Trojan Women=Heartache

Trojan Women
January 11, 2008
Harlem Stage

Wow. There exists hurt and heartbreak and tragedy in this world that just can’t be explained or approached in normal terms. Sometimes, in cases of extreme violence, racism, genocide, infanticide, war horrors and systematic enslavement of entire cultures, everyday attempts to come to an understanding of these things fails. So what do we do? We turn to other methods of coming to terms with our flaws, and in the process, attempt to undermine the logic of warfare and violence. For the Greeks, it was the dramatic form of tragedy. Tragedy became, for the Hellenic culture, a way to illuminate the excesses of our nature—and now, in the 21st Century, as we contend with a burgeoning population, a rapidly increasing global middle class, poverty, race wars and urban slums, there has never been a more appropriate time to turn to the old masters of tragedy to help us understand our base nature.

Which is what the Harlem Stage has done. Ostensibly a part of the Under the Radar Festival, this piece had a very different feeling than the rest of the Festival. Not only separated by geography—the Stage is in an old converted gatehouse in Harlem—this piece also distinguished itself by adhering to more traditional notions of plot, character and narrative arc. It was a nice change from the bulk of UTR performances, which, for the most part, actively break down these very notions.

So what the Harlem Stage has done with Trojan Women is to transplant the story, originally part of Grecian oral tradition and then adapted by Euripides into a play by the same name, into a contemporary setting and into a near post-apocalyptic future in which New York City has been destroyed by unknown invaders after a long war. The play is set in the rubble of Penn Station and a high chain link fence separates the audience from the play. A cage is positioned up high at the left side of the stage in which a beautiful woman lounges—it turns out this is Helen of Troy, the woman who, in Euripides play, was the object of desire for Paris.

Ok, a bit of background about the original story and then we’ll get back to the play. Helen is the daughter of Zeus and is so beautiful that she has many suitors from all over the Greek lands. Finally, the Greek Menelaus weds her and they settle down. But then Paris, who is, like Helen, Trojan, kidnaps Helen and brings her back to Troy, which ignites a ten-year long war that culminates in the defeat of Troy. Their husbands killed and their land sacked, the Trojan Women are all that are left. The characters that one needs to know in the play are Hecuba, the dethroned queen and the moral center of the group; her daughter Cassandra, who is blessed with the knowledge of the future but cursed because no one will believe her. Finally, Andromache, widower of Hector, is a Trojan princess and carries with her a little baby boy. These are the central Trojan Women. The male characters are Menelaus, husband of Helen who wins her back through battle; and Talthybius, a messenger who bears the bad news of the women’s fate.

So in the present version of this play, the soldiers are dressed in green Army fatigues and look like something from a Vietnam war movie. Talthybius, the messenger, has been reconfigured into a smarmy, duplicitous “diplomat” who is super corporate: slickly dressed, holding a clipboard and speaking a kind of business/diplomatic doubletalk.

The play’s main plot hasn’t been changed from Euripedes’ version. From what I can tell, and I’ve not seen a production of the old Greek play, the plot is essentially the same. What Alfred Preisser, the writer and director who adapted the play, has done is added excruciating testimony from the victims of civil wars in Sierra Leone and Liberia. These moments are of course the most powerful of the play and really contextualize the piece in contemporary rhetoric of atrocity. When one of the women stands up and approaches the chain link fence, the audience understands that this woman is not only speaking the lines from a thousand year old play, but that she is speaking from a very recent time in which arms and hands are hacked off, girls are literally raped to death, and babies are skewered on sticks. A pretty deft political move by Mr. Preisser, I think, and one that connects the dots between victimized populations of women across time, country and ideology.

What’s so powerful about this piece is largely the lament of the women, especially the performance by the woman playing Hecuba. The actor, a woman in her sixties, is just wonderfully cast. Her face contorts with pain and agony with each fresh loss, and she powerfully serves as the mouthpiece for the women. She is given one line that nearly brought me to tears. As she considers the hubris of her former, pre-war and enslavement hubris of invincibility, she laments that while she understood that her country men fought in lands over “there,” she never thought that “there could become here.” A pointed reference to America’s own sense, even in a post 9/11 world, that we are immune to outside attack.

The play is a wonderful interpretation of Homer brought forward into the present and by so doing, shows us that atrocities are atrocities in any time period, and that after nearly three millennia of Western Civilization, we are still far from an atmosphere of tolerance, understanding and peace.

Scott McEachern
UTR Press Corps
PICA
scott@pica.org