I read the play for a history class last semester and was reading another post related to Ancient Greece and women and I started thinking about Lysistrata again.
It focuses on women very heavily and it portrays them in an empowering sort of way. I could be interpreting the play wrong but that's what I got from it. And please let me know if I'm wrong or misunderstand anything.
Was there any controversy in regards to showing women having power over men? This could be because of the sex or
I understand the play was a comedy so is it possible that the women controlling the men (and the men being so desperate for sex) was a sort of "when pigs fly" kind of idea?
Would men have played the female characters? If so, would that have added to the comedy?
In the play, couldn't the men have had sex with other men? I'm not sure how widespread homosexual activity was in Ancient Greece or how casual it was or could be.
I might come up with some other questions later. Thanks!
We don't know. We don't necessarily have records of critical reception other than what the plays themselves talk about and the victory records for each comedy festival. We don't have record of Lysistrata winning, but this in and of itself doesn't really prove much other than people voted for a different play. For all when know, they liked the music better. But...
...the play is sort of less subversive than all that. Lysistrata is very much an Aristophanic hero - the sane person who realizes that a crazy world requires a crazy plan. Everyone's desperate for sex in the play. She has to fight with women wanting to leave the acropolis for sex more than making demands of the men. There's a certain "when pigs fly" (or, indeed, in the case of the Peace, dung beetles) to most Aristophanes that touches on the war, which seems to represent something more like a demand for different vision out of the politicians of the day that requires an outsider of some sort (a meme that we definitely still have in the U.S.), with Lysistrata being that outsider here. To that extent, she has to be a woman to make the plot function, not necessarily to make the fantasy of the plot (the fantasy of a sex-strike being fantasy enough). Note, for instance, most of the jokes don't operate from her being in control over men (those jokes would come in the Ecclesiazusae, another later play of his), but either the A) sex-mad Yakety Sax business of both genders (and this is probably more focused on the women), B) the sort of gender wars tropes of the chorus, and C) the sort of not-joke jokes of Lysistrata discussing women's troubles in war (which Aristophanes had poked at at least once before in the Acharnians, making this a full development of that idea).
Yes, at least all the parts that spoke/sung. The second question is a bit more speculative. On one hand, it wouldn't be as atypical as us moderns seeing someone in drag during a show. On the other, well, comedy does operate by mocking mimicry.
Homosexuality in Ancient Greece is it's own topic and way beyond the confines of the play. It's safe to say that heterosexual and homosexual sexual contact isn't the same, so wasn't just something you would sub in.