When Gilbert Murray translated The Trojan Women into rhyming verse, he wrote in his note that the play was “only the crying of one of the great wrongs of the earth into music, and made beautiful by ‘the most tragic of the poets.’” Euripides poetry, ancient and profound, has hung in the air since its original writing, clinging to the breath of the mythical characters he painted. His piece told pieces of stories that legend had already taught his peers in a series of harrowing episodes pouring grief and rage and fearful sorrow over the audience in the voices of lamenting figures on the stage, interposed with choral odes that alternately lulled the audience with beautiful patterns and rhythms or chastised them with aggressively vivid language.
This play owes its life to Euripides, and to that poetic translation itself, but it is not that play alone. This is something new, made new with pursuing the opportunities that he laid in his original work. It owes itself to lessons learned from Shakespeare, learned in advocacy work, in a lifetime of love for the Trojan War mythos and studying Greek mythology itself, and to inspiration even drawn from the work of the artists on this stage who inspired additions and changes to it during its development. When Euripides allowed a young soldier to return to the stage and admit vulnerably that the suffering of the woman he had so admired a scene earlier and had now delivered to a terrible fate had “charmed tears” into his eyes, when he placed empathy for the women of fallen Troy, and learning in the face of suffering caused by war in the heart and words of a footsoldier messenger, he opened the door to this version of this story. In this world, we expand upon what he created. The heroes or monsters of legend that he referenced in his text (Odysseus, Agamemnon) join us on the stage. The solitary laments at times become dialogue as the women in this version confront their captors. The maligned Helen of Troy speaks her truth. A full ensemble inhabits the world, not limited by Athenian conventions. And the play finds an axis on which to turn, and a plot to follow beyond mourning the city and its dead, in the deepening of the tale of a doomed princess- a widow and young mother living in fear of the torments and shame awaiting her in slavery- and the young man who will witness her resilience, courage, and the power of her love and be forever changed by it. But not in time to alter the tragedy that awaits.
It’s essential in tragedy that characters participate in their own downfall. These characters do. They have agency in the face of terrible events, and in their desperation or fear or anger they make choices that accelerate or deepen their own suffering, as all humans do. It's essential we view them as the personal, not statistics. One student in this show wrote me a letter about encountering violence as statistics, versus encountering in this play the murder of one child speaking for thousands, the suffering of one woman speaking for thousands, and its impact on him. He wrote about how understanding sacrificial love requires going on a transformational journey and allowing himself to be changed by the work. Murray also wrote of The Trojan Women that it is “something more than art. It is a prophecy, a bearing of witness. And the prophet, bound to deliver his message, walks outside the regular ways of the artist.” It was with that clarion call that I dove into the task of creating something that I believe, were Euripides with us today, he would have supported- an expansion of his episodes into a cohesive and daunting story that demands of its audience and its characters that they do more after the lights dim than bear witness to suffering.
