Lysistrata (version 2)

The women of Greece have a plan. In this audacious ancient comedy, Aristophanes imagines what happens when Lysistrata convinces all the women across the city-states to withhold sex from their husbands until the endless war ends. The premise is absurd, the comedy is bawdy, and the political commentary is razor-sharp. As the men grow desperate outside the Acropolis while their wives barricade themselves inside, Aristophanes exposes the ridiculousness of a war that destroys the very people fighting it, and suggests that perhaps the people most affected by conflict have been excluded from the decision-making all along. First performed in 411 BCE during the Peloponnesian War, Lysistrata is a fever dream of gender politics, a weaponized joke, and a stubborn insistence that peace might be achievable if anyone with sense was in charge. It endures because its central joke, that the people who make war possible are the ones being told to stay silent, has never stopped being true.