Also this issue:

Star Turn
The NY season is off to a celeb-packed start.That's not always a good thing.
-Toby Zinman

Tune In
This just in: Hairspray's not the only musical on Broadway this season.
-David Anthony Fox

Stones in His Pockets
-Toby Zinman

Philadanco
-Janet Anderson

CafŽ Puttanesca
-Juliet Fletcher

Kumquat Dance Collective
-Janet Anderson

Sex Workers Art Show
-A.D. Amorosi

Waking Dreams
-Kristina Weise

November 21-27, 2002

theater

The Trojan Women

Troy and pain: The cast of Villanovaâs The Trojan Women.

by David Anthony Fox

The plays of Euripides, written more than 2,400 years ago, continue to astound us with their insights. Medea, for example, deals with a woman’s wrath, treating it in a way that feels modern. And although it is tradition for classical tragedy to take up issues of war and its aftermath, Euripides finds powerful and unexpected ways to tell familiar stories.

The heroines of The Trojan Women -- Hecuba, Cassandra and Andromache -- are the displaced wives and daughters of military heroes. These women are prisoners, encamped in Troy following the city's fall. They are shorn of their elevated political positions and even their basic human dignity. (That another woman, Helen, caused the Trojan War -- and that she herself may be a different kind of prisoner -- is bitterly ironic.) In a particularly harrowing incident, the child of Andromache is taken for sacrifice.

In the theater, timeliness is next to godliness. Sept. 11, the growing concern about Iraq -- these are continuous undercurrents in our minds. It's more than mere timeliness, though, that makes its mark in this Trojan Women. Villanova's production is visually stunning and deeply moving. It would be a thought-provoking evening in the theater in any era. Today, it is transfixing.

In key ways, the production makes specific references to the modern world. Aspects of the design suggest the Middle East, and director James J. Christy has incorporated into Euripides' choral odes contemporary accounts of women's abuse at the hands of soldiers.

But to call the production "updated" would be to oversimplify its sophisticated construct. Christy has incorporated both Classical and modern images in a way that is profoundly unsettling. We don't know where we are, and that's the point -- this could be anywhere, anytime.

Time and again, Christy and company hit the right notes. The stage pictures are spectacular (special praise here to Dirk Durosette's scenery and Charlotte Cloe Fox's costumes), but the personal drama is always central. The sheer scale of passion in Greek drama is daunting to modern audiences -- and to actors. Here the emphasis is on a more human scale, but there's no dishonor in that; in fact, it helps us empathize. Only Christy's choice to portray Menelaus as a kind of good ol' boy strikes me as a miscalculation, striving too hard for contemporary resonance, although it does help us understand his outsider-ness.

I urge you to see the exceptional work being done at Villanova, which -- it pains me to write -- feels fresher than ever.