Waiting in the wings backstage in his high school auditorium, watching a production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” unfold, Al Duncan fell in love with theater. The youthful zeal, the community, the authenticity — he was captivated by the magic and beauty of the performance.
“There’s something beautiful about theater always being a team effort,” he says.
After that, Duncan embraced the theater in every way, taking on roles as a director, actor, and set designer. In the early 2000s, while attending the University of Michigan, he found himself captivated by the pages of Greek and Roman dramas.
“The ancient world is just so bizarre. I can’t stop thinking about it,” he says. “I’m the guy who thinks about the Roman Empire four times a day.”
The solace he found in reading plays like “Helen” and “Bacchae” wasn’t just intellectual; it was deeply personal. These texts offered a window into a world that was as chaotic and conflicted as his own, and they sparked a desire to dig deeper into the human condition. His passion for the classics grew, eventually leading him to pursue a PhD in classics and humanities at Stanford University in 2006.
It was there, in a seminar about pleasure, that Duncan had a moment of revelation. He found himself thinking not about beauty, but about ugliness — and the peculiar pleasure we seem to derive from it. Consider Halloween: on Oct. 31, we eagerly embrace everything we normally avoid, like spiders, witchcraft, and death. For one night, we revel in these darker aspects of life, only to shun them the other 364 days of the year.
Duncan realized that playing with discomfort, especially in a controlled setting like theater, allows us to confront our fears and instincts in a way that is oddly satisfying. This idea of finding pleasure in the ugly became the foundation of his scholarly journey into ancient drama.
Now a professor of classics at UNC-Chapel Hill, Duncan has finished a book on the representation of ugliness in ancient Greek tragedies.
“It’s funny to tell people that I’m a specialist in ugly,” he says. “People wonder about you, I think, when you’ve worked on a topic like this for as long as I have. It’s been fun to carve out this little niche that can seem very distant, but actually, I find ugliness in every aspect of my day.”
Shifting perspectives
For classicists, there aren’t new artifacts or texts being discovered anymore, so they’re working with what exists. Duncan’s research began with reading through ancient texts and plays of all genres, thinking about how they wove themes together. He analyzed how 18th-century theorists thought about ugliness in drama and consulted more cutting-edge 20th-century ideas of aesthetics, ethics, and politics.
“I just drenched myself in the literature, and I came up with a dissertation that reflected those historical scholarly interests,” he says.
And then one morning in 2012, Duncan’s academic interests became personal.
He woke up and couldn’t feel the left side of his body. At the age of 27, he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Suddenly, the ugliness of an autoimmune disease had crept its way into Duncan’s life.
“I never really thought of myself as a beautiful person necessarily, but I was functional,” he says. “And then all of a sudden, this permanent thing came up, and there is that kind of awakening that we all have. We all age. It wasn’t abstract anymore. It was my mind. It was my body. It was my life. So that made it real.”
After this personal confrontation with so many of the emotions he was writing about, he decided his dissertation no longer reflected the nuance and immediacy of ugliness. So, he rewrote it. Again and again.
Redefining tragedy
What began as a master’s dissertation 15 years ago is now a full-fledged book, “Ugly Productions: An Aesthetics of Greek Drama,” set to release in February 2025. Duncan’s work draws on concepts of neuroscience, cognition, and emotion, transforming his perspective on ugliness. His book examines ugliness not just as an aesthetic but also as a moral force, one that triggers complex emotions like pity, fear, grief, and abjection.
In his book, Duncan argues that although ancient tragedies are often associated with beauty in ancient Greece, the ugly was not merely tolerated — it was vital. It heightened emotion, challenged the audience, and pushed the boundaries of what drama could achieve.
“Even the Greeks had no simple word for ugly,” he points out. “Their concept touches on moral categories like shame and discomfort.”
Through flawed characters, grotesque imagery, and moral unease, ancient playwrights used ugliness to deepen the emotional and intellectual impact of their plays. Characters like Euripides’ Medea, who kills her own children, and Sophocles’ Oedipus, who blinds himself in a gruesome act of self-punishment, embody the grotesque and the morally complex.
The emotions stirred by ugliness were central to the cathartic experience of Greek theater, where audiences were forced to confront unsettling truths about human nature, morality, and suffering. Ugliness disrupted the norms of beauty and heroism, making these dramas more nuanced and relatable. By challenging idealized notions of beauty, ancient playwrights compelled audiences to face the messier aspects of life.
“I would like the reader to come away with not thinking of the ancient Greek and Roman world as this place of supreme beauty, of proportionality, of all these ideals,” Duncan reflects. “If we look at the historical realities, misogyny and enslavement are just rampant. It was a deeply disturbing and ugly world for the people who lived there.”
And these ideas of challenging societal norms are still present in modern theater, even if the contexts and cultural understandings have evolved. In Duncan’s own classroom, he challenges his students to creatively represent ugliness, both physically and morally through performance.
After 15 years of research, writing, and rewriting, Duncan is relieved to see the book come to completion. He acknowledges the immense pressure on academics to produce books that affirm their intellectual expertise and theoretical abilities. For him, the book’s publication signals the culmination of a journey — and the chance to shift his focus to new interests.
Moving forward
While writing his book, Duncan became fascinated with the spectator experience in ancient Greece and Rome. His field and career are both rooted in performance, so his next research project aims to understand how people perceived, remembered, and responded to these plays.
“I want people to approach Greek drama not as text, not as abstraction, but as something that was always embedded in performance and the experience of spectators,” he says.
In many ways, Duncan’s academic journey mirrors the very plays he studies — full of complexity, discomfort, and unexpected insights. His exploration of ugliness has not only redefined how we think about ancient drama but also reshaped how he views the world. By embracing the ugly, both on stage and in life, he believes we can confront the messy, emotional realities that define the human experience and, in doing so, discover a new kind of beauty.
“The ability to now take anything that’s ugly and make it more playful, to make it something I want to see and be a part of — that’s been a transformative experience for how I engage with the world,” he says.