Fabre’s Dionysus never gets tired of inviting spectators to “imagine something new”: man has to “take the power back / enjoy (his) own tragedy / breathe; just breathe, / and imagine something new.” Fabre’s production articulates at great length the need for another imagination. It constantly undermines patriarchal and fundamentalist power, contains powerful female roles, enjoys female giggling and tittering addressed to male gods. Dionysus and his new spouse, Dionysa, enter the arena of a political warzone, grinning and sneering at men’s inability to do better, inciting them to have the courage to think for themselves, more autonomously than ever, and to dare to feel and get into real contact with their entire body. As part of the poststructuralist revision of myth, Dionysus stimulates man to awake from the clichés that kept him prisoner and to assume a new, symbolizing position; or, as Dionysus ironically points out, “Look at your horizon and see the vast cage / in which you have to dwell. . . . The gods you like were made by you and your obsession / for punishment.”
