can be rendered inoperative through acts of performance, let us look at the play's opening sequence. The particular moment I am discussing here stages inoperativity and gender. Seconds after the play begins, actor David Greenspan enters the stage wearing a black suit. He is tall, with salt-and-pepper hair, and has an elegant queerness. After the word prolegomenon is projected above the stage, Greenspan surveys the crowd before issuing the first line: “I am Artemis.” Some in the audience laugh a little as they take in the incongruity between the actor's body and his identification with the Greek goddess, but he continues: “I am the daughter of Zeus, twin sister of Apollo. / You should know who I am. I am the goddess of / the moon, hunting, wild-life, virginity, forests, hills. / I am also just to clarify / called Diana” (2).

Greenspan uses performance to render gender norms inoperative. The actor's movements are fey and fluid, he speaks with a lisp, and he accents his speech with gratuitous hand gestures. Yet at no point do we question Artemis’ female gender. Importantly, none of the other characters acknowledge or refer to his apparent male body or masculine self-presentation. Within the textual fabric of Rescue Me, Greenspan's Artemis is an accepted “she,” and as the play progresses, the audience quickly becomes accustomed to this operative fiction. Barall's language emphasizes Artemis as a “daughter,” “a twin sister,” and “a goddess” of the moon and virginity. Greenspan executes the prologue with an earnest commitment that neither discards nor attempts to cover the gap between the gender identity of the character, his male body, and the queer male affect with which he animates the role. He assumes the pronouns of femininity without irony or distance and makes no attempt to mimic stereotypical tropes of embodied femininity. Instead, he embodies Artemis by taking on the affect of the sissy, a queer archetype that at once refers to dominant constructions of feminine gender while being uniquely located in a biologically male body. The combination of Greenspan's tailored suit, self-consciously executed sibilant s's, graceful sashays, artful flourishes of the hand, and air of catty reserve are more evocative of Paul Lynde than of an august female deity. Normatively gendered subjectivity is thus displaced from Greenspan's/Artemis' body and removed from its objective social functionality. Through Greenspan's performance, gender is rendered inoperative, simultaneously present and on display for the audience but emancipated and directed away from its traditional mode of signification.

I do not turn to a moment of inoperativity and gender to posit equivalence between race and gender. Rather, I do so to emphasize that the play begins with an example of how a form of bodily identity is rendered inoperative through performance. In a study of the “glorious body,” or the body that will be resurrected in Paradise and returned to the souls of the saved according to Christian theology, Agamben notes that this body poses a problem for theologians because its functions will be unnecessary once it enters heaven: mouths will no longer need to eat, genitals will no longer have a reproductive capacity, anuses will no longer be needed for the expulsion of waste. Thus, “Theologians come up against a decisive aporia, one that . . . constitutes the locus in which we can think of a different possible use for the body.”Footnote ³⁵ The organs of the body, delinked from their practical purpose in earthly life, are freed from their objective social function and are able to perform in new ways.

I rehearse Agamben's discussion of this theological paradigm because it models an address to the general aporia with which we are faced: how does a total system come to an end and bring about a new order of being? How can the seeming immobility of the majoritarian public sphere, for example, give way to an emancipatory minoritarian politics? The example of the “glorious body” is particularly useful in that it reminds us of the necessary role of the body in mounting an address to these questions. My interest is not in the specificity of the Christian scene so much as in the lesson that this paradigm teaches us regarding the general struggle to bring about a new, minoritarian politics of emancipation. In this sense, it's important that Greenspan uses queer affect, because Agamben understands queer sexual practices as always already rendering parts of the body inoperative: “This is precisely what amorous desire and so-called perversion achieve every time they use the organs of the nutritive and reproduction functions and turn them—in the very act of using them—away from their physiological meaning, towards a new . . . operation.”Footnote ³⁶ Importantly, these acts occur as part of a common or shared experience. Greenspan's performance of gender inoperativity thus offers us a point of departure for theorizing and experimenting with “a new possible common use” for the socially marked body.Footnote ³⁷

The notion of the inoperative body is useful as a way of conceiving strategies for contesting forms of injustice that are rooted in bodily difference, including racial difference. Performing the raced body as inoperative does not make race invisible, and it is not the same thing as declaring that one is “beyond” or “post” race, because racial difference and the history of racialization may persist in and be exhibited by the racially inoperative body. But racial meaning that is deactivated or transformed through performance is exhibited on the body without constraining or limiting it by reducing it to a fixed identity. Deactivating or suspending racial meaning allows the racialized body to signify and act in new ways that are otherwise foreclosed in the racist regimes to which the minoritarian body is currently subject. Importantly, however, it does so without taking away the capacity of the raced subject to account for and demand a remedy to the legacies of racial injustice that may continue to constrain or affect his or her body.

To perform the racialized body as inoperative, Rescue Me must first make explicit the process through which race attaches itself to the body, which the play does by subtly inviting the audience member to become aware of his or her own role in producing and projecting racial meaning onto the minortiarian subject. As noted above, “Asia” and “Asian American” are terms that are largely foreign to the spoken text of Barall's play; they are signified through the bodies of many of the actors and the creative team. Asian difference is explicitly referred to only once in the text, during a moment when Orestes and his companion, Pylades, arrive on Taurian shores. Its injection into the narrative raises significant questions about what “Asian” means and specifically how it signifies in relation to Orestes' body during the performance.

During this early scene, Orestes, played by dancer and choreographer Julian Barnett, runs onto a dark stage, screaming. He enters a bright spotlight at the center of the stage and performs a spastic, tortured dance to electronic dance music with ambient beats, frantic digital chirps, and disjointed scraps of melody. This frenetic explosion of sound is decoded by a supertitle that reads, “Orestes pursued by Furies.” Pylades joins the hysterical prince and soothes him by turning to a discussion of their mission to free the statue of Artemis from the temple and return her to Greece. As Orestes falters, Pylades gives a rousing speech before taking his friend's head in his hands and stating, “As soon as we get this statue back to Greece, our luck is gonna change. I can feel it. So don't get all Asiatic on me” (9).

The reference is confounding. What does it mean to “get all Asiatic”? For classical Athens, where Greece was located at the center of the known world, Asia was anything to the east of Hellas. When the reference to Asia is rewritten and staged in a contemporary context, however, there is no clear meaning in Barall's text. Once more, the bodies of the actors disrupt any scheme of racial signification that might give the command substantive meaning. Ryan King, who plays Pylades, is a tall white actor with matinee-idol looks. Barnett's ethnicity is ambiguous; he is short with darker features. His program biography states, “Julian Barnett was born in Tokyo, Japan and transplanted to Oakland, CA where he grew up breakdancing and playing the guitar,” so one could leap to the assumption that he's hapa.Footnote ³⁸ But he could just as easily have been the child of non-Japanese parents who were living in Japan by circumstance. Thus, if a spectator projects “Asian” subjectivity onto Barnett in order to give meaning to the reference, he or she does so at the risk of producing racial meaning where there is none. The problem of identifying the race of Barnett's Orestes becomes all the more complex when he is revealed as the brother of Ikeda's Iphigenia.

Franz Fanon argued that dominant racial ideology extrapolates visual and phenotypical difference to ascribe racial subjectivity to a body, locking the racialized subject into a “racial epidermal schema.”Footnote ³⁹ By the logic of this schema, Jennifer Ikeda is Asian American because she looks Asian American, but Barnett's Orestes suspends this logic. An audience member who chooses to recognize Barnett as “Asiatic” in order to harmonize his character with Pylades' epithet, or with the assertion in the narrative of blood kinship between Barnett's Orestes and Ikeda's Iphigenia, will deactivate the assumption that race is determined through visible/phenotypical characteristics. While such a projection undermines the association between the visibly marked body and racial subjectivity, it also betrays a potential desire to preserve racial subjectivity as a recognizable, fixed, or salient category. That is, if the audience member projects Asian American subjectivity onto Barnett, she or he might be challenging a dominant visual logic of race but would still be articulating race as a salient, meaningful phenomenon that ultimately can be located within the body of the minoritarian subject. Rescue Me thus stages what Joan Kee saw in the work of Asian American artists who withhold a clear visualization of racial or ethnic identifiers: their art “seek[s] to covertly uncover various phenomena of power external to the work [such as race and racialization] . . . by having the viewer reveal his or her allegiance to them.”Footnote ⁴⁰ As a result, the play invites the audience member to be conscious of his or her own role in the racialization of the performing body while challenging the racist logic that sustains this very process.

The play pushes this conceit to its limit: it is Iphigenia's racial and national subjectivity—not Orestes'—that is explicitly called into question. When Orestes and Pylades are delivered to Iphigenia to be prepared for sacrifice, Iphigenia, who is unaware that she and he are brother and sister, reveals that she is Greek in the following exchange:

Iphigenia's response, “We've been here a long time,” can be read as a gesture toward how diaspora can confuse or transform the racial and cultural identity of racialized subjects living in an adopted homeland. Similarly, Orestes' remark “you don't look it” is a phrase that is very familiar to any member of the audience whose bodily configuration may not fit the easily recognizable racial or gender taxonomies of the dominant culture. Ethnically ambiguous and mixed-race subjects, who are often asked to identify their race, know that if this identification does not match what their interlocutor expects (an Asian American or Native American, for example), it is not uncommon for the interlocutor to respond by saying something like “You don't look it” or “I don't see it.” This response is part of a larger ideological apparatuses that maintains a structure of power that is intimately tied to racial differentiation and the constant reproduction of race as something that is fixed, visually discernible, and/or a coherent, meaningful, and stable category of social identification. Thus, “you don't look it” takes on a ideological and regulative function, challenging the speaking subject to control the racial dissonance that his or her unclassifiable body poses to the racial epidermal schema by performing himself or herself as a recognizably racialized subject.Footnote ⁴¹ The ambiguously ethnic subject is compelled to perform within the coordinates of a limiting but stable racial identity—“I am Asian American” or “I am Greek,” for example—or to accept a lack of legible social being.

Importantly, this scene of misrecognition (“You don't look it”) precedes Orestes' and Iphigenia's ultimate recognition of each other as siblings. When this recognition comes, Artemis highlights the importance of the exchange by giving it a scholarly footnote: “Aristotle was particularly fond of this scene. . . . [He] thought it exemplified the most artistic kind of recognition” (46).Footnote ⁴² Emphasizing the thematic importance of recognition to Iphigenia's story, the earlier exchange of misrecognition thus invites the audience to play the part of one of the siblings, recognizing Iphigenia as properly Greek (despite Orestes' stated misgiving that she doesn't look it) and thus radically undermining the link between visual assessment and racial constitution. Indeed, throughout the play, Arcenas's casting choices draw attention to the raced bodies of the actors onstage while suspending and confounding any attempt to reduce the racialized body to a recognizable or fixed set of meanings. Trying to view Barall's Greeks as simple stand-ins for Asian Americans will always fail to a certain extent because African American and white performers play the other Greeks (such as Pylades and the Temple Maidens) and Greenspan, a white man, who portrays the Greek goddesses Artemis and Athena (Fig. 2). Indeed, the casting of Pinoy actor Paco Tolson to portray all the Taurian characters other than the king actively troubles such an assumption.

Figure 2.

Sandra (Oni Monifa Renee Brown, left) and Lydia (Katherine Partington, right) prepare Artemis (David Greenspan, center) to leave Tauris in Rescue Me, Ma-Yi Theater Company, Ohio Theatre, New York City, 2010. Photo: Brian Barenio.

These casting strategies achieve more than a simple liberal ethos of color-blind casting whereby the racial and gender particularity of the actors is set aside or ignored in pursuit of an ahistorical and depoliticized formal equality.Footnote ⁴³ Rather, Rescue Me asks the audience to pay attention to the raced body while disorganizing and deactivating the dominant racial logics that reduce it to a limiting and fixed set of racial meanings. In this way, Rescue Me achieves what the cross-racial casting practices of Asian American theatre companies do, according to Angela C. Pao: “Instead of reasserting a static, bounded notion of cultural identity, the cross-cultural casting makes a statement about the changing nature of [U.S.] American cultural identity over time.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Through these various production choices, race in Rescue Me is simultaneously displayed and delinked from its traditional forms of meaning, deactivated and opened up for myriad new, potentially disruptive modes of signification.

As the performance renders the racial epidermal schema inoperative with the bodies of Barall's characters, they are finally free to return to the question of Iphigenia's freedom. Indeed, it is on the question of Iphigenia's emancipation that Barall concludes her adaptation. But in order to return to this issue, the characters must first render the law inoperative, insofar as the law is defined as that which limits the heroine's capacity for freedom.

Iphigenia's Emancipation: Rescue Me and the New Law

Whatever the merits are of the new justice system Athena establishes at the conclusion of the Oresteia, both Iphigenia in Tauris and Rescue Me imply that this new legal system is a partial failure: some of the erinyes refuse their new home at the base of Areopagus and continue to hound Orestes across Greece and into Tauris. In the latter work, in particular, Iphigenia's bondage is inextricably linked to the command of the gods and is staged as an injustice. In order to resolve this problem, both plays conclude with an amendment to the Oresteian system of justice.

As Thoas chases the absconding siblings, Athena arrives and orders them to forgo their return home to Argos. In Iphigenia in Tauris the goddess declares, “And let this be the law,” before commanding the siblings to establish two temples in Greece: one in which worshipers will annually reenact a ritual theatricalization of Iphigenia's sacrifice, and another in which Iphigenia will continue her service as a priestess to Artemis.Footnote ⁴⁵ To command is to perform a particular type of legal speech act that J. L. Austin identifies as an exercitive. Exercitives, which are especially the province of “arbitrators and judges,” are speech acts that declare a “decision that something is to be so . . . a sentence as opposed to a verdict.”Footnote ⁴⁶ If Athena's preamble (“And let this be the law”) emphasizes the intention of an exercitive speech act, her command to instantiate an annual ritual to perform and commemorate Iphigenia's sacrifice highlights the importance of performance/ritual to this supplementary model of justice: “When they observe / Her festival, the priest shall hold, / In memory of you, the sharp blade of his knife / Against a human throat and draw one drop / Of blood, then stop—this in no disrespect / But a grave reminder of Her former ways.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Where a rational and deliberative legal order was named as the primary vehicle for the realization of justice at the conclusion of the Oresteia, Euripides' play concludes by naming the conjunction between performance/ritual (in the form of a reenactment of Iphigenia's sacrifice) and law (in the form of the extant jury at the Areopagus) as that which will put an end to the elements of vengeance and wrath that escaped the inadequate court system established for Orestes' trial. Euripides suggests that it will be through the incorporation of performance that the cycle of violence that makes justice impossible for the Atreidae siblings might end. Notably, Euripides is entirely uninterested in the matter of the emancipation of the brother and sister, and they remain subject to the limits and commands of the gods and are thus banned from returning home to Argos. Barall, in contrast, concludes the play on the question of the possibility of freedom.

Athena is capable, in both the Oresteia and Iphigenia in Tauris, of performatively rendering inoperative the “old laws” or even supplementing the new ones because of her authority as the divine source of law. If the revolutionary potentiality of inoperativity has thus been reserved for the privileged voice of a sovereign or a god, Rescue Me introduces another possibility. In its final moment, it reworks Athena's enunciation of a new law. One of Barall's characters interrupts and rewrites Euripides' conclusion in a way that renders the theologicojuridical force of Athena's speech act inoperative. Just as Thoas is preparing his army to pursue the escaping siblings, the lights shift to a deep blue. Thoas cowers in a corner of the stage as the image of Greenspan's Athena, wearing a red couture gown, flickers across the televisions in the columns on both sides of the stage and as a massive projection on the back wall. Unlike his playful, queer embodiment of Artemis, Greenspan's Athena is stern and androgynous. She chants an incantation in Greek at the same time that a recording of Greenspan performing an English version of her speech booms throughout the theatre. Though she does not utter the word law, she issues a decree: “Orestes (I know you can hear me). Attend my commands” (66). Greenspan's Athena issues the same exercitives as her counterpart in Euripides' play. But as she does so, Iphigenia's two attendants (Sandra and Lydia) causally walk onto the stage and pick up a remote control. As Athena is about to finish her decree, Lydia raises the remote and, with an emphatic push of the button, turns the televisions off. The lights come to full power, and the play is suspended for a moment.

“I'm starting this scene over,” announces Lydia. She looks out to the audience and continues, “It doesn't happen this way. It's my turn” (66). First, she calls Thoas to the stage and convinces him to allow the siblings to return home. With supplicating hands, Lydia begs, “Please, Thoas. She's been here for twenty years. She's barely been alive. She's loved no one, no thing” (66). Lydia understands Iphigenia as a minoritarian subject who has been stripped of the bare foundations of human experience: “barely alive” and having “loved no one, no thing.” This is framed as an injustice so intolerable that even the unrelenting king abandons his pursuit and gives the siblings his blessing to return home. Then we see a boat coursing through the open seas on a few of the screens. Lydia runs to the front of the stage and addresses the audience as if we (the audience) are Iphigenia: “Just a second, everyone. To Athens, my friends. Iphigenia, if you can still hear me, don't stop in Athens, keep heading home. All the way home. Winds. Breathe soft” (67).

Although Lydia uses a remote control to turn off the televisions/projection in the Ma-Yi production, in Barall's unpublished script Lydia simply “pauses the image of Athena” (66). Let us take a second to imagine the scene had the production manifested this direction. Athena, at precisely the moment that she performs the exercitive, is paused (or placed in suspension). Imagine the stage as Barall wrote it, in which Lydia pauses the law and assumes sovereign command over the scene. The old order is not simply destroyed, erased, or abolished. Instead, although Athena is deactivated, she is still exhibited for the audience as she remains frozen on the screen. By suspending Athena, Lydia assumes and repurposes the sovereign capacity to announce performatively a new form of law in which Iphigenia can finally be emancipated from both the law of the gods and her family's sordid past. And as Lydia is a servant, neither royal nor a god, we are reminded that the power to take control of and repurpose the law is a potential seeded in all of the law's subjects, no matter where we find ourselves in the hierarchies of embodied subjectification. From the ground level, Lydia becomes an embodiment of minoritarian practices that interrupt and render the machinery of the dominant culture inoperative.

An alternative reading might posit that Iphigenia's emancipation comes at the hand of the king when Thoas voluntarily relinquishes his pursuit. But the source of power in the scene, from the moment Lydia announces “I'm starting this scene over,” is rooted in the speech acts of this lowborn servant girl. In the Austinian sense, Thoas' choice to break off pursuit is a response to Lydia's utterances. For Austin, perlocutionary utterances are “what we bring about or achieve by saying something, such as convincing [or] persuading.”Footnote ⁴⁸ This perlocutionary force is instantiated precisely by Lydia's act of suspending Athena's divine decree and Thoas' sovereign prerogative in order to assume fully this potestas for herself as a representative of the multitude.

Just as the play suspends and deactivates racial meaning while still displaying the raced body, it does not fully obliterate the law when it renders it inoperative. Instead, by putting these phenomena in a state of suspension, Rescue Me makes possible the opening of a new space in which the characters finally have the capacity to journey towards freedom's realization. The play ends on the question of emancipation without offering a neat portrait of a world in which our long-suffering heroine is free. Rather, when Lydia causes Athena's law to be inoperative, true emancipation becomes a possibility for Iphigenia for the first time. In this way, Lydia (or perhaps Barall) liberates Iphigenia from Athena's command and her bondage. Through the suspension of the divine exercitive, Lydia establishes the conditions whereby Iphigenia might choose freedom and make it her reality. The performance concludes in this moment of potentiality. As Lydia speaks directly to the audience when addressing Iphigenia, we are momentarily cast in the role of the heroine. Lydia gives voice to the minoritarian insurgency that animates the Muñoz passage with which I began this essay. She urges us to ignore the command of law and dictates of the dominant culture and to travel home or, better yet, build the homes we want. This frames our new imperative, and it is nothing short of the invitation to bring about the conditions whereby a long-deferred emancipation is finally performed into reality.