Plato for the People

Shakespeare found his kings in Holinshed’s chronicles and made them live on stage. This project does the same with Plato. The dialogues are already plays — scenes, characters, arguments, dramatic irony. Plato for the People puts them back on the stage they were written for: lifting the chronicle, the speech, the scene, and running it through the full pressure of dramatic form until it becomes something the audience recognizes as being about them.

The Athenian citizen class become the American tech and political elite. The Peloponnesian War becomes the competition between China and America. The characters keep their names. The arguments mostly stay.

The first production, Virtue as a Service — a transposition of the Protagoras to a Bay Area friendsgiving — ran in San Francisco in 2025 and proved the form works. The next three plays follow the chronology of Socrates’ life: First Alcibiades, a confrontation before power; a near-future Taiwan Strait crisis drawn from the Potidaea campaign; and a Charmides set in the aftermath, where the cure turns out to be its own kind of sickness.

Scripts are freely available. The goal is not a single company touring but a form that spreads — to friends in living rooms and parks and bars, the way it started.