All Our Tragic: Part II - Politics

by Sean Graney

“By whatever alchemy, it serves the greatest collection of stories ever written — adds to them, modernizes them, makes them feel fresh, forces you to see them both strange and familiar...There has not been anything quite like this ever before.” - THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE

A contemporary Festival of Dionysus! This brilliant work by playwright Sean Graney undertakes a day-long play retelling of the thirty-two surviving Greek tragedies. PART POLITICS

THE BACCHAE - ION - OEDIPUS REX - OEDIPUS AT COLONUS - SEVEN AGAINST THEBES - THE PHOENICIAN WOMEN - ANTIGONE

"All Our Tragic is a sprawling, messy, at-times-brilliant show, much like the lives of those it portrays and would hope to honor. It is a singular achievement, one not likely to be repeated any time soon." - GAPERS BLOCK, CHICAGO

"We see the full range of relationships between husbands and wives, parents and children, sisters and brothers, politicians and citizens, generals and soldiers. We see the horrors and insanity of war in all their extremity, the gruesome payback for sexual betrayals, the high price paid for loyalty, the futility of prophecy and the wages of guilt. We see people driven to acts of both devotion and madness. We feel the lust for power, the ache for home, and the inevitability of death." - CHICAGO SUN-TIMES

"An ambitious production that exceeds expectation (as if it's possible to even know what to expect of a 12-hour performance!), All Our Tragic is simply unforgettable, on so many levels. It's not really a show or even a play, but an experience, a total immersion into the imaginations of Sean Graney and the Greeks. The end result is that the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides really do become they are all our tragic." - STAGE AND CINEMA

196 pages, Paperback

Published August 27, 2023

About the author

Mr. Graney is the Artistic Director and Founder of The Hypocrites, a Chicago theater company. As a playwright, he has received productions of The 4th Graders Present an Unnamed Suicide at 59E59 in New York, The Hypocrites and the side project in Chicago; Autophagy at the Drama League Director's Fest in 2007 in New York; Porno at the side project in Chicago; as well as many adaptations and short plays. As a director, Mr. Graney directed over 30 productions since 1997. He was a participant in the NEA/TCG Career Development Program for Directors from 2004/6. He has won two Joseph Jefferson Citations for Outstanding Direction.