And modern audiences have laughed at the old Plautine plots redeployed in such Broadway musicals as “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” and “The Boys From Syracuse” (the latter adapted from Shakespeare’s “The Comedy of Errors,” itself a reworking of Plautus’ “Menaechmi”).īut given that nothing ages faster than comedy, how does one revive Plautus’ works today? Polonius tells Hamlet that “Seneca cannot be too heavy, nor Plautus too light” for the versatile traveling players that have come to the palace, and this hint is picked up by the Troubadour Theater Company in the relentlessly zany production of “Haunted House Party: A Roman Comedy” that opened Wednesday at the Getty Villa’s Barbara and Lawrence Fleischman Outdoor Classical Theater. Shakespeare learned his farcical grammar from studying Plautus at school. His plays, epitomizing Roman popular entertainment, are scripted vaudevilles that lead subversive mirth down a circuitous path to relative safety.Īlthough behind Plautus’ plays were Greek originals now lost to time, his influence on the history of comedy is foundational. 254-184 BC) has been described by classicist and novelist Erich Segal as “the least admired and most imitated” of the ancient Greek and Roman dramatists.
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