Review: "The Maenads" Offers an Ecstatic Experience

The Maenads

Written by Stephen Foglia

Directed by Phillip Christian Smith

Presented by Harborcoat Productions and The Tank at The Tank

312 W 36th St., 1st Fl., Manhattan, NYC

September 18-October 12, 2025

In their book Why Does Patriarchy Persist? (Polity, 2018), Carol Gilligan and Naomi Snider observe that patriarchy associates "masculinity with pseudo-independence (and the shielding of relational desires and sensitivities)," leading to "a loss of relationship: a loss of intimacy and connection" (22). It is in response to just such lack that the quintet of men in Phillip Christian Smith's hilarious and incisive play The Maenads find themselves on a mountain together, experimenting with an ancient–and female–identity. As they try to model themselves on the eponymous maenads, female followers of Dionysus in ancient Greek cultural narratives, audiences are treated to a superbly staged, percipient, and, fittingly for its links to classical Greece, cathartic exploration of masculine selves in–and out of–relationship to others.

The group outing that the play follows is organized by college professor Stewart (Keith Michael Pinault), an expert on Greek antiquity and someone who has difficulties not being in control. Catalyzed by an experience that he movingly describes late in the play, Stewart started a sort of maenad club, the members of which are all men, each of whom has joined for his own reasons. Stew speaks early in the group's trip up the mountain of "breaking the cage of masculinity," and that cage takes different forms for each man, though they largely share a sense of disconnection. Stew himself wants to show the woman he wants to marry, as well as himself, that he can let go and open up bit; Stew's Uncle Phil (Thaddeus Daniels) is recently divorced and has been told that he needs to find his own friends; Devon (DJ Davis) has a rocky relationship with his preacher father, feels like "God's pig," and wants to experience something "real"; and Jacob (Charles Manning) is particularly interested in the chance to inhabit a different gender identity. Max (Alex Stene), meanwhile, is the most stereotypically bro-ish and is there, it turns out, mostly to support his longtime friend Jacob, but he also has the greatest openness to experience of any of the men. The group's sojourn in the wilderness begins with some chanting and invocations and everyone's selection of his maenad name (the men largely stick with these names and with female pronouns after this point), as well as, to Devon's angry disappointment, Stew's proposed substitute for the ancient Greek maenads' frenzied dismemberment of a live animal. Soon enough, though, the food is gone, there are drugs in the box wine, and it's starting to snow, and the men move over time from questioning whether their acting as women in an improv-style activity was actually drawing on disrespectful stereotypes to more intensely personal and vulnerable excavations of their histories, frustrations, fears, and desires–not to mention riskier strategies for connecting with the Dionysian. Jumping the fire, anyone?

         

At one point, Stew asks whether the other men haven't also always wondered about (and been jealous of) the part of women's experience and embodiment that he couldn't share. At the same time, we see the group experiment with things that could be shared but are proscribed by normative masculinity, like interpersonal touch. Patriarchy, the play reminds us, hurts everyone, not just women. However, even for an expert like Stew, even for someone who, like Stew and Jacob, really wants to change and knows his own failings in doing so, there is a difference between knowing and doing; and, following a fantastic scene featuring the euphoric return of a song of which Jacob (or Anthe, to use her maenad name) had earlier sung a lovely, plaintive version, it becomes clear that not everyone has the same result from their experience.  

Christian Killada and John Horzen's truly impressive projection design works with Annie Garrett-Larsen's lighting design and Dedalus Wainwright's rocky set to transport us to the mountain, as well as to the men's drug-tinged perception of it, as night falls and then recedes. And was that a wolf or the god Dionysus himself? The cast is fabulous, handling both the grounded and absurd elements of what transpires such that the line between them ceases to matter, whether that is Manning as Jacob as Anthe confronting Max over the dynamics of their friendship, Davis as Devon as Choiros coming to terms with how the night has gone, or Pinault as Stew as Meliou reckoning with why he really came to the mountain, or whether it's Stene as Max as Kalyke acting like a goat or Daniels as Phil as Honey tripping under a reflective blanket. The Maenads is extremely funny, often surprising, and, even finally, idiosyncratically, beautiful. Wolves and potential hypothermia aside, we could do worse than to emulate these particular maenads in at least rattling the bars of that patriarchal cage.

-John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards