Lysistrata is one of the most famous plays by the Greek comic playwright Aristophanes. The play follows Lysistrata, who leads her fellow women from Athens and its enemy Sparta in refusing to have sex with their husbands until they end the war between the two places. Although the women struggle without sex, they ultimately succeed, with Lysistrata negotiating a peace treaty.
Although the play is a raucous, bawdy comedy, with lewd jokes practically every other line, it has also been treated as a script with serious import over the centuries, particularly on the subject of war. Before George W. Bush ordered the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, for instance, theater companies all over the...
