Red Bull Theater to Present Reading of SARDANAPALUS By Lord Byron

RED BULL THEATER has revealed the next Revelation Reading: Sardanapalus by Lord Byron, directed by Raz Golden and featuring Amir Arison, Atra Asdou; Merritt Janson, Amir Malaklou, Paul Niebanck, Zachary Lopez Roa, Omar Shafiuzzaman, Sanjit De Silva, AhDream Smith, and Shayvawn Webster.

The tragic fall of the last Assyrian king and his decadent reign: a story of love, betrayal, and self-discovery as told by the most notorious of the Romantic poets. Produced in partnership with the Byron Society of America, the Keats-Shelley Association of America, and the Keats-Shelley House in Rome.

The live in-person performance and simulcast, at Sheen Center Loreto Theatre (18 Bleecker Street, between Mott and Elizabeth), will premiere on Thursday October 24th at 7:30 PM. Then watch on-demand from 7:30 PM ET on Friday, October 25 through 11:59 PM ET on Wednesday, October 30. For tickets and more information, visit redbulltheater.com/sardanapalus. 

ABOUT THE PLAY

Set in ancient Assyria in the 7th Century BCE, this historical tragedy is about how insurgency and popular revolt bring an empire to its end. But rather than tracking the actual revolution against the government, the drama focuses on a love story as well as the eccentric title character himself, the “last Assyrian emperor,” according to Byron's sources. On the surface, King Sardanapalus stands out from his long line of royal ancestors. He prefers love and revelry to combat and military valor. Unlike Salamenes, the king's confidant, head of the army, and dutiful brother to the queen, Sardanapalus is hedonistic, vain, and possibly queer. Described as “slothful” and labeled a “she-king,” he enjoys not only lavish banquets of great food and wine but also donning fine garments and accessories so that he can admire himself in the mirror. He also likes spending time with his lover and “favourite,” the enslaved Greek Myrrha, instead of queen Zarina, his wife and the mother to his children. Despite urgings from Salamenes and Myrrha, the king refuses to believe that two governors or “satraps,” Arbaces and Beleses, are staging a coup against the kingdom. Priding himself on being a pacifist sovereign, Sardanapalus has assumed that his many subjects – whose array of cultures have been subsumed under the “Assyrian” imperial umbrella – are pleased with his governing style; he cannot fathom that what he understands as “peace” might be interpreted elsewhere as idleness and “inaction.” In his words, he has been “misplaced” and would rather wear a “crown of flowers” in a land far away from his Mesopotamian homeland.

Byron's historical source for his play was the ancient Greek historian, Diodorus, who described the ancient emperor of Assyria as an indolent and “effeminate” crossdresser and bisexual. While composing Sardanapalus, Byron also drew on a range of other sources, including the dramatic works of Seneca, John Dryden, William Shakespeare (especially his Antony and Cleopatra), Vittorio Alfieri (especially Mirra), and Franz Grillparzer. The play was published in 1821 alongside a historical tragedy, The Two Foscari, and Cain, a “mystery.” In the preface to this collection, Byron explicitly wrote that the dramas were not intended for stage production. Some critics have agreed with Byron that such a “closet drama”—to include other plays by Byron's contemporaries such as William Wordsworth's The Borderers, Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Remorse, or Percy Shelley's Prometheus Unbound — is better kept to the page than stage because of its emphasis on high literary language rather than dramatic action. In fact, melodrama and pantomime were the most popular forms of stage drama in the early nineteenth century: spectacles like trained horses or elaborate set-pieces attracted contemporary audiences to the theater. While Byron did manage to have one of his plays, Marino Faliero (1821), staged during his lifetime at Drury Lane Theater in London, the performances unfortunately received extremely harsh reviews. Some critics have proposed that the inflammatory final gesture of Sardanapalus, which Byron conceived of during the Drury Lane fiasco, may have been influenced by the reports and reviews sent to him. Perhaps the last scene implies what Byron may have wanted to do to London's theater culture.

Sardanapalus first opened, long after Byron's death, at Drury Lane Theater in London on April 10, 1834, in a production by William Macready, which ran for twenty-three nights. The actor and theater manager, Charles Kean, revived the play in 1853 for a successful two seasons of ninety-three performances. It was not uncommon for these Victorian performances to limit the king's “effeminate” manner and appearance; they cut the mirror scene and downplayed questions of gender identity by emphasizing the play's representations of militaristic imperialism and governance. In 1990, Murray Biggs organized a production of the drama at Yale University. Tonight's event at Red Bull is the second time that this theater company stages Sardanapalus and the first time it broadcasts it virtually across the globe; Red Bull's first in-person performance of Byron's play took place in 2012 at the Peter Jay Sharp Theater on 42nd Street in NYC.

Byron's play inspired several works in other media. The famous French painter, Eugène Delacroix, produced a large painting, Le Mort de Sardanapale (The Death of Sardanapalus, 1827-1828); it hangs today in the Louvre Museum in Paris right across from the very famous Delacroix painting, La Liberté guidant le peuple (Liberty Leading the People, 1830). In the 1830s, the French composer Henri Berlioz produced La Mort de Sardanapale, a cantata that ultimately won him the Prix de Rome. In the 1840s, Franz Liszt produced Sardanapalo, an unfinished Italian opera based on Byron's vision. 

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