Susan Granger’s review of “The Trojan Women” at The Flea (Off-Broadway, Sept. 2016)
First produced in 415 B.C. in the midst of the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta, shortly after the Athenian army’s massacre of the men of the island of Melos, Euripides presents a tragic situation which dramatizes the fate of the women, who are considered spoils of war.
Set amid the rubble that once was Troy – after the infamous wooden-horse calamity – the women are asleep, as the sea god Poseidon (Thomas Mucciooli) counsels, “Whatever you dream, even the most horrifying dream, cannot be worse than what you will awake to.”
There’s Queen Hecuba (DeAnna Supplee), widow of King Priam and mother of his 19 children, including the slain warriors Hector and Paris, her vengeful prophetess daughter Cassandra (Lindsley Howard), and Hector’s widow Andromache (Casey Wortmann), who tries desperately to save her infant son, Astyanax.
They all blame the legendary beauty Helen (Rebecca Rad), whom the Greeks went to war to recover, brutally attacking her. “Behind every man who took me stood a goddess/Who steadied his hips and whispered in his ears,” she reminds them.
Developed in 1995 for a staged reading performed by refugees of the Balkan conflict, which followed the fragmentation of Yugoslavia, Ellen McLaughlin’s current adaptation focuses on the wasted lives that war leaves in its wake. And its theme, of course, is timeless.
Classical scholars will note that McLaughlin has totally eliminated the part of Spartan King Menelaus, shortening the play considerably.
Modestly staged by Anne Cecelia Haney with Scot Gianelli’s ominous lighting and Ben Vigus’ sound design, this translation is performed by The Flea’s resident acting company, known as The Bats, many dressed in togas and not well served by Joya Powell’s distracting choreography.
Perhaps because of their youth and relative inexperience, they declaim the choral text, never seeming to grasp the emotional subtlety, which is as relevant today as it was back then.
As Poseidon observes, “Another war has ended. When will the next begin?”
“The Trojan Women” runs through Sept. 26, downstairs at The Flea, located at 41 White Street between Church and Broadway, three blocks south of Canal.