When Euripides’ The Trojan Women was first presented at the city of Dionysia in 415 B.C., it won second place in a theater contest. Awards for the show have continued to this day, with our production garnering the “Pick of the Week” recognition from offoffonline.com and reviewer Kelly Aliano. Woo-hoo!
Check out her full review here: http://www.offoffonline.com/reviews.php?id=1789
--Jeff Stein
Like countless writers before and after him, 5th-Century Athenian playwright Euripides created his story around the presumed facts of the Trojan War, as outlined by Homer. Euripides, like all the ancient Greeks, accepted both the events and personalities of the Trojan War, hundreds of years before Euripides’ time, as historical fact. His play about the imagined female victims of the war was not simply taken as a parable, or myth, but the staged, admittedly dramatized, portrayal of real events.
But was Euripides right to believe he was writing about the lives of real women? Historians have long debated the veracity of the Trojan War, with many in the modern era believing the story to be nothing more than an elaborate legend. By the late 19th-Century, indeed, it was generally assumed that “Troy” had never even existed.
Yet groundbreaking archeology from 1870 to the present day has reversed that picture. As recently as 2001, a geologist from the University of Delaware announced new findings corroborating many of the details found in Homer. After centuries of being dismissed, “it is now more likely than not” that there were “several armed conflicts in and around Troy at the end of the Late Bronze Age,” according to Archeology.org.
Does that mean there was a war started by a beauty named Helen, or that a mother named Hecuba lost all her children to war, or that a woman named Amiable once fondled a broken toaster oven? Probably not. More probable is that after a vicious war, the Trojan women of a destroyed civilization were subject to the whims and abuses of their male Greek conquerors. Thus Euripides’—and, therefore, our—play has a likely all-too-real, unfortunate historical basis. This is not just the stuff of myths.
--Jeff Stein
In the best plays, the “suspension of disbelief” is produced involuntarily. Some theatergoers may work to subdue the natural, incredulous impulse—“that’s just fake blood,” “she’s not really dead,” “he’s ACTING,”—but, ultimately, it is the show’s responsibility to make an audience suspend its disbelief. When we go to a play, we want to immerse ourselves in the characters—to buy into an illusion we all know is patently false.
The theater company Hudson Warehouse has gotten and will continue to get audiences to do exactly this with Euripides’ The Trojan Women in June, Rostand’s Cyrano in July and Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet in August. Each weekend, these plays will work to make hundreds of people forget that they are at a play, and to therefore believe the joys, pains and tribulations of the invented people we call characters.
Yet this blog, however diminutive its scope and limited its ambition, will work against this goal. Through anecdotes, stories and interviews, I, along with fellow Production Assistant and old friend David Martin, will explore what the show will try to get you to forget. We’ll ask our actors what they really think about the people they pretend to be, reveal our director’s manipulation of ancient scripts, and, even, divulge our secret recipe for fake vomit.
So—whoever, if anyone, is out there—sit back and enjoy, gently to hear, kindly to judge, a blog about our play.
--Jeff Stein
