Here it is 2009, and an ego search on my name turned up an article in About.com from 1998 which included a biography of me in my then-persona as Founding and Managing Editor of Didaskalia: Ancient Theater Today. The Internet really is forever.

It might make more sense to put this on a page covering those years, except then I’d just end up waiting until I finished the site, and at this rate that will be never. I can’t even keep my professional sites up to date, never mind this one.

So I’m going to reprint this article here for people to see what I was up to in 1998. I’ve made the links live and corrected a few of them.

I fell into the Classics Vortex at 14 when I first learned Latin. I went to Brown University meaning to get a degree in psychology and graduated with an AB in Classics. I’d spent 2 years as president of the Classics Club and added Greek to my Latin. I also spent a term at the Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies in Rome (known familiarly as the Centro). The teaching wasn’t up to Brown’s standards, but we got to see everything.

That summer I spent 6 weeks in Greece and had the opportunity to see a play (Oedipus Tyrannos , as it happens, done by the Open Theater) in the theater at Epidavros. The moon was just rising over the back of the theatron as the show closed. From that time on I was increasingly interested in ancient theater. I wrote my senior thesis about the character of Klytaimnestra in Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Seneca, Giraudoux, Sartre, and O’Neill.

It was at the University of Michigan, where I was a PhD student, that I began translating and directing ancient plays (I had done a bit of acting in them as an undergrad, and my interest in theater goes back to early childhood). The first was Auricula Meretricula, a simplified Roman comedy written by a couple of classicists to make teaching Latin more fun. I’d first read it when I was 15. It was performed in Latin with a cast who knew no Latin for an audience only half of whom knew Latin—with a budget of $50. It was enough of a success to encourage me to proceed on to tragedy.

I had spent the summer of 1990 living in Nafplion, Greece, and studying the theatrical festival at Epidavros, interviewing as many of the directors as would talk to me. (About half of them, and usually in Modern Greek, which I had squeezed into my undergraduate schedule.) While there I made the translation of Aeschylus’ Eumenides which I directed (and produced, and house-managed, and board-opped, and designed costumes for) in November of 1991. This was enough of a success that even my department began to be interested in production. (My supervisor’s first words on the subject were “I’ve never seen a production of a Greek tragedy from which I learned anything.”)

In 1993 I collaborated with Kate Mendeloff of U-M’s Residential College Drama Program (and holder of an MFA in directing from Yale) on a production of Euripides’ Bacchae. I was then a fellow at the Institute for the Humanities, which helped immeasurably with both funding and publicity. In my off hours I was writing my dissertation, on Eumenides. Bacchae was a commercial as well as critical success. I did a presentation on it at the King’s College London conference on “Tragedy and the Tragic.”

I also spent a lot of time traveling the US to see productions of ancient plays, including Mnouchkine’s Les Atrides. I made contact with a number of scholars in the field (there aren’t that many of us), most especially Oliver Taplin. And when he suggested that there ought to be an electronic newsletter to publicize modern productions of Greek plays, a colleague nominated me.

I didn’t know much about computers at the time beyond word processing and basic e-mail—and the U-M e-mail system was hideously primitive. The WWW didn’t really exist yet. But even in ASCII format for ftp, the Internet was the best way to distribute listings, etc (it was my idea to include reviews and features) to people who were widely scattered across the globe. (There’s a fairly dense concentration of them in Britain, which is part of why I moved here, but otherwise it’s much a matter of one or two in the biggest departments—a couple on each coast of the US, a couple in South Africa, a scattering across Australia and Canada, etc.)

We had published three issues when I moved to Britain. Most of the technical stuff was handled by my co-editors, Ian Worthington and Peter Toohey, who had founded Electronic Antiquity (still an ftp journal) about a year earlier. I had discovered the WWW by then and was definitely interested in moving Did onto it—theatrical production is very hard to discuss without pictures. I got a lot of help from Warwick’s Computing Services department, and our first HTML issue went out in December of 1994.

I began to get more and more ideas for the website, which eventually developed a fairly dense core of information in addition to the published issues—which got to be published less and less often. Like many academics, I had vastly underestimated how much work was involved in running an electronic journal. Though there are no printing and distribution costs (within a university), the labor involved in creating the thing is just as great. I’ve never been paid for my work on Did and my editorial board contributes primarily in the area of refereeing articles. I’m trying to work out ways of delegating markup and other tasks which I don’t really have to do myself—there’s just no one else to do them at the moment. I’ve gotten to the point where I would happily consider a commercial sponsor.

I’ve been amazed at the range of people who use Didaskalia. Despite its faltering condition it is still very popular. I get enquiries from all over the world on quite a variety of subjects. Some of the features I’ve added have been for the benefit of my own students (I have been teaching Ancient Theatre on the Modern Stage and Greek Tragedy in the School of Theatre Studies since 1995/6).

Warwick’s library isn’t all that strong in Classics, and the WWW has been a good way of expanding the research materials available to my students. And to other people’s students. I’ve gotten so much into the habit of doing research on the WWW that I sometimes forget what useful books I own.

Article written by Nemesis Gill.

It feels like a lot more than 11 years have passed since that interview. It was only a few months later that I moved back to the United States. Not long after that, I turned over the job of Man
aging Editor to Hugh Denard, and I’ve had little to do with Didaskalia since then, unless specifically asked for input.

Someone phoned me about a month ago to ask if I could help track down Dorpfeld’s original drawings of the skene. Um, no. After 11 years, even the references I can remember are out of date, though of course Dorpfeld’s drawings pre-date my entry into the field of Classics, never mind my exit from it. My Greek and Latin are a bit rusty, though I still occasionally have a use for my linguistic skills. I don’t see myself heading back to academentia anytime soon.

But yes, I really did have this photo on my bio page as editor. And no, unlike many of the images you’ll see of the current Sallie, it hasn’t been digitally enhanced. It was taken when I was 26, just after the Bacchae production, before I met Stefan and long before I’d heard of Photoshop. I’ve obviously gotten more conservative as I’ve aged, because I hesitate to use a photo of me in an off-the-shoulder dress for professional purposes these days.