Using Greek Tragedy To Make Sense Of The Pandemic

Elif Batuman on watching Theater of War’s online production of Sophocles’s Oedipus the King: “You’ve never really seen Oedipus, I found myself thinking, till you’ve seen it during a plague. The plague hadn’t really stood out to me on previous readings, yet it was the key to everything. … No matter how many times you see it pulled off, the magic trick is always a surprise: how a text that is hundreds or thousands of years old turns out to be about the thing that’s happening to you, however modern and unprecedented you thought it was.” – The New Yorker