As Kathryn Walker is quick to admit, "staging Greek tragedy can be very hard to pull off." The 1997 Visiting Artist at Radcliffe has imposed this difficulty on herself with delight. Her audacious production of Euripides; The Bacchae opens this week, the result of many years of reading, thinking about and loving the play.

Walker has written that the play "explores the terrain of the ineffable." The god whose cult it concerns is beyond mortal understanding: Dionysos is automorphic, xenophoric, acrobatic, dark, sexual and fierce all at once--a gleeful irreverent demanding reverence. So Euripides focuses on our experience instead: the human response to divinity.

Walker sees the play's interpretation of that experience as contemporary and relevant, and presents what she calls a "profound disillusionment with the values of the state," in a "narrow, legal and power-obsessed society." Dionysos, held in myth to be the inventor of theater, imposes on civic order a dancing, crowded and angry disorder that could sweep, perhaps, over Boston as readily as over Thebes.

Music for a Grecian Ode

This primeval dynamic appealed to William Harper, who composed the score for The Bacchae.

"It's known that in the original Greek drama there was music all the way through and that the choral odes were especially important," Harper said in a telephone interview. "The question becomes how to reinvent those."

The innovative answer was Walker's. She says she opted for them not to be sung "in favor of the distinctly musical possibilities of the speaking voice." She also found C.K. Williams' English version of the play, which she adapted for this production, "ravishing to read." She claims for her chief love "language used skillfully," and finds much to love in the Williams.

Harper agrees: "It's the most beautiful translated thing I've ever read."

He adds that the quality and pleasures of the text led him to an approach "almost operatic in conception, and my definition of opera is 'what is fun'." Computerizing Walker's recitation of the odes, Harper pooled talents with Walker and choreographers Claire Mallardi and Tommy Nebblett in a kind of multimedia approach.

Perhaps in part to reflect this diversity of presentation, Harper chose to be stylistically eclectic. His score alludes to Renaissance music and rock alike.

"You're supposed not to be aware of where you are historically," Harper explains.

Stranger in a Strange Land

That exciting disorientation is an aim shared by Walker, who is fascinated by the possibility that Dionysos might be earlier and more eastern than Hellenistic civilization.

"I've got the Maenads as a chorus of Asian women, and a silent Magna Mater figure onstage," Walker says.

The attention Walker pays to the feminizing influence of the god has led her to to one of her boldest directorial decisions: casting a female (Winsome Brown '96) as Dionysos.