Classic tale of strength retold with modern spirit

By Alexis Soloski

The music starts just after the houselights dim. A string instrument pours shrilly from the speakers: howling, baleful. The two women already on stage are joined by others. Each has a series of movements which she repeats, a private ritual of distress and mourning. One clutches, one falls, one screams, but no sound emerges. Drumbeats pound and the women's paces quicken, bucking

'Troy Women' merges modern and classic theatre at the School of Drama

against the rhythm. One more woman, veiled, is thrust onto the stage by three hooded men. They toss her about until they tire of their game and leave her to crumple to the ground. The music stops and the play begins.

This dynamic, wordless prologue is just one of Laura Stribling's, DRA '97, several evocative, innovative directing choices in this weekend's production of Troy Women. The play, Stribling's thesis project for the Master of Fine Arts in directing at Yale School of Drama, is a new verse adaptation of Euripides's The Trojan Women by colleague Karen Hartman, DRA '97 a fellow MFA candidate in playwriting. Both Stribling and Hartman toy liberally with the conventions and boundaries of this classical Greek tragedy, but they manage to remain true to the play's themes and core spirit. That's no small task.

Though Stribling and Hartman choose to set the play in ancient times, they uncover the sexuality, feminism, paradox and sheer brutality which lay veiled in the original. This openness allows the modern echos to resonate more clearly and eliminates the stuffiness which can plague such revivals. Its fierceness and passion allow Troy Women to seem current and, like the best of Greek tragedy, to evoke the universal.

The play opens in Troy on one hell of a morning after. The belly of the Trojan Horse has long since dispersed its hidden warriors, the city has been sacked, the plunder divided, the women violated, and the men killed. Only a few women remain, and they wait to be told which men have chosen them as mistresses and slaves. They are led by Hecuba, Priam's widow, once queen of Troy. She laments her woes: though she bore one hundred children, only two daughters remain. The rest of the play strives over and over to end a sentence which begins, "Just when you thought it couldn't get any worse..." It does. Much worse.

In fact, much of the play may be seen as an informal contest to see who drew the shortest straw. Hecuba, Cassandra, Andromache, Helen and the chorus all line up to compete, but the real winner seems to be the city itself. Hartman has improved on Euripides in suggesting the city's pain by personifying Troy as a fallen woman (though when the city later speaks it is, oddly, with a man's voice). As Poseidon details the destruction of his city he begins by calling Troy "a city of cities, an unbreakable girl," but ends by comparing her to "a foreign whore: fallen, open, and owned."

Interestingly, Hartman and Stribling not only bestow an identity upon the city, they give each member of the chorus an individual role as well. Though Euripides' chorus remains faceless, Hartman has divided the lines in such a way that distinct personalities emerge. Jill Lawrence, for example, seems to have been a seamstress, while Vivian Keh, DRA '98, plays a little girl. (Her query "Mommy, will marriage be like what they did last night?" is one of the relatively few ill-judged lines in an otherwise excellent script.) This division of the chorus may even work too well. Though its participants are strong when they move and speak individually, they lose power during the speeches delivered in unison--particularly in one diatribe against Helen which sounds suspiciously like Dr. Seuss.

The principal women all impress, especially Amy Cronise's regal, tear-jerking Andromache and Tessa Auberjonois's mad, sex-obsessed Cassandra. Cassandra communicates the horror of her situation by veering into jokes and songs and stereotypes; she speaks as a bourgeois Brit one moment and a Southern coquette the next. Her plight is so terrifying that she retreats into other games and constructed personalities in an effort to survive. Her crassness becomes a reminder of the terrible sorrow lying just beneath its surface. The costume and lighting designers seem to have worked together to compose rich, provocative stage pictures while using a limited palette. The light gels and cloths range mostly from dirty whites to tans to golds. Each designer uses a single touch of red to great effect. Cristina M. Desrosiers-Ruales has crafted Hecuba's torn gown from red satin with a woven gold overlay and Daniel Meeker, DRA '98, chooses a strong, red light to evoke the flames of the burning Troy. These bright, terrible touches illuminate the sparceness of Louisa Thompson's, DRA '98, set. The sole costuming mishap is Poseidon and Athena clothed as Star Trek extras.

Though such hitches do occur, they don't distract much from the overall production. Hartman and Stribling's bold blending of classical material with a thoroughly modern theatrical consciousness succeeds quite admirably.

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