Bawdy, gaudy and naughty—Lysistrata and her friends are using all their feminine wiles to keep their menfolk knocking and knocking on the doors of love, but they’re not letting them in.
The eponymous heroine of the Phnom Penh Players’ latest production has shut up shop. The men of Athens and Sparta just won’t give up their endless battles so the women have had to tell them to put their swords away. No more sexual favors, boys, until you stop the war.
Endless innuendo and visual sexual jokes make this ancient Greek comedy unsuitable for children but highly suitable for a very adult night out.
Ligia Radoias holds the cast together as a strong and formidable Lysistrata who persuades a group of women to give up sex and force their men to give up war. Some are understandably reluctant. Others warm to the task.
Myhrrina, played with great comic aplomb by Beth Deutsch, charms her husband behind a lighted screen and takes him to the limits of sexual frustration. Poor Kinesias is left nursing a very painful male ego. Not to mention a large protrusion under his skirt.
Director Eleni Nikolaou has inspired her cast to relish the rhythmic, rhyming language of a play, which moves easily from poetry to song to elements of farce.
In the end Lysistrata gets her way. An erotic strip dance is all it takes to get the men to sign the peace agreement. A lesson for us all?
