Big Love

Experimental Theatre Chicago (ETC) presents Big Love, by Charles Mee, a re-imagining of Aeschylus’ The Suppliant Women. Fifty sisters who are promised to marry their 50 cousins are forced to flee Greece. When it becomes apparent that the marriages cannot be avoided, the women hatch a murderous plot, the only scheme that can assure their freedom. Jaclyn Biskup directs.

Using the surviving text as the point of departure, Mee combines traditional narrative storytelling with expressive movement and music to create a contemporary tale linking modern and ancient ideas about love, marriage, and the differences between men and women. The New York Times described Big Love as “an MGM musical in Technicolor, a circus and, believe it, a Greek tragedy.”