1 “Undone With Terror”: Aeschylus’ Suppliants as Agents of Binary Terror Sydney Marie Hughes Theatre Like other performance arts, theatre is unique because the human body is the artistic vessel used for expression. The actor's body onstage is ever-entwined in the work, whether consciously or unconsciously. When certain bodies perform specific works, the performances can transform into a site of cultural confrontation. The concept of “binary terror,”1 coined by Vivian Patraka, describes the feeling that arises in an audience when established binary distinctions are challenged or disrupted, especially ones that explicitly or implicitly shape social understandings, functions, and economies. By highlighting the body and its inherent historical and political markings, performance artists provoke binary terror, challenging the audience to examine its social norms. Aeschylus’ play The Suppliants provides abundant opportunities for this binary confrontation through its inherent themes of feminine choice, bodily autonomy, the cost of war, and the challenges of refugees. I argue that The Suppliants (and its titular chorus of women) has served as an effective vehicle for binary terror in service of social critique, from its original 5th-century BCE staging through contemporary adaptations. I will examine three productions of The Suppliants and demonstrate how its original text is ideal for spurring political commentary and action; first, through the immigration crisis in Greece during its political crisis (463 BCE); second, in the Theatre of War production during the Russian invasion of Ukraine (2022); and finally, in a hypothetical production designed to be produced in the United States to address contemporary political upheaval. Through identity-conscious casting and embodied performance, its themes of resistance, binary disruption, and bodily autonomy can be amplified in a strikingly relevant way to a contemporary audience without changing the original text. 2 Identity-conscious casting takes into consideration how the actors’ identity and physical markers can deepen the narrative and thematic resonance of a production, rather than treating them as incidental. The Suppliants can highlight the systemic inequalities and social hierarchies embedded within its narrative by treating the specific embodied performance of the Suppliant women as integral and inseparable from the plot. By demonstrating the potential of The Suppliants to challenge cultural binaries through its original text and the explicit bodies of its performers, I argue for a broader reevaluation of previously dismissed classical theatre texts. When centering marginalized voices and embracing identity-conscious casting, future performances of classical plays can interrogate enduring social and political inequalities without requiring extensive adaptation to remain meaningful. I posit that historic plays can become uniquely meaningful in a way contemporary plays can not when they include historically excluded bodies by providing necessary discomfort and inspiring critical engagement. This approach not only ensures the continued relevance of ancient works but reaffirms theatre's ability and responsibility to disrupt and catalyze change. Aeschylus’ The Suppliants begins with a chorus of fifty women, the Danaids, arriving in Argos carrying white wool tied to olive branches. The branches symbolize their supplication and appeal to Zeus for protection and assistance. They meet the ruler of Argos, King Pelasgus, who immediately recognizes them as foreigners not only physically but in their clothing as well, as he states, “Greeks you are not: what woman of Argos, What Greek, wears clothes like these?”2 The Danaids explain that they are fleeing Egypt due to forced marriage to their cousins, the sons of Aegyptus. When questioned as to why the King should not send them back, as they are women and, therefore, property of Egypt, they are insistent that they are in danger and fleeing violence and oppression. They strengthen their claims to protection by proving that they are descendants 3 of Zeus through Io, a figure from Greek mythology who fled to Egypt before giving birth to Zeus’ child. However, King Pelasgus is still hesitant to provide the Danaids sanctuary, as he fears it will begin a war with the sons of Aegyptus. The king is at the center of a moral and ethical dilemma: should he honor the Argive laws of hospitality while simultaneously risking war with a foreign nation? The Danaids invoke the gods and threaten to take their own lives at the Argive altar if their request is denied, telling the king that “To die is to be free Of this misery, these tears,” and that they prefer death to a life of forced marriage.3 The King leaves the decision to the Argives, and the citizens unanimously vote to protect the women. When an Egyptian captain comes to retrieve the Danaids, the King hides them behind the city's walls and announces that they are now citizens of Argos and under his protection. The women of Argos come from their homes and take in each of the suppliant women. The play ends with an exchange between the women of Argos and the Danaid chorus in which the Argive women acknowledge that there may be consequences for their choice and the future may hold danger. The Danaids respond that the price is worth the cost and pray for continued protection. Binary Terror in the Explicit Bodies of The Suppliant Women The original text of The Suppliants is permeated by tension caused by the presence of the Danaids, who are both familiar and foreign to the people of Argos. They share ancestry with the Argives through Io, reinforcing their claim to protection as children of Zeus. However, they are still simultaneously Egyptian, seen as outsiders not only for their appearance but for their apparent physical differences and resistance to the norms of Greek society. Their presence also brings threats of war with the barbarian Egyptians, who will inevitably arrive to claim their right of ownership of the women. Similarly, the women continuously reject the patriarchal norms of female subjugation, insisting on their bodily autonomy and arguing the law of God over man, 4 outright proclaiming, “No man our master! God grant it, Law or no law.”4 They clearly and purposefully disrupt the accepted binaries of male (owner) and female (property). The destabilization of social binaries is the core of Patraka’s concept of “binary terror,” which describes the fear or anxiety that arises when deeply ingrained social binaries are threatened.5 This fear is felt most acutely by those who benefit from maintaining these distinctions, stemming from uncertainty of what chaos might emerge from their loss of privilege and power in the absence of those binary systems. Therefore, binary terror is both a psychological response and a social phenomenon that can create a space for reevaluating norms and a new understanding of identity and power. The Danaids' presence causes binary terror as they embody both dangerous foreigners (Egyptians) and protected kin (descendants of Io) simultaneously. Building upon Patraka’s concepts, Performance Studies scholar Rebecca Schneider extends this framework into the domain of performance studies through her concepts of the explicit body. Unlike a blank canvas (or an empty stage), a performer’s body can not ever truly be presented to the audience as neutral due to social symbolism, which “organizes bodies by markings, relegating them male body, female body, colored body, white body, and so on.” 6 All bodies onstage also must bear the weight of the historical, cultural, and political forces imposed upon them. A Black woman playing Hamlet can not simply be playing Hamlet; an audience from our Western society will always interpret her Hamlet with all the historical and social trappings that come with being both Black and a woman. Explicit body performers, Schneider explains, can use their bodies to call attention to those markings in ways that examine the fragility of the social and political systems in place.7 In theatrical performance, explicit bodies can be used as agents of binary terror to bring new emphasis to existing themes in a play’s text, making these 5 deconstructions both visible and tangible. Jaques Derrida’s theory of deconstruction emphasizes the instability of binary oppositions, arguing that such distinctions are neither natural nor fixed, but rather rely on structures that privilege one term over the other.8 For instance, in binaries such as male/female or civilized/barbarian the first term is granted authority by the social hierarchy, while the second is marginalized. In performance, the explicit body actively destabilizes these oppositions and exposes the arbitrary nature of their construction by focusing on what happens when the supplemental term becomes the primary focus. As its title suggests, The Suppliants serves as a compelling case study for these ideas. The Danaids embody binary terror by disrupting the distinctions between civilized and barbarian, male and female, and self and other. Their explicit bodily presence forces the audience to recognize the historical and cultural symbols present in the bodies of the women. Binary terror is present not only in the story and embodiment of the Danaids but also in their structural function in the play. Aeschylus’ choice for the Danaids to serve as both the chorus and the protagonist in The Suppliants marks a significant departure from typical choral functions in classic Greek theatre. Typically, the chorus served to provide commentary on the play's action, as well as cues on how the audience might interpret the action of the play, often speaking up with asides and making moral judgments. The chorus was often a collective stand-in for the civic body, helping to signal societal norms and values.9 In The Suppliants, however, the chorus is far from a neutral observer, commenting on the action while viscerally being affected by it. As central characters seeking asylum, the Danaids have a direct and vested stake in the moral and political choices onstage, creating an unexpected and likely uncomfortable dynamic for the audience. 6 This dual role of the Danaids as both active participants and chorus members disrupted audience expectations and introduced a sense of binary terror in its deconstruction of the audience and performer binary. By casting the Danaids in the role of the chorus, Aeschylus forces the audience to realize that the chorus, in whom they would typically expect to see their own beliefs and ideals mirrored, is instead a representation of “other” with their own opinions, agendas, and principles. This confrontation would have been surprising and perhaps unsettling to an original Greek audience, heightening the play's tension as it encouraged the audience to confront their status as outsiders while simultaneously placing them in a position encouraging empathy. The Danaids as 5th Century Athenian Immigrants The play's binary confrontation is particularly significant given the original historical context of its original production. At the time that Aeschylus first wrote The Suppliants, which would have been sometime just before 458 BCE, the theatre served not only as entertainment but as a civic responsibility. At the time, most plays (including The Suppliants) were performed in the festivals of Dionysus, which were attended as a civic duty by the people of Athens. The tragedies especially were typically written to inspire discussion around Greek civic identity and values by addressing contemporary social and political concerns through an entertaining narrative, as well as to communicate Greek superiority. Athenian democracy was hierarchical and firmly placed wealthy Greek men in the privileged position. As Lynette G. Mitchell notes, Greek culture was considered civilized, placed above all other cultures as physically, morally, and intellectually superior, and outsiders were perceived as savage and uncivilized10. Exploring the original text through this contextual lens highlights the binaries that are at the core of its themes and ideals. 7 Geoffrey W. Bakewell notes that The Suppliants likely resonated with its original audience due to Athens’ large percentage of immigrants and asylum seekers as a result of the Persian Wars, with immigrants making up as much as fifty percent of the free Athenian population during the time the play was produced.11 By contrast, the original performers would have been made up entirely of white, wealthy, male Athenian citizens, as it was the tradition of Athenian theatre for male actors to play all roles regardless of gender. This practice, although enforcing the patriarchal norms of Athenian society, was simultaneously subverting the gender binary. Male actors playing Danaids would have been speaking the words of women pleading for bodily autonomy and rejecting male-centric laws. As Sue-Ellen Case, a theatre and queer theory scholar, notes, the use of male actors to portray women both reaffirmed and exposed the societal marginalization of women and illustrated its performative aspects.12 Even in its original context, the titular Suppliant women were the embodied site of both glorification and rejection of male Athenian ideals. Greek identity during this time was also heavily defined in opposition to those deemed uncivilized. This binary was not only culturally motivated but also politically used to justify the imperialist ambitions of Athens’ upper class. Because the Danaids were both foreign and familiar, they forced the audience to feel discomfort as they considered their pleas for asylum. The Danaids’ defiance of traditional gender roles adds yet another layer to this disruption. Mitchell argues that their insistence on choice challenges patriarchal expectations of female submission.13 This dynamic underscores the tension between Argos’ duty to protect its citizens and its moral obligation to provide refuge, especially to those with whom they share a common lineage. 8 As originally performed, The Suppliants reinforced Athenian political ideals by using their physical markers, both in clothing and natural appearance, to identify the Suppliant chorus as outsiders. The King of Argos is framed as their potential savior, and he immediately points out these differences when they claim Argive blood. He immediately observes that their clothing sets them apart and that they wear clothes no Argive woman would wear. He even claims they look more “like Libyans, not Greeks:”14 Both Aeschylus and the King clearly and quickly categorize them as foreigners based on their appearance. The performers, originally all white men, not only wore clothing to specifically mark the actors as foreign but also painted themselves with black or brown paint.15 Conversely, they also carried a symbol of their Greek ancestry in the olive branches that gave the women their title of suppliants, a signifier of Greek customs and an appeal to Greek gods. It is the binary terror between these multiple facets of their tangible appearance that places the Danaids in a liminal space: they are both visibly foreign through their Egyptian heritage and visibly kin to the Greeks through their claim to the olive branches they carry. This duality simultaneously reinforces Athenian superiority, placing them as desired protectors to foreigners while complicating the established binary as the Danaids invoke shared heritage to assert their claims to asylum in Argos. The play also uses the civilized/barbarian binary (or perhaps, more specifically, the Greek/barbarian binary) to navigate questions of justice - especially as related to refugee rights and civic incorporation. Around the time of its production, Athens was facing an immigration crisis unlike any it had ever seen following the Persian Wars. Immigrants and refugees were so numerous that they were given a formal legal status as free non-citizens not only to give them limited rights but to delineate them as people who lived in Athens but were not truly Athenian. Bakewell argues that The Suppliants critiqued Athenian xenophobia through King Pelasgus’ 9 decision to give them asylum, thus placing a higher moral emphasis on the divine imperative to protect the suppliants regardless of their origins.16 The king’s decision was likely a reflection of and response to true Athenian concern, implying that moral responsibilities (the law of gods) should transcend political boundaries (the law of man). The Argive citizens unanimously voted to protect the suppliants, despite their clear misgivings that there would be retaliation by the Egyptians. This tension is further complicated by the role of the Argive women in aiding the Danaids. Interestingly, women in Athens could not vote, either in reality or in the play, so the assumption is that it is the men of Argos who have voted to save the Danaids. However, the Argive women take on an active role by incorporating the Danaids into the city and their households by taking them as handmaidens when the Egyptian captain comes to claim them, granting the Argive women an indirect but powerful influence in civic decisions. This highlights how women, despite being marked for social exclusion by their gender, can still challenge existing social boundaries. The narrative emphasis placed on the Argive women at the end of the play draws attention not only to the binaries that separate the two groups (foreigner versus citizen) but also the markers that they share as women. Although the Argive women are included through their identity as Greeks, they are still excluded through womanhood. “Marriage? Women’s destiny: It’s so, so has it always been.”17 This shared fate, marriage despite any personal wishes, is what communicates their shared identity of womanhood. The Danaids as Advocates: 2022 Theatre of War Production In 2022, Theatre of War Productions staged The Suppliants Project, a Zoom reading of The Suppliants with Ukrainian citizens in the roles as the chorus of Danaids. This production, inspired by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, brought the play’s themes of asylum and resistance 10 into a strikingly contemporary context. The Ukrainian women in the performance came from a variety of backgrounds, including those who identified as students, soldiers, artists, politicians, activists, and refugees. The women in the chorus were not only performing the roles as actors but physically embodying the Danaids, drawing from their lived experiences. This particular type of adaptation, which directly casts actors who have experienced similar events in the play, amplified the theme of refugee concerns.18 For an audience observer aware of the Ukrainian conflict, it became impossible for the lived experiences of the actors to not be reflected in the text. This strengthening of the themes was clearly the purpose of the production, as a panel was held at the end of the performance, in which the women were able to discuss the play, answer questions, and facilitate large-scale discussions with audience members. Using this question-and- answer segment, they were able to directly engage with the themes of the play while fostering empathy and advocacy for the Ukrainian conflict. As Bakewell observes, the performers’ connection to the narrative allowed the audience to experience The Suppliants not as a distant historical artifact but as a visceral, contemporary crisis.19 The casting of Ukrainian citizens also shifted the focus present in the play’s binaries. As in the original production, the male/female binary was present, but this production clearly placed emphasis on the citizen/foreigner binary. Casting performers with explicit bodies, marked by Ukrainian citizenship and, for some, actual experience as a refugee, was clearly meant to highlight actual-lived experience. However, by casting Ukrainian citizens performing for a primarily white American audience, their markers as “foreign” were less present, which also disrupted audience assumptions about nationality and belonging. Although “social symbolism organizes bodies by markings,” the markings on the physical bodies of these Danaids were subtle to the point of near invisibility to American audiences.20 The original production used physical 11 markers in clothing and facepaint to clearly delineate the actors (who shared gender, nationality, and ethnicity with the rest of the cast). By contrast, the Danaids in the Theatre of War production were made to look no different from their Argive cast-mates. In fact, it was impossible to tell who in the Danaids were refugees and who were soldiers, politicians, or other citizens. The Danaids did not wear “foreign” clothes or bear strong physical marks, which would have set them apart from the actors playing the people of Argos. This challenged the assumption about what an “other” looks like, instead forcing the audience to examine the arbitrary political lines drawn between nations. This was even further driven home by the fact that the production was produced via Zoom; in a post-COVID world, the boundaries between nations are easily crossed by way of the internet. When everyone in the recorded production looked at least passably similar, it made it abundantly clear how the binaries and divides being upheld are built on arbitrary national and physical lines. This Zoom-only production was so successful that, only a few months later, the production was re-staged at the University of Notre Dame using Ukrainian students in a hybrid production, with actors on the stage being broadcast across the world. The Suppliants Project production brought new relevance to the text and helped it resonate across cultural divides through the physicality of the performers. A Contemporary Production: Conscious Casting of the Danaids Productions of The Suppliants are few and far between, despite it being one of the earliest examples of Western drama and one with clear contemporary relevance in its themes. I argue that a contemporary production of The Suppliants in the United States can amplify its themes of binary disruption and bodily autonomy by consciously casting performers who embody multiple marginalized identities as the Danaids. One of the most unique aspects of The Suppliants is that its protagonist is also its chorus, a unified group of 50 women who are never individualized 12 except on occasion through a “Lead Danaid.” The chorus of Danaids, rather than being portrayed as a fully unified, analogous group, could instead be made up of explicitly varied women. This casting strategy would draw directly from Schneider’s concept of the explicit body and use the performers’ physical presence to highlight the markers tied to their identities.21 By bringing performers whose bodies have been marked by systemic oppression onto the stage, this production would foreground the fragility of societal binaries and challenge audiences to confront their own biases. This approach could also challenge the binaries of individual versus collective and self versus other. The clear, tangible presence of marginalized performers disrupts entrenched social norms, and this could be explored in countless ways through the Danaids. Multiple different binaries can be explored, especially those designed and upheld by a Western audience. Casting women of color as Danaids would foreground the play’s themes of immigration and cultural otherness. The Danaids, portrayed as refugees from Egypt in the original text, inherently challenged the Greek/barbarian binary, a construct that Athenian audiences would have associated with cultural and racial superiority, and justified their exclusion from the Athenian democratic framework.22 Casting women of color reinforces the historical dynamic in the text while confronting contemporary audiences with a legacy of colonialism and racial discrimination. The visible presence of women of color onstage as both outsiders and advocates for their own moral and physical agency dismantles those binaries and directly challenges the audience's assumptions about identity. Casting hijabi women as Danaids would add an additional layer of religious and cultural specificity to the production’s critique of exclusion. In many Western societies, the hijab is often misinterpreted as a symbol of oppression. In this context, a woman fleeing true oppression 13 through forced marriage but continuing to exercise her rights to her body and religious choice would uphold the hijab as a symbol of agency. The Danaids' act of rebellion is not only a rejection of patriarchal society but an uplifting of the laws of the gods over the laws of man, and thus an act of religious faith. As Zira highlights, the Danaids function as clear moral agents in the play, navigating between divine and human law.23 The inclusion of a symbol of the Muslim faith worn by a character who speaks for the higher religious law would challenge stereotypes about religious identity and heighten binary terror in a culture that privileges (white) Christianity. In a different vein, including trans and nonbinary performers in the chorus could lead a production to deconstruct the male/female binary inherent in the original text. The Danaids’ rejection of forced marriage would have been considered an act of rebellion in its defiance of patriarchal norms, but casting trans and nonbinary individuals would add another dimension to this resistance. This casting would emphasize the performative nature of gender itself. Gender performance in ancient Greek theatre already blurred the lines of gender representation through its practice of male actors portraying female characters.24 In a contemporary production, an emphasis on the original text’s references to gendered violence could have the same effect on contemporary audiences. The suppliant women explicitly reference gender in the violence they are fleeing, with mention of “male lust” and “godless men.”25 They flee not from men in general, but specifically male violence, and they set themselves apart from it as women. In an updated production, the inclusion of trans, masc, and nonbinary performers would emphasize that it is a specific performance of gender and toxic masculinity that is the enemy, not gender itself, and build upon that existing legacy using Schneider’s explicit body framework to provoke an equivalent binary terror for contemporary audiences. 14 In addition, casting women of various ages to portray the Danaids could emphasize the universality of the Danaids’ plight while also creating visual layers within the chorus. The presence of older women could speak to those who have been struggling for their entire lives and reflect the social expectations placed on women throughout their lives. Younger actors such as Danaids could bring to mind broken innocence and vulnerability and remind audiences of the youth who are often negatively affected by war and displacement. Finally, the inclusion of disabled actors would draw attention to the often-overlooked connections between bodily autonomy and disability. Casting visibly disabled performers would encourage audiences to confront their biases about strength and agency. By incorporating actors with disabilities in the Danaids chorus, the production would highlight disabled bodies as ones capable of resilience and rebellion against societal norms. Perhaps the most compelling argument for a diverse cast of Danaids is that, in the original text, the precise reason for the women’s refusal to marry their cousins is never explicitly stated. Although scholars have offered a variety of possible reasons drawn from the text, including violence displayed by their potential suitors, obedience to their father, a rejection of incestual marriage, or a simple aversion to marriage in general, there is no definitive answer to be found.26 Perhaps the original reasoning was less important to Athenian audiences, or this gap in the text was easily filled in through its contemporary context. Regardless, it leaves ample room for twenty-first-century productions to establish their own meaning for the Danaids’ flight. When considering the Danaids as individuals rather than a collective, it naturally follows that all fifty women surely have their own individual experiences, feelings, and motivations behind their decision to leave their homeland. 15 Through intentionally casting performers from diverse identities, this hypothetical production would assert the Danaids as agents of binary terror and challenge audience assumptions about identity, agency, and belonging. Emphasizing the diversity of the Danaids rather than viewing them only as a group will clarify to an audience that the plight of refugees is not tied to one nation, identity, or physical marker but to all. “It shines everywhere, even in gloom”: The continued social relevance of The Suppliants Aeschylus’ The Suppliants is a striking example of how classical texts, even those written thousands of years ago, can remain intensely relevant to a 21st-century audience. The play’s exploration of bodily autonomy, refugee and asylum crises, and the tension between moral and political responsibility provides ample opportunities for examining the enduring social binaries within our own Western culture, such as male versus female, citizen versus foreigner, and individual versus collective. From the original staging to contemporary adaptations, The Suppliants has been an effective tool for confronting political and social hierarchies and forcing audiences to confront their own assumptions of privilege and inclusion. This capacity for deconstruction and disruption can be even further heightened when the play is performed with attention to the explicit bodies of its performers, using their own historical and political markings to come to the foreground. In this way, the embodied performance of The Suppliants allows the text to become a living critique of exclusion, systemic violence, and social hierarchies. The use of binary terror in The Suppliants is most powerful when the explicit bodies onstage belong to individuals who have historically been excluded from positions of agency, highlighting the Danaids’ act of rebellion as a step towards reclaiming their agency. The casting of Ukrainian refugees in the 2022 Theatre of War production demonstrated how the lived 16 experiences of displacement could help the play's themes resonate with a new urgency for a contemporary audience. This lived experience, juxtaposed with few physical differences, demonstrated a more subtle marking of bodies that highlights how arbitrary our own prejudicial lines have been drawn across nations and people. By centering marginalized voices, the bodies of the titular suppliants can become a site of cultural confrontation that interrogates the impact that historical, cultural, and political issues have had on the bodies of the women playing these roles. Casting traditionally marginalized performers in The Suppliants does more than disrupt binaries for the sake of effective theatre-making; it transforms the play from an ancient relic to a bridge between the past and the present. This casting also accentuates the universality of the play's central themes of bodily autonomy and community responsibility by reframing them within the embodied experience of those who are still fighting for those rights. By allowing these actors to speak the original text rather than a completely rewritten adaptation, audiences are forced to recognize that these issues are not new and progressive but are as old as humanity itself. This approach not only enriches the narrative of an ancient play but also encourages the audience to reflect on their own roles in perpetuating long-standing social hierarchies, with the hope that they will also examine how they can dismantle them. In particular, theatre practitioners, scholars, and creators can use these texts as tools to confront the inequities of our time. By consciously choosing marginalized voices for these roles, we remind audiences that the stories of our past are not so different from the struggles of the present. Classical texts like The Suppliants have the potential to transcend their historical origins and speak directly to a modern audience. Through this lens, classic plays can become sites of ongoing social critique, demonstrating theatre’s ability to disrupt binaries, foster empathy, and inspire collective action. While The Suppliants provides a strong case study for this fact, its 17 application is not unique. Rather, this concept offers a framework for reconsidering how bodies function in performance across a range of classical and contemporary works. The physical presence of actors can be used to challenge the historical exclusions embedded in the text. Casting choices and conscious embodied storytelling can illuminate whose bodies have been historically marginalized and how that exclusion continues to exist today. This framework urges theatre practitioners and scholars to consider not only how to adapt historical texts for a modern audience, but how those texts can be used to analyze and disrupt existing power structures, and how the bodies onstage demand to be recognized. 18 Endnotes 1. Vivian M. Patraka, “Binary Terror and Feminist Performance: Reading Both Ways.” Discourse 14, no. 2 (1992): 163–85. 2. Aeschylus, McLeish, and Raphael, The Suppliants, (Methuen Drama, 1991), 237-238. 3. Aeschylus, McLeish, and Raphael, The Suppliants, 803. 4. Aeschylus, McLeish, and Raphael, The Suppliants, 803. 5. Vivian M. Patraka, Binary Terror and Feminist Performance, 176. 6. Rebecca Schneider, The Explicit Body In Performance, (Routledge, 1997), 20. 7. Schneider, The Explicit Body In Performance, 23. 8. Derrida, Jacques, Of Grammatology trans. by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). 9. Schlegel, Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, trans. John Black (London, 1846). 10. Lynette G. Mitchell, “Greeks, Barbarians and Aeschylus’ ‘Suppliants.’” Greece & Rome 53, no. 2 (2006), 211. 11. Geoffrey W. Bakewell, Aeschylus’s Suppliant Women: The Tragedy of Immigration (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2013) 27. 12. Sue-Ellen Case, “Classic Drag: The Greek Creation of Female Parts”, Greece & Rome no. 53, 318. 13. Mitchell, “Greeks, Barbarians and Aeschylus’ ‘Suppliants’”, 212. 14. Aeschylus, McLeish, and Raphael, The Suppliants, 237. 15. Bakewell, Aeschylus’s Suppliant Women, 22. 16. Bakewell, Aeschylus’s Suppliant Women, 23. 19 17. Aeschylus, McLeish, and Raphael, The Suppliants, 1050. 18. Magdalena Zira, “Directing Greek tragedy as a ritual: Mystagogy, religion and ecstasy," Contemporary Adaptations of Greek Tragedy: Auteurship and Directorial Visions, (2017), 114. 19. Bakewell , Aeschylus’s Suppliant Women, 5. 20. Schneider, The Explicit Body In Performance, 20. 21. Schneider, The Explicit Body In Performance, 20. 22. Mitchell, “Greeks, Barbarians and Aeschylus’ ‘Suppliants’”, 211. 23. Magdalena Zira, “Directing Greek tragedy as a ritual: Mystagogy, religion and ecstasy," Contemporary Adaptations of Greek Tragedy: Auteurship and Directorial Visions, (2017), 114. 24. Case, “Classic Drag”, 311. 25. Mitchell, “Greeks, Barbarians and Aeschylus’ ‘Suppliants’”, 145.. 26. Geoffrey Bakewell, Aeschylus’s Suppliant Women: The Tragedy of Immigration, 23. 20 Bibliography Patraka, Vivian M. “Binary Terror and Feminist Performance: Reading Both Ways.” Discourse 14, no. 2 (1992): 163–85. Aeschylus, Kenneth McLeish, and Frederic Raphael. The Suppliants. In Plays: One. 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