Aretha doesn’t speak a word; they won’t shut up.

Aretha doesn’t speak a word; they won’t shut up. IAN JOHNSTON / DANGERPANTS PHOTOGRAPHY

In 438 BCE, Euripides won second prize at the Dionysia theater festival with his strange play Alcestis, an uncomfortably ambivalent story about a queen who volunteers to die in her husband’s place and is then wrestled back into the land of the living by a hungover Hercules.

The mechanics behind the plot are ridiculous: Apollo is exiled from Olympus, has a nice time with King Admetus and his wife, Queen Alcestis, and makes a deal with the Fates…

Brend an Kiley has worked as a child actor in New Orleans, as a member of the junior press corps at the 1988 Republican National Convention, and, for one happy April, as a bootlegger’s assistant in Nicaragua....