Myth can be a powerful tool for making metaphors. In her play Iphigenia Point Blank: The Story of the First Refugee, as well as her new opera Ruinous Gods, Lisa Schlesinger and her collaborators utilize these timeless narratives to shed light on the suffering and trauma experienced by refugees caught in the ongoing Middle East conflict and the journeys they take to escape violence.
Schlesinger—who co-directs the Iowa Playwrights Workshop and is an alumnus of both the Iowa Writers Workshop and the Iowa Playwrights Workshop—has been preoccupied with Iphigenia, a character from Greek mythology, since the early years of her writing career. “She is a young woman who is told she is coming to Aulis to marry a national hero only to find out her father is going to sacrifice her so that he can go to and win the Trojan war,” Schlesinger describes the importance of the character to her process. “I continue to be interested in exploring this transaction metaphorically.”
Iphigenia Point Blank wrapped up a run of seven performances in New York City at the Sheen Center for Thought and Culture in December 2023. Her new opera, Ruinous Gods will have its highly anticipated premiere at the Spoleto Festival USA in Charleston, SC, on May 24, 2024. With a groundbreaking score that weaves Arabic Maqam and Western classical music, Ruinous Gods urges crucial conversations about the effect of displacement on migrant children.
Ruinous Gods is rooted in many of the same questions and interests that abound in Iphigenia Point Blank, a transdisciplinary theatrical collaboration addressing a global crisis that was developed and premiered at the University of Iowa in 2018. In the 2023 NYC production, Iowa Theatre Arts alumni actor Crystal Stewart and Shahzeb Hussain, who also studied theatre at Iowa, reprised their original roles—and the play featured lighting design by UI Theatre Professor Bryon Winn.
“When I started this project in 2014,” Schlesinger says, “there were approximately 59 million refugees worldwide. Now there are over 110 million.”
Schlesinger’s new opera, Ruinous Gods: Suites for Sleeping Children, focuses on displaced children who suffer from resignation syndrome, a rare trauma response to the state of living in the limbo of displacement. “My obsession with displacement is rooted in my love of home,” Schlesinger explains. “Home is so crucial to well-being. How can anyone be without one?”
While researching Iphigenia Point Blank, Schlesinger stumbled upon an article in the New Yorker, “The Trauma of Facing Deportation,” that described resignation syndrome, which Swedish psychiatrists identified in the early 2000s as uppgivenhetssyndrom. Rachel Aviv’s article detailed a phenomenon in Sweden that afflicted hundreds of refugee children. After being informed that their families would be expelled from the country, these children would fall into a non-responsive state that could persist for months.
Until recently, uppgivenhetssyndrom was only diagnosed in Sweden—but it prompted Schlesinger to think about how dissociating or falling away from traumatic situations must happen in other places and at other times in history. “There was a line about it in Iphigenia,” Schlesinger says, describing the inception of Ruinous Gods, “and I knew I would revisit the subject because I could feel in my body the relief of this kind of falling away from the world.”
Ruinous Gods is a collaboration developed by Schlesinger and Layale Chaker, a French-Lebanese violinist and composer. Schlesinger met Chaker while developing and preparing for the premiere of Iphigenia Point Blank.
Chaker’s debut album, Inner Rhyme, was released while they were in rehearsals for Iphigenia Point Blank and Schlesinger fell in love with Chaker’s fusion of European classical music with traditional Arabic maqam music. Schlesinger smiles, “I asked Layale to compose music for Ruinous Gods before I started writing.”
Schlesinger and Chaker worked on Ruinous Gods virtually throughout the pandemic lockdown, and much of their early collaboration was necessarily done at a distance. The first time Schlesinger heard Chaker’s music live was in March 2023, during a New York workshop at Opera America presented by Spoleto Festival.
“Layale and I looked at each other and both said the same thing – this is where I belong,” Schlesinger says.
Ruinous Gods follows a mother, Hannah, and her 12-year-old daughter, H’ala, who are experiencing trauma caused by displacement. The opera is loosely based on the Greek myth of Persephone and Demeter, a story about the connection between mother and daughter that is severed when Persephone is separated from her mother, Demeter, when she is kidnapped and taken to the underworld. The opera also includes testimonies from survivors and families of those afflicted by uppgivenhetssyndrom, leveraging the powerful juxtaposition of myth and documentary that Schlesinger employed in Iphigenia.
Schlesinger’s theatrical practice is intimately mixed with her political activism. She describes how performance and activism are both practices that combine ritual and community. "Both have the potential to engage in actions so much bigger than the individual self. It is a joyful sense of collective action.”
The production of Ruinous Gods has itself been a collective action. The project is fostered by a vibrant team with a wide range of artistic expertise. Maya Zbib and Omar Abi Azar, from Zoukak Theatre in Beirut, Lebanon, bring narrative depth and emotional resonance through their direction and dramaturgy. They are also collaborating with Joelle Aoun (Scenic Design) and James Ingalls (Lighting Design) and producers Mena Mark Hana and Liz Keller-Tripp at Spoleto. Ruinous Gods, like much of Schlesinger’s work, is a transdisciplinary event that combines dance, music, and text.
“A play is a poem standing up,” Schlesinger quotes Spanish playwright Federico Garcia Lorca. “Theatre is a form of living poetry. I try to create a theatrical cosmology, a space for different ways of seeing, new imaginations and transformation.”