ACTIVE EYE

Jyana's post below about the issues of life and death that we were exploring is also relevant to what we're starting work on next: Iphigenia in Aulis. It's a story that we've been planning to do for some time now, with a new text by Emily Raboteau. There you have the story of a father deciding to sacrifice his daughter to start a war. It's an individual life, to be sure, but it's intimately connected to the lives of thousands of others. The play is all about the value that we place on life. In the sense of the heightened value one person's life can have, it resonates with the awful 'ticking bomb' scenario that's talked about all the time with respect to terrorism. In that case the polarities are reversed--hurting a person to prevent a war, ostensibly--but both example force us to consider the balance between one person and many. And they raise the question of whether there is a limit to what we will subject a human in service of a greater good (whether the greater good is good at all is open to question, of course). To what degree, that is, will we allow a person to cease being a person and become a tool for our use?