Professor Stratos E. Constantinidis' essay, "Playing the Persian Queen" appears in Building Embodiment: Integrating Acting, Voice, and Movement to Illuminate Poetic Text, edited by Baron Kelly and Karen Kopryanski (New York: Routledge, paperback book 2023), pp. 67-80.

Abstract: Performers cannot be taught to perform Greek drama in general. They can only learn how to perform one Greek play at a time. Their learning curve is determined by the selected play (e.g., Aeschylus’ Persians) and by one of the five filters that its Greek text will be put through when it is restaged in the language and culture of a new audience. The degree to which scholarly erudition and artistic imagination are engaged depends on the filter that is used by directors, dramaturgs, and actors – translation (metaphrasis), version (ekdoche), adaptation (prosarmoge), variant (paralage), or remake (diaskeve). These five filters impose different degrees of separation from the original text and its language. Each filter controls four variable processes (interpretation, rewriting, appropriation, and acculturation) albeit each process in each filter is manipulated to a different degree. It is through translation that most ingredients of a text are preserved during its transfer from its source language and culture to the target language and culture. The filter of translation will be used here to show how to play the role of the queen in a scene from Aeschylus’ Persians (lines 155–248).