Writing Songs for Nero

At the opening night of WSC/Avant Bard's production of The Bacchae on Monday night, I had a powerful flashback to why I decided that my new play Nero/Pseudo about the fake emperor Nero who popped up in Greece in 69 AD needed music -- and glam rock music at that.

Rock and roll has always possessed obvious Dionysiac elements, from Elvis to the Beatles and on forward. Jim Morrison of the Doors struck this note explicitly, giving an explicit shoutout to Nietzsche's 1872 book The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music. (I can't help but notice that Morrison and Nero were both born under the sign of Sagittarius, the "most philosophical of all the signs.")

Glam rock seemed to have an even stronger claim to being the music for the play, however. Glam's blurred sexuality, its radical swings between the bombastic and the fey, its ludicrous cosmologies, and the way that the music is balanced so exquisitely between alienation, longing and comraderie seemed perfect for a play about Nero -- or at least what we know of him centuries later.

Saying there should be music is one thing. Making it happen is quite another thing. What sort of glam songs should be in a play about a fake Emperor Nero? And what sort of songs will you hear if you come to WSC/Avant Bard's staged reading of the play at Artisphere on May 30?

After a lot of research, I was impressed by the fact that historians (then and now) seem to agree that Nero wrote a lot of his own material as well as playing the "classics." Indeed, Nero's most famous alleged performance was to accompany himself on the lyre as he sang his own poem The Fall of Troy (Troica) during the great fire of Rome in 64 AD.

I also discovered that a miniscule amount of Nero's poetry survived to the present day. In fact, there is only one fragment of more than one line that scholars definitely agree was penned by Nero. Three very obscure lines from his poem on the The Fall of Troy:

quique pererratam subductus Persida Tigris
deserit et longo terrarum tractus hiatu
reddit quaesitas iam non quaerentibus undas

I ended up finding a place for these lines in the play, very liberally translated and embellished, as:

From as far away as the Tigris
that river which descends beneath the earth
and even to the underworld
ferrying warriors up from Hades
until it reemerges once again on earth. 

(In Michael Dewar's article, "Nero on the Disappearing Tigris," which appeared in the The Classical Quarterly in 1991, the author says that the lines most likely describe a natural phenomenon noted by Strabo and Pliny in which the Tigris River disappears at lake Thospitis and remerges 22 miles later.)

So what could I do with so little of Nero's actual poetry to play with? I decided to rewrite The Fall of Troy for him -- a short cycle of songs that sets out the theme of the sack of Troy and then takes the story to its end, with the Greeks killing Hector's son Astyanax and Trojan princess Polyxena and taking the wives of the dead Trojans as their property. A few of the songs are written in the voice of a character in the story such as Ulysses or Cassandra. (Nero like to perform classical roles onstage, even the roles of women, wearing masks as he did so.) Other songs are more philosophical. They are Nero's view of the cosmos. But part of my aim with the cycle of songs was to let the audience get to know the emperor who's being impersonated.

I feel very fortunate that my musical collaborators Jon Langford (Mekons, Waco Brothers) and Jim Elkington (The Zincs, The Horse's Ha) found this project (and writing glam music to it) worth their time and energy and talent. I can't presume to speak for them, but the music that they wrote calls upon many moods of glam. (And since they'll both be performing with the actors at the staged reading, thay may have something to say about it themselves when we discuss the play afterwards at the talkback.)

But Langford and Elkington have graciously agreed to let you hear one of the demo versions of the songs for Nero/Pseudo as a sneak preview of the work in progress. The demo track I have selected is called "Hymn to Athena." It's a song that's sung in the voice of Cassandra. I hope it intrigues you enough to want to come see the WSC/Avant Bard staged reading of Nero/Pseudo at Artisphere in Rosslyn on May 30 at 8 p.m. and hear some more of the play.

The link to "Hymn to Athena" can be found here.

A Little Bit About My New Play, Nero/Pseudo

The new play that I've been working on since July 2009 --called Nero/Pseudo -- is finally ready for people to read. Which is exciting. The first draft was finished this past summer, then it got a ruthless rewrite or two -- the last one thanks to some very perceptive comments by DC playwright Jim McNeill and actor/director Gwen Grastorf.

I went back into my notebooks to try and trace down just what the original impetus for Nero/Pseudo was. I remember it being a very hot summer day, and I sought refuge in the cool darkness of the bedroom and started reading a copy of Tacitus' Histories -- his account of 69 AD, the so-called "Year of Four Emperors" which kicked off with Nero's suicide and ended only with Vespasian's triumphant return to Rome.

I had only gotten to early in the second book of the volume when I came across this passage:

About this time Achaia and Asia were thrown into a groundless panic by a rumor that "Nero was at hand." The accounts of his death being many and various, people were all the more inclined to allege and to believe that he was still alive. I shall mention in the course of this work the attempts and the fate of the other pretenders. This time it was a slave from Pontus, or, according to other traditions, a freedman from Italy. His skill as a singer and harpist combined with his facial resemblance to Nero, gave him some credentials for imposture.

The passage startled me. It was a story only half-remembered. I recall thinking about it for a few minutes, getting up, Googling it a bit, finding out that there had been two or three such pretenders (scholars differ) and then grabbing my notebook and writing (as I look at it again now):

Play about first Pseudo-Nero.

A bunch of other thoughts flooded the page, and then the first title:

The Return of the Exalted Emperor Nero, Confounding Reports Erroneous of Unfortunate Demise

It took me five years to get the last play I wrote, Burn Your Bookes, from my head to the 2007 Prague Playwriting Festival to the Kennedy Center to Taffety Punk's amazing production at Capitol Hill Arts Workshop this past April. But I learned a lot from that experience, and I've accelerated my process of researching, outlining and writing. I've also become smarter about my own work habits as a playwright.

So now that it's done, I'm starting to look for a home for Nero/Pseudo. Getting in it the hands of various folks, trying to obtain opinions and critiques and (hopefully)to generate some interest in a production. Part of that process is writing a succinct synopsis, which I'm inserting at the end of this post. As you'll see, the play has its roots in history, but it's not a period piece.

Interested in reading it? Let me know in the comments or by email if the synopsis intrigues you:

Nero/Pseudo: A Synopsis

A naked fake emperor. Glam rock. A head in a box. That's Nero/Pseudo -- a new play by Richard Byrne.

Nero/Pseudo takes its inspiration from a passage in Tacitus' Histories, in which a man with an uncanny physical resemblance to the emperor Nero (and skill in playing the lyre) took Greece by storm a few months after the real Nero's suicide in 69 AD. Not only did the fake Nero cause mass tumult before he was captured and executed -- but the notion that Nero might actually return to rule again was fuel for apocalyptic writers in Jewish and Christian sects of that era (including The Book of Revelation).

But Nero/Pseudo isn't a period piece. Byrne mashes up classical literature with glam rock, political cults of celebrity, a healthy dollop of sex and a newly-imagined version of Nero's famous poem on the Fall of Troy. All but three lines of the original Nero poem have been lost, so the playwright's new version casts as much an eye on contemporary politics as it does on Trojans and Greeks.

Nero/Pseudo requires a minimum of six (6) actors.