Gallery: Lunacy's Production History

THE WOMEN OF TROY, Fall 2009

Production Directed by Glenn McCumber Opening Night Benefit themed   as a Bacchanale Oct 2009, Sellwood Masonic Lodge CASSANDRA Aiyana Cunningham HECUBA Mikki Lipsey THE WOMEN Corinne Christian,   Bonnie Crawford, Amanda De Forest,   Chelsie Thomas TALTHYBIUS Glenn McCumber THE MEN Adam Michaels, Barrie Wild POLYXENA Nelda Reyes ODYSSEUS Brian Guerrero AGAMEMNON Alan Hakim POLYMESTOR Jake Street ANDROMACHE Jessica Geffen HELEN Aiyana Cunningham MENELAUS Jake Street DIRECTOR'S ASSISTANT Elisabeth Harvey STAGE MANAGER Sarah Wright STAGE MANAGER'S ASSISTANT   Nathan Christ BOARD OPERATOR Lindsay Bernal HOUSE MANAGER Ann Singer ORGANIZATION Heather Lundy Kahl PUBLICITY Nathan Christ,   Heather Lundy Kahl, Alex Pasco,   Jessica Steele FUNDRAISING Heather Lundy Kahl,   Glenn McCumber COSTUMES Tony DeFrank GRAPHIC DESIGN Paper Radish LIGHTS Lindsay Bernal MASKS Tony Fuemmeler PROPS Kellee Boyer SCENE Russ Romas, Sue Romas back to top

Notes

Director's Notes

I believe that before there was war, there was story, and I believe that story succeeds war as well. Thousands of years ago, there was a war, and a story about that war, and another, and another. And for thousands of years, humans have been telling these stories while other wars have come and gone and been absorbed into them.

I was interested in producing Trojan Women from the inception of our company, and I was excited to direct the production. The story, as I remembered it, seemed as timely as it was timeless: a devastated people desperately working for life. But when I read Trojan Women, as sometimes happens with myth, the story in that form was not the story I remembered, and not the story I thought we needed to tell. I thought, "Not to worry; the story of the Trojan war is larger than any particular telling of it, or even of all the tellings together. I'll read Hecuba - same playwright, same setting; perhaps this is the story asking to be told." And with respect to this story, which has demanded to be told for a thousand years and more, I began to wonder: what do we owe to it, and what do we need from it?

When I read Hecuba, I realized that although Euripides tells us where we have been, the questions of our own time and place are not satisfactorily addressed within those he holds up for examination. So we embarked on a new framework to respond to our ancestors pointing to what they had made, a smoking, dead city, and asking, "What about that?"

***

The title of director can be misleading, for the show manifested here did not spring fully formed from my head. If you would see who made this piece of theatre, their names are in the playbill next to titles too narrow for what they have contributed. I am unutterably grateful to those who have carried this with me and who have lifted it off me when it has been too much for me to shoulder.

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Lunacy's Notes

On the last day of August, our team met here in the ballroom of the Masonic lodge to read the play aloud for the first time. All we had at that point was the team, the text, and the light streaming through the windows.

Every time live theatre is produced, it's a birth/death cycle that happens all in the space of a couple months. It starts with a blank slate, it's born on opening night, it lives, then dissolves again as the team goes their separate ways and we turn this theatre back into a ballroom. Anchored to place and time, live theatre can't be put on the shelf for future viewing. This is part of the magic.

The Women of Troy is Lunacy Stageworks' third production. In the wake of all we've learned in our first year, we bring to you this culmination of our friendship, conversation and experience: an original piece created almost entirely from the minds and imagination of the Lunacy company. Euripides was the seed. Together, in the writing, design, marketing, acting, construction and bookkeeping, from that seed we have grown something new. As we delve into the riches and chaos of our past, we give thanks for the abundance of the present and look forward to the beauty of the future.

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Playwright's Notes

A word on the text.

Euripides wrote two plays which share the same setting, characters and concerns: Trojan Women and Hecuba. They both take place after the sack of Troy. They both present a case study on the remaining captives, the women, and they both indict the senselessness of wartime suffering. Particularly, Trojan Women may be summed up in the words, "War sucks," while Hecuba focuses on the deconstruction of a single person: the queen of Troy. In a phrase, it's "How to change a queen to a dog in two days."

The story we wanted to tell is different again. Euripides was aware of absurdity, and his plays showcase that. At the same time, while he questions the superficial realities faced by the suffering innocent, the deeper realities, the most fundamental absurdities, remain subtext. My effort in this adaptation has been to draw that subtext to the surface and make plain what Euripides must have felt like a broken rib: deep inside, never breaking the surface, constricting everything but undiagnosed. I have tried to unearth the enduring elements of Euripides' work; I've also worked to retool it into a story whose themes are not only "universal," but immediately relevant to our own unique moment in the human story.

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Reviews

The Oregonian

The Women of Troy ambitiously blends two plays, with a few bumps. Recommended. If you missed Classical Greek Theatre of Oregon's production of Trojan Women, which closed last week, don't fret. The tragic female survivors of a war-destroyed city are the focus of another production, The Women of Troy, presented by Portland Ensemble Theatre Company in association with Lunacy Stageworks. This intriguingly ambitious, if occasionally rough, piece is an original adaptation not only of Euripides' Trojan Women but also of his Hecuba.

Put together by Elisabeth Harvey, one of Lunacy's co-directors, The Women of Troy combines two plays that may have been written as much as 15 years apart. With overlapping but slightly incongruous plots, both are set among the tents of the Trojan women prisoners as they wait to be split up and carried off as slaves to new homes in Greece.

In Trojan Woman, Hecuba, the defeated Trojan queen, endures one tragic loss after another. She laments the recent devastation of her city and slaughter of husband, Priam, at the play's start. Her agony is compounded when she learns of her daughter Polyxena's death, helplessly watches as daughter Cassandra and daughter-in-law Andromache are taken away by their new Greek masters, and finally suffers the torment of tending her murdered grandson's corpse. War is shown to be horrible, but the Greek overlords, in their failure to see the horror of their deeds, set their own tragic destinies in motion.

Hecuba focuses on the queen's loss of her son Polydorus and daughter Polyxena and her brutal vengeance against Polymestor for the murder of the former. In this savage act, Hecuba becomes like her oppressors - exemplifying how war dehumanizes victor and defeated alike.

Harvey's fusion of the two plays is surprisingly seamless. She develops a poetic idiom that allows for fluid back-and-forth movement, and she makes small changes in the story-lines as necessary to accommodate her amalgamation.

Most interesting is her transformation of Helen, who as the catalyst for the war comes off rather badly in Euripides' Trojan Women. Here Helen is much more sympathetic, even drawing the sympathy of the Trojan women chorus when Hecuba verbally abuses her late in the second act.

This adaptation's problem is that the revenge on Polymestor and its contribution to an ongoing cycle of violence is so powerfully drawn that the attack on a relatively innocent Helen seems anti-climactic. Harvey might be trying to do too much. By the tragedy's end, Hecuba's emotional and moral development become a bit tangled. Perhaps Euripides was right - the intensity and complexity of the material requires two separate plays.

Even so, director Glenn McCumber's gallant acting company does well with the challenging text. Members of the large cast, including a Greek chorus of four women, occasionally have difficulties measuring up to the classical style, but for the most part, the actors create clearly and thoughtfully defined characters.

As Hecuba, Mikki Lipsey ably conveys a broad range of emotions, smoothly manifesting the depth of the queen's sorrow, the fervor of her fierce hatred of her enemies, and the controlled restraint of her eloquent arguments against Polymestor and Helen.

Among the supporting roles, Aiyana Cunningham's madly ecstatic Cassandra, Nelda Reyes' passionately heroic Polyxena, Brian Guerrero's oh-so-wily Odysseus, and Jake Street's arrogantly deceitful Polymestor stand out.

Most of the actors, including the chorus, wear half-masks, and occasionally actors raise their masks. The logic prompting this doffing of masks isn't always clear; but at least in the case of the Greek characters, removing the mask seems to suggest a temporary but real sympathy with whomever the character is speaking.

Russ and Sue Romas' scenery evokes a sense of both the primitive and the ritualistic: a dirt floor, off-white drops in the background, two off-white tents in the mid-ground and several wooden stumps and a burnt-out campfire of rocks, ashes, and what looks like a large thigh bone in the foreground. This setting, as well as the production's artful lighting and costumes suggesting ancient Greece, work well to carry us into the world of this tragedy.

  - Richard Wattenberg

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Willamette Week

Elisabeth Harvey's adaptation of Euripides' Trojan Women and Hecuba for Lunacy Stageworks attempts to explore the depths of human suffering and the senselessness of war. In the rubble outside their defeated city of Troy, disempowered women reflect on what they have lost and await the future. Their queen, Hecuba, is at the heart of this squalor, but her tragedy gets a little boring. The actors remain masked for most of the performance, which nullifies an intimate venue's perk of noting the performers' facial expressions. It also inhibits them from genuinely becoming their roles. Hecuba's youngest daughter, Polyxena (Nelda Reyes), was the best part of the show, but she's offed pretty damn fast.

  - Sasha Ingber

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