Lysistrata Themes

Known as the “Father of Comedy”, the ancient Athenian playwright Aristophanes wrote forty plays between 427 B.C. and 386 B.C. Of those forty, only eleven plays survive in their entirety. His most well-known and anthologized play is Lysistrata. First performed in 411 B.C., the comedy is a political satire meant to criticize the Peloponnesian War raging between the Greek city-states of Athens and Sparta at the time. The plot of the play revolves around a sex strike that was organized by the women of the two city-states as a ploy to get the men to end their fighting. Amid the comedic, suggestive scenes and jokes, Aristophanes manages to include some very serious and important themes. It is these themes that have made Lysistrata so timeless. Modern

The title of the film is a portmanteau of Chicago and Iraq, which came about because the city’s high murder rate is comparable to that of an actual war zone. Lee opens the film with some harrowing statistics that point to the validity of the nickname. Between 2001 and 2015, there have been 7,356 murders in Chicago alone. In contrast, between 2003 and 2011, there have only been 4,425 American deaths in the Iraq war and 2,349 deaths in Afghanistan (Chi-Raq 00:03:45-00:04:10). Within the first twenty minutes, the film presents three different acts of violence perpetuated by gangs. The first is an assassination attempt against the leader of the Spartan gang, who is also the protagonist of the film. Nicknamed Chi-Raq, the protagonist is the boyfriend of Lysistrata, the mastermind behind the sex strike in the film. Later that same night, Lysistrata has her house set ablaze by the rival Trojan gang. Soon after, Lysistrata stumbles upon a crime scene. A nine-year-old neighborhood girl has been killed by a stray bullet from a drive-by shooting. The girl’s mother is seen weeping over her baby’s body. Unlike Aristophanes, who just launched right into the plan for peace, Lee takes the time to establish the effects of violence through the use of emotional scenes, which strengthens the urgency in his work. In contrast, Aristophanes did not have to establish the effects of war because his audience was experiencing them firsthand. Shaken, Lysistrata goes to a local motherly neighbor. It is this neighbor that points her in the direction of the sex strike. Motivated, Lysistrata calls a meeting with the women of the Spartan and Trojan gangs. Once gathered, they realized that they have all lost a man in their life to gang violence. Just like the women of ancient Greece, the women of Chicago’s Southside also offer to cut themselves in half for peace. Once Lysistrata suggests the sex strike, the Southside women also