While most courses offered in the theater department are based on training and technique — acting, stage management, play analysis — Professor Derek Goldman’s new class blends method with real, practical and more importantly, professional experience. The class, Ensemble Theater Practicum: Synetic Theater’s “Lysistrata,” prepares students to perform in this spring’s “Lysistrata,” an ancient Greek comedy, at both Georgetown and off campus in Washington, D.C. Goldman, director of the theater and performance studies program at Georgetown and artistic director of the Davis Performing Arts Center, believes the experience will not only give students a new perspective on an ancient classic, but also introduce them to the professional theater world. He sat down with The Guide this week to talk about class, the war in Georgia and phalluses on the stage.

Tell us about your new class.

The play is called “Lysistrata” by Aristophanes. The production is a partnership production; one of the things we’re doing in the [theater and performance studies] program is student-centered professional partnerships with some of D.C.’s leading companies like Synetic Theater. It’s one of D.C.’s most exciting theater companies; they’ve been the toast of the Helen Hayes Awards for many recent years. The director and choreographer, Paata and Irina Tsikurishvili, are Georgian, which has been very interesting given the play’s context of war. They’ve been teaching physical theater for us; what defines their work is a very physical-oriented approach. They do some texts of pieces completely silent, like they’ve done a production of Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” completely silent. It’s very, very beautiful, visceral, just really, really exciting work that’s attracting national attention.

How will the company be involved with this course?

They’ve been working with the theater students training them in kinetic techniques. The Synetic folks and us got together and are developing this production together. It will feature both Georgetown students and professionals that Synetic works with in the ensemble. It will open here in the Gonda Theater in the spring, and then move to Synetic, so the students involved will actually get to be in a professional production.

Part of the way they work and my background is in adapting the script, so it will be unconventional. The course will be really developing this project together; it’s the beginning of that process. It will be the beginning of training, which is very rigorous, but with a specific eye toward developing the physical vocabulary. The students aren’t just being trained as actors in the piece, but the course is really about them having some real agency and authoring, not in the traditional sense of sitting down and writing, but authoring some of the story.

One thing we’re committed to is making sure the students are at the center. I think sometimes some student theater groups who have relationships with professional companies think it’s more about come see their work and the students just get to sit on the side and admire. The excitement of the Synetic Project is treating the students as professionals and really having them function as professional actors in the production.

Tell me a little bit more about the play itself. What is it about?

It’s the world’s first comedy. The play in its initial context is the Peloponnesian War, which we’re trying to put into a more timeless context. Lysistrata is this woman who gathers all the women and conjures up a sex strike, as well as barricading the treasury, the public funds. It’s a play that’s a classic. I think one of the challenges of the piece is in translation and can feel a little bit dusty. At its root, the bones of the play are a very powerful and timeless look at the deep relationships of power and who holds what kind of power, the relationship between extroverted, military, masculine power and the power of females in society — what kind of power they’re granted and what kind of power they take. It’s an interesting play because critics will often write about it being the first feminist text; other times people will think of it as fundamentally sexist. Our challenge is making it immediate, current and urgent to all kinds of audiences. I think it is, but it needs the adaptation to that.

How do you plan on accomplishing this universality?
What we’re really working on with Synetic is creating a visual, physical world that invokes not a particular war or place, but I think it will evoke Georgia, Iraq, the Balkans and, frankly, inner-city America.

Comedy in its roots is not just about laughs; this piece moves from the bleakness of war to the sort of vision of love, not just sex, that causes love and peace in a society that can be sustained between men and women. It’s a comedy in the classic sense in its progression from darkness to light.

It’s an amazing group of students, not just as performers, who bring out their own personal experiences, researches and points of view. This is the way I love to work.

Will the physical aspects of the piece be more physical comedy or more just movement?

There will be physical aspects that will be very comedic, but Synetic also works a lot with just movement. We’re doing a lot of work with masks, playing with gender stereotypes. There will be some very powerful sequences of war. We’re also using a multimedia design, so there will be imagery not in a slideshow way, but part of the world.

Can you give us an example of this adaptation of physical comedy?

There are scenes in the play where the men essentially come out wearing these huge phalluses. One of the challenges of the play, therefore, is to find the humor, but to find that the humor is coming out of very real, powerful, dramatic contexts.

This is a lot of what we’re talking about as a team now — finding that vocabulary, but making sure that we do find a version of that. With the phalluses, for instance, it’s not just strapping one on and saying, ‘This is hilarious,’ but thinking about things like, what are the relationships between phalluses and guns? How is it ironic that both are perceived as indicators of strength and power, but also as weaknesses?

I think a lot of the play is about numbness, both of war and of sexuality. We’re really trying to dig to the roots of this play that has survived for 2,500 years.