Resource and Study Guide
The Play and its
Context
• Introduction
 The Suppliants p. 2
 The Suppliants p. 5
Reinvented
• Plot Summary p. 7
• Character Profiles p. 9
• The Playwright p.14
• Production History
p.18
In the Classroom
• Using the Guide p.19
• Theatre and Acting
Classes
p.20
• English Classes p.20
About this
Production
Big Love contains adult themes
and language.
• Who’s Who
p.21
• From the Director
p.23
• Scenic Design p. 25
• Costume Design p.
26
• Pre and Post Show
p.27 Questions and
Activities
2
Introduction
Ancient Influences: The Suppliant
Women
Big Love is inspired, in part byThe Suppliant Women
or The Suppliants. Written in approximately 492 BC by
Aeschylus the play is considered to be the first extant
drama in Western European literature. It is the first part
of a tragic trilogy, the second and third plays are lost.
The action of the play revolves around the rejection
by the 50 daughters of Danaus to proposals of marriage
proffered by the 50 sons of Danaus’ brother, Aegyptus.
The sisters flee to the island of Argos to seek protection
3
of the gods and the king, Pelasgus. The fifty girls
supplicate their distant relation, Pelasgus, who vows to
defend the girls. (Their threat of mass suicide at the holy
altar, an appalling act of defamation helps him to see the
light.) The sons of Aegyptus threaten war against Argos
and are rebuffed by Pelasgus and The Suppliant Women
ends in a tense standoff.
From a reconstruction of available sources,
Aeschylus’ two other plays in the trilogy were most likely
titled The Egyptians and The Daughters of Danaus. In The
Egyptians Pelasgus is defeated by the brothers and
Danaus assumes the throne. Danaus agrees to allow his
daughters to be married to the conquerors. However, he
secretly commands them to kill their husbands on their
wedding night. All obey except one; Hypermnestra saves
her husband, Lynceus because she is truly in love with
him.
In part three of the trilogy, The Daughter of Danaus
or The Danaids the moral, legal, and political fallout of
Hypermnestra’s actions are the focus. She is put on trial
for breaking her oath and the goddess of love, Aphrodite
defends her and eventually acquits her by pointing out
the universal power of love and sex and the courage of
Hypermnestra to stand up against her sisters and follow
her heart. The desire for peace, marriage, and procreation
is restored at the end of this trilogy, with the underlying
4
theme of female terror of male aggression still
reverberating.
Production of The Suppliants at the Epidaurus Theatre, Greece, 1994
5
Charles Mee Shatters The Suppliant
Women
Big Love at the University of Florida (2004)
In her article about her father’s work, “Shattered and
Fucked up and Full of Wreckage” Erin Mee describes
Mee’s plays as “blueprints for events. For spectacles. For
festivals.” (83). Mee frequently begins with a familiar story,
often from Greek classic tragedies. As Mee himself states,
“There is no such thing as an original play.” (www.charlesmee.org)
He provides evidence ranging from the Greek playwrights
(whose plots were taken from earlier poems and myths) to
Shakespeare who liberally borrowed and often took
verbatim from many sources including the Greeks in many
of his plays. While The Suppliants provide the framework
6
for the action of Big Love, it is barely recognizable when
compared side by side to the source material. Mee uses
the Greeks as a launching point and pastes together plays
like a collage with multiple sources from popular culture.
He is the ultimate American postmodern or “anti-modern”
playwright. The vestiges of Greek classic drama are
evident in the songs, dances, and movement pieces that
are integrated into Big Love, Mee’s ode to the Greek
parodos, the songs and dances that the chorus performed
in classic Greek performances.
Big Love is a comedy about rape (Cummings, 78)
that manages to juxtapose wild, wacky humor and
violent, bitter pathos side-by-side to create a world with
its own set of laws. Mee takes the setting of The
Suppliants from Argos to present day Italy. Danaus, the
father of the fifty sisters is not seen in the play. The
sisters are on their own and even the father substitute
in the character of Piero, whom they ask for assistance,
eventually sells them out to the fifty cousins. The
cousins are Greek-American and Aphrodite, the judge is
replaced by a wise Italian “mama.” The action of the play
mirrors the action of the trilogy and ends with Bella, the
classic Italian mama finding Lydia (Hypermnestra) not
guilty and declaring that “Love trumps all.” Mee keeps the
framework of the trilogy by Aeschylus while creating an
7
original, outlandish play that reinvents this classic tragedy
into a post-modern tragic-comedy.
Plot
Summary
Big Love is set on the coast of present day Italy. The
action begins with the arrival at an Italian villa of eight of
fifty Greek sisters who have fled (by yacht) their
wedding ceremony to their Greek-American cousins. The
sisters meet Piero, the wealthy owner of the villa and
supplicate themselves to him asking for asylum. They
claim international refugee status and seek Piero’s
protection
8
Production of Big Love
from their arranged marriages to their cousins. The
brothers eventually pursue them to Piero’s villa via
helicopter. While one brother, Nikos is truly puzzled by his
betrothed, Lydia’s flight, another is outraged.
Constantine is ready to take what is his, as he states,
“I’ll have my bride. If I have to have her arms tied behind
her back and dragged to me. I’ll have her back.”
With the arrival of the brothers and Piero’s
compliance to their demand to be married immediately,
the girls decide to take action. All of the sisters make a
pact to murder their husbands on their wedding night.
With that knowledge the girls prepare for the wedding
with the help of some houseguests of Piero as well as his
feckless nephew, Giuliano, who longs for his own wedding
and bedecks himself in hopes of being able to participate
in the day’s big event.
Wedding gifts arrive and a cake is ordered as the
tension escalates. With the marriage ceremony
completed, the celebration begins with toasts and a
first dance. During this the grooms are all murdered
except for Nikos, Lydia’s husband. The couple is
discovered by the sisters and Lydia is put on trial for
“treason.” Bella acts as judge and after hearing both
sides of the story, she acquits Lydia. The celebration
continues and the sisters bid farewell to Lydia and Nikos,
9
who depart to an uncertain future, leaving the sisters
face their own future alone.
Character
Profiles
Ferdinand Hodler
The Sisters
Lydia - A young woman in her 20’s who is unsure
of her relationship with Nikos, the man her father
has arranged for her to marry. Although suspicious
of the situation, she lets her heart guide her.
10
“Sometimes people don’t want to fall in love.
Because when you love someone
it's too late to set conditions.”
Thyona - An unhappy, angry, man-hating young
woman who leads her sisters in revolting against
their arranged marriages.
“Men.
You think you can do whatever you want with me, think again.
you think that I’m so delicate?
you think you have to care for me?
You throw me to the ground
you think I break?
you think I can’t get up again?”
Olympia – Lydia and Thyona’s younger sister, a
self absorbed, materialistic young woman who is
more concerned about designer wedding gowns
than about the man she is marrying.
“Nothing seems to be working out
I don’t see why
at least on my wedding day
I can’t have things exactly the way I want them!”
Chloe, Neysa, Thea, Adara, Penelope
11
The Brothers
Nikos – In love with Lydia, a talkative, sensitive
man who is reasonable and although confused, just
wants to do the right thing.
“And I think sometimes I scare people
because of it
they think I’m so, like determined
just barging ahead –
not really a sensitive person,
whereas, in truth,
I am.”
Constantine – the oldest brother, a male
chauvinist who asserts his power through
aggression and violence, engaged to Thyona.
“there’s no such thing as good guys and bad guys
only guys
and they kill people”
Oed
- the quiet brother who passively goes
along with the others but holds back his feelings of
rage, engaged to Olympia.
“they know the pain,
they don’t want to talk about it”
12
Lex, Paris, Ajax, Pavlos, Dion
The Hosts
Giuliani
- Piero’s gay nephew who sympathizes
with the plight of the sisters and attempts to help
them out.
“And I’ve often thought,
oh, well,
maybe he really did love me
maybe that was my chance
and I ran away from it
because
I didn’t know it at the time.”
Piero – the benevolent yet self-seeking Italian mama’s
boy. He is coerced into dealing with the unpleasant
situation forced upon him by the sisters but manages to
resolve the issues with a craftiness and . . . a glass of
chianti.
“In the world I come from
it's not always all or nothing.
Men learn to compromise all the time.
After all we have to go on living in the same world together.”
Bella – Mother of Piero, her oldest son out of 13
boys and her favorite. A wise old woman who
knows about “big love.”
13
“This is why: love trumps all.
Love is the highest law.”
The Guests
Eleanor – an English woman who delights in the
prospect of a big wedding.
“Do we have a real happiness in being together,
talking, or just doing nothing together?
Do we have a feeling of paired unity?”
Leo – Eleanor’s paramour, a slightly used Italian
gigolo who is intoxicated with life’s pleasures as well
as too many martinis.
“When you are young, you think nothing of it.
But the older you get
the more you think: oh, god, let me have more pleasures!”
The
Playwright
Charles L. Mee (b. 1938 in Evanston, IL)
The defining moment of Charles Mee’s life
came at the age of fourteen, when what he had
described as a vibrant youth was interrupted by a
case of polio in the summer of 1953 that would
leave him disabled for the rest of his life. During
one of his long stays in the hospital, Mee was
given a copy of Plato's Symposium, an
experience he identifies as a turning point in his
14
Mee on writing a play:
“I like plays that are not too neat,
too finished, too presentable. My
own plays are broken, jagged, filled
with sharp edges, filled with things
that take sudden turns, careen into
each other, smash up, veer off in
sickening turns. That feels good to
me. It feels like my life. And then I
like to put this chaotic stuff – with
some struggle remaining – into a
classic form, a Greek form, or a
beautiful dance theatre piece, or
some other effort at civilization.”
(from
A Nearly
Life, 214)A
A chapter
from Normal
Mee’s biography
Nearly Normal Life.
http://www.twbookmark.com/book
s/91/0316558362/chapter_excerpt9
373.html
`
15
Notes on a Manifesto by Charles L. Mee
If Aristotle was right
that human beings are social animals
that we create ourselves in our relationships to others,
and if theatre
is the art form that deals above all others in human relationships,
then theatre is the art form, par excellence,
in which we discover what it is to be human
and what it is possible for humans to be.
Whatever else it may do,
a play embodies a playwright's beliefs about how it is to be alive today,
and what it is to be a human being so that what a play is about,
what people say and how things look onstage,
and, even more deeply than that,
how a play is structured,
contain a vision of what it is to have a life on earth.
If things happen suddenly and inexplicably,
it's because a playwright believes that's how life is.
if things unfold gradually and logically,
that's an idea about how the world works.
if characters are motivated by psychological impulses
that were planted early in a character's life in her childhood home,
it's because a playwright believes
that's what causes people to do things they do the way they do them.
Or,
if a character is motivated by other things, in addition,
or even primarily motivated by other things by the cumulative impact of culture and history,
by politics and economics,
by gender and genetics and rational thought and whim,
informed by books and by the National Enquirer,
given to responses that are tragic and hilarious,
conscious and unconscious, ignorant and informed at the same time it's because the playwright believes
this complex of things is what makes human history happen.
Most of the plays I grew up seeing didn't feel like my life.
They were such well-made things,
so nicely crafted, so perfectly functioning in their plots and actions and endings,
16
so clear and clearly understood,
so rational in their structures,
in their psychological explanations of the causes of things.
And my life hadn't been like that.
When I had polio as a boy, my life changed in an instant and forever.
my life was not shaped by Freudian psychology;
it was shaped by a virus.
and it was no longer well made.
it seemed far more complex a project than any of the plays I was seeing.
And so,
in my own work,
I've stepped somewhat outside
the traditions of American theatre in which I grew up
to find a kind of dramaturgy that feels like my life.
And I've been inspired a lot by the Greeks.
I love the Greeks
because their plays so often begin with matricide and fratricide,
with a man murdering his nephews and serving the boys to their father for
dinner. That is to say, the Greeks take no easy problems,
no little misunderstanding that is going to be resolved
before the final commercial break at the top of the hour,
no tragedy that will be resolved with good will,
acceptance of a childhood hurt,
and a little bit of healing.
They take deep anguish and hatred and disability
and rage and homicidal mania and confusion and aspiration
and a longing for the purest beauty
and they say:
Here is not an easy problem;
take all this and make a civilization of it.
And the forms in which they cast their theatre were not simple.
Unlike Western theatre since Ibsen,
which has been essentially a theatre of staged texts,
the Greeks employed spectacle,
music, and dance or physical movement,
into which text was placed
as one of the elements of theatre.
The complexity and richness of form
reflected a complexity and richness of understanding
of human character and human history.
17
The Greeks and Shakespeare and Brecht
understood human character
within a rich context of history and culture.
This is my model.
In 1906/07, Picasso stumbled upon cubism as a possible form.
Immediately, he made three pencil sketches
of a man,
of a newspaper and a couple of other items on a table,
and of Sacre Coeur that is, of the three classic subjects of art:
portraiture, still life, and landscape.
And he proved, to his satisfaction, therefore,
that cubism "worked."
My ambition is to do the same for a new form of theatre,
composed of music and movements as well as text
like the theatre of the Greeks
and of American musical comedy
and of Shakespeare and Brecht
and of Anne Bogart and Robert Woodruff
and of Robert Le Page and Simon McBurney
and of Sasha Waltz and Jan Lauwers and Alain Platel
and of Pina Bausch and Ivo van Hove
and of others working in Europe today
and of the theatre traditions in most of the world forever.
-Charles L. Mee, 2002
18
Production History
Big Love premiered at the Humana Festival of New American Plays at the Actors'
Theatre of Louisville in 2000 (photo above) directed by Les Waters, and, in 2001, at
the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, CT, Berkeley Rep in California, the
Goodman Theatre in Chicago, and the Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy
of Music.
2001. Big Love directed by Brian Kulick and produced at ACT in Seattle and by
Darron West and produced by the Rude Mechanicals in Austin, Texas.
2001. Big Love directed by Betty Bernhard at the University of Calicut, School of
Drama, India. In Malayalam.
2002. Big Love directed by Howard Shalwitz at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company,
Washington, DC and directed by Mel Shapiro for Pacific Resident Theatre, Venice,
CA and directed by Meg Gibson at the Salt Lake Acting Company, Salt Lake City,
Utah.
2003. Big Love directed by Richard Hamburger at the Dallas Theatre Center,
directed by Jiri Zizka at the Wilma Theatre, Philadelphia, PA, directed by Sarah Jane
Hardy at Theatre Vertigo, Portland, OR.
2004. Big Love directed by Jeff Griffin at Early Stages, New York.
2005. Big Love directed by Mo Ryan and Jeanine Thompson at the Red Herring
Theatre Ensemble, Colombus, OH and directed by Michael Fields at the Redwood
Curtain, Eureka, CA.
19
In the Classroom
Using the Guide
This guide will help classroom teachers at both the high
school and college levels. The information is useful for
university theatre classes including acting, introduction to
theatre, history of the theatre, playwrighting and script
analysis. For teachers of high school theatre and English
classes information is included that introduces or integrates
the experience of the production into class content.
Below is a list of sources that may be useful to you and
were used in preparing this study guide.
Complete text for Big Love and other plays by Charles Mee
http://www.charlesmee.org./html/big_love.htm
Bogart, Anne and Tina Landau. The Viewpoints Book. New
York: TCG, 2005.
Cummings, Scott. Remaking American Theatre: Charles
Mee, Anne Bogart and the SITI Company. New York:
Cambridge UP, 2006.
20
Dixon, Michael Bigelow and Joel A. Smith, eds. Anne
Bogart: Viewpoints. Lyme: Smith and Kraus, 1995.
Mee, Charles L. A Nearly Normal Life. New York: Little,
Brown, 1999.
Mee, Charles L. History Plays. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
UP, 1998.
Oates, Whitney J. and Eugene O’Neill, Jr., eds. The
Complete Greek Drama. New York: Random, 1938.
English and Theatre Classes
For the high school and university acting class Big Love
and Charles Mee’s other plays are excellent sources for
monologues for audition and class work. Go to
http://www.charlesmee.org./html/plays.html for complete
texts of all of his plays. While he often applies a poetic
structure, his language is modern and the characters
complex.
For English classes there are a variety of questions and
activities at the end of the guide to explore and compare
Mee’s source material Aeschylus’ The Suppliants to Big
Love.
21
Who’s Who in BIG LOVE
Lydia played by Cecily Ryan
Thyona played by Sarah Adams
Olympia played by Lizzie O’Hara
Piero played by Jay Baglia
Giuliano played by Josh Jack Carl
Bella played by Amy Lizardo
Nikos played by Omar Munoz
Constantine played by Josh Marx
Oed played by Chris Gaorian
Eleanor played by Monique Warren
Leo played by Wesley Hofman
Penelope played by Christina Rodriquz
Neysa played by Caitlin Dissinger
22
Adara played by Sarah Luna
Chloe played by Joey Sandin
Thea played by Kat Tan
Lex played by Chris Carter
Dion played by Havish Ravipati
Paris played by Philip Nguyen
Pavlos played by Sean Gilvary
Ajax played by Eric Medeiros
23
Director’s Notes
I don’t know when I first heard about playwright
Charles Mee but I was intrigued with his radical notion of
allowing anyone to rewrite or remake his plays. I visited his
web site and there for the taking were full text versions of
his plays, available to download FOR FREE! But then I
started to read his plays and the above became a footnote
to this story. His writing and approach to theatre was
revolutionary and thrilling to me. It also helped that he had
a close professional relationship to, for me, one of the most
daring and imaginative directors in American theatre today,
Anne Bogart. His was a voice from a world that I desired to
create on stage. The intriguing use of music, language, and
movement in Big Love results in a giddy yet solemn,
hilarious yet shocking, cerebral yet poignant play that
defies categories and slashes through audience
expectations. I wondered what life experiences had
informed this unique playwright and his work.
I read his autobiography, A Nearly Normal Life and
only then did his plays seem to make perfect sense. An
athletic, vital teenager Mee was changed forever by a bout
of polio in the summer of 1953. More than 50 years later
Mee still struggles with both selves in one body: the intact
14 year old football player and the almost 70 year old
disabled man, he writes, “For myself, to this day I have
24
never had a dream in which I walked with crutches; I’ve
never had a dream in which I was disabled in any way; in
my dreams my body is intact as it was when I was
fourteen.” In his plays he brings his shattered physical
existence to deconstruct classic Greek texts because it
simply feels right to him, “ The Greeks took no easy
problems. They put on the stage a world of unspeakable
anguish, of matricide and fratricide and patricide, and then
they refused to blink. They looked into the abyss of human
life and human nature with open eyes and understood that
the thing to do is to feel life as it is, in all its anguish as well
as its aspirations, its missed opportunities and its savored
beauties, never to falsify it, never to pretty it up; but rather
to look at it bravely, unflinchingly.” (215) He knows what
looking into the abyss is and Mee’s work takes a reckless
yet unflinching look at the world, often through the lens of
the Greeks and bewildered yet enthralled we, his audience
are transported.
Big Love is classic Mee, a riotous world of extremes
and startling twists and turns that at the core is a diatribe
on marriage and relationships between men and women
but also about those achingly stunning moments in human
existence that are not often seen on stage. In his work Mee
often revisits the topic of marriage (perhaps having been
married three times.) However, this is hardly a tragedy but
rather a full-blown, what I term “violent comedy,” a new
dramatic genre. The “well-crafted” dramatic structure is
dismantled and in its place is a play that becomes a vehicle
25
for Mee’s own experience of life, loss, and love through a
variety of performance forms, an ode to the ancients and
yet extraordinarily modern, youthful, and physical.
As a director Mee requires that you be a collaborator in
the creation of the performance, a co-conspirator if you will.
As Erin Mee, the playwright’s daughter and a director
herself states, “He sets up a situation that requires the
director, in turn, to elaborate on what he has written.
Therefore, as a director I can’t simply illustrate what my
father has done; I have to meet the text with other
elements – dance, music, painting. I’m not just allowed to
bring my ideas to the production; I’m expected to do so.”
Mee demands no adherence to the text but gives a director
a blueprint to build a performance, a chance to work with
abandon and to rip into his play creating a new play. To
paraphrase Mee “that feels good to me.”
Kathleen Normington
March 2007
26
Scenic Design
27
Costume Design
28
Pre-Show Questions and
Activities
1. Brainstorm a list of ideas, images, emotions, colors,
objects, or experiences that the title of the play
reveals?
2. Compare this passage from Aeschylus’ The
Suppliants with this passage from Mee’s Big Love.
What do the two scenes share? Can you identify the
characters of the Chorus and the King from The
Suppliants in the scene from Big Love? How does the
Greek god, Zeus figure in both scenes? Compare the
mood created by each playwright. Compare the idea
of state in The Suppliants with family in Big Love.
From The Suppliants
Chorus:
The King of Argos:
Justice, the daughter of right-dealing Zeus,
Justice, the queen of suppliants, look down,
That this our plight no ill may loose
Upon your town!
This word, even from the young, let age and wisdom learn:
If thou to suppliants show grace,
Thou shalt not lack Heaven’s grace in turn,
So long as virtue’s gifts on heavenly shrines have place.
Not at my private hearth ye sit and sue;
And if the city bear a common stain,
Be it the common toil to cleanse the same:
29
Chorus:
King of Argos:
Chorus:
King of Argos:
Chorus:
King of Argos:
Therefore no pledge, no promise will I give,
Ere counsel with the commonwealth be held.
Nay, but the source of sway, the city’s self, art thou,
A power unjudged! Thine, only thine,
To rule the right of hearth and shrine!
Before thy throne and scepter all men bow!
Thou, in all causes lord, beware the curse divine!
May that curse fall upon mine enemies!
I cannot aid you without risk of scathe,
Nor scorn your prayers – unmerciful it were.
Perplexed, distraught I stand, and fear alike
The twofold chance, to do or not to do.
Have heed of him who looketh from on high,
The guard of woeful mortals, whosoe’er
Unto their fellows cry,
And find no pity, find no justice there.
Abiding in his wrath, the suppliants’ lord
Doth smite, unmoved by cries, unbent by prayful word.
But if Aegyptus’ children grasp you here,
Claiming, their country’s right, to hold you theirs
As next of kin, who dares to counter this?
Plead ye your country’s laws, if plead ye may,
That upon you they lay no lawful hand.
Let me not fall, O nevermore,
A prey into the young men’s hand;
Rather than wed who I abhor,
By pilot-stars I flee this land;
O king, take justice to thy side,
And with the righteous powers decide!
Hard is the cause – make me not judge thereof
Already I have vowed it, to do nought
Save after counsel with my people ta’en,
King thou I be; that ne’er in after time,
If ill fate chance, my people then may say –
In aid of strangers thou the State hast slain.
From Big Love
Lydia:
Really we were mostly hoping to ask you to just: take us in.
30
Piero:
Take you in?
Lydia:
Your nephew Giuliano says you have some connections.
Piero:
Oh?
Lydia:
And that you can help us.
Piero:
Well, of course, this is a country where people know one
another
and, Giuliano is right, sometimes these connections can be
useful.
If, for example,
You were a member of my family,
certainly I would just take you in.
But
(he shrugs)
I don’t know you.
Lydia:
Piero:
Oh. But.
We are related.
I mean, you know: in some way.
Our people came from Greece to Sicily a long time ago
and to Siracusa
and from Siracusa to Taormina and to the Golfo di Saint’
Eufemia
and from there up the coast of Italy to where we are now.
So we are probably members of the same family you and I.
Descended from Zeus, you mean.
Olympia:
Yes. We’re all sort of goddesses in a way.
Thea:
Yes, we are!
Piero:
Indeed. It’s very enticing to recover a family connection to
Zeus.
And, where is your father, meanwhile?
Is he not able to take care of you?
Our father signed a wedding contract to give us away.
Lydia:
31
Piero:
To your cousins from Greece.
Thyona:
From America.
They went from Greece to America,
and now they’re rich
and they think they can come back
and take whatever they want.
And the courts in your county:
they would enforce such a contract?
Piero:
Lydia:
It’s an old contract. It seems they will.
We have nothing against men –
Olympia:
Not all of us.
Neysa:
That’s right, Thyona.
Lydia:
But what these men have in mind is not usual.
Thyona:
Or else
all too usual.
[silence]
Piero:
Thyona:
You know, as it happens, I have some houseguests here
for the weekend
and I would be delighted if you would all join us for dinner,
stay the night if you like
until you get your bearings
but really
as for the difficulties you find yourselves in
disagreeable as they are
and as much as I would like to help
this is not my business.
Olympia:
Whose business is it
if not yours?
You’re a human being.
And a relative.
Piero:
A relative?
32
Penelope:
Thyona:
A close relative.
This is a crisis.
Piero:
And yet . . .
You know, I am not the Red Cross.
Thyona:
And so?
Piero:
So, to be frank,
I can’t take in every refugee who comes into my garden.
Olympia:
Why not?
Piero:
Because the next thing I know I would have a refugee camp
Here in my house.
I’d have a house full of Kosovars and Ibo and Tootsies
boat people from China and godknows whatall.
What do I know?
I don’t know what sort of fellows they are.
I should put myself, perhaps my life on the line –
Knowing nothing –
and also the life the life of my nephew
my brother next door
my brother’s sons.
I put their lives on the line
for what?
3. Read the Plot Description and decide on a potential
sequence of actions. Working in groups give a title to
each action and create a series of tableaux to
illustrate each action. If you can, add music to each
tableau to help illustrate and illuminate each action.
Post Show Questions
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1. What moments in the production were surprising?
What were shocking? Why? Can you identify the
reason that these moments were memorable?
2. Which character could you relate to in the play? Why
was that particular character interesting to you?
3. Imagine and then discuss what happens to the
characters after the play ends. Create Big Love: The
Sequel. What happens to Olympia, Thyona, and the
other sisters? Do they eventually get married? Do
you think they return to Greece?
4. What will married life be like for Lydia and Nikos? Do
you think they live “happily ever after?” What clues
does the play/production provide to support your
opinion?
5. Is the ending of Big Love one of hope or despair?
What elements of the production help you decide
this?
6. One of the play’s themes is the power struggle
between the genders. How is this revealed in the
play and are there some surprising points of view?
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7. The classic Greek theatre used the convention of the
parados which was the entering song and dance of
the chorus. In the parados of The Suppliants the
chorus of the fifty sisters enters the sacred grove
near Argos and pray to Zeus for help in escaping
from their lustful, violent cousins. How does Mee
replicate that moment in Big Love?
8. The stasimon are the songs and dances that are
interspersed with episodes or scenes in classic
Greek drama. Identify how Mee uses this theatrical
device in Big Love.