Symposium (version 2) (dramatic reading)

In the golden age of Athens, a group of the city's most brilliant minds gather for a quiet revolution. Rather than drink themselves into oblivion to celebrate a poet's victory, they decide instead to give speeches in praise of love. What begins as an elegant intellectual exercise becomes something far more dangerous: an excavation of desire itself, of beauty, and of why humans ache for what they cannot hold. Socrates delivers the evening's most radical speech, recounting teachings from a woman named Diotima about love as a ladder climbing from physical beauty toward wisdom's highest form. But the symposium is not all philosophy: the comedian Aristophanes tells a strange myth about humans split in two, and when the drunken Alcibiades bursts in drunk, he offers an embarrassing and revealing portrait of his own impossible longing for Socrates. Two thousand years later, this dialogue still asks the question we still cannot answer: what are we really seeking when we seek love?