The Trojan Women

From the moment that The Trojan Women, directed by Andrei Serban at La Mama, begins with the sounds of horns echoing from the foyer outside the theater—where the audience is initially gathered—into the hidden, darkened womb of the performance space itself, one realizes one is not in our own time any more.  

A crack into something ancient, something forgotten, has been opened. A memory is awakened: memory of what, we cannot be quite certain; and perhaps this is the point of genius around which this whole production has been organized. Its center of gravity doesn’t live in today or even in the world of Troy; it’s in our own hearts, and in what it means to be a human being.

Like the rest of the audience, I stood mesmerized as the Greek warriors, their canes of bamboo representing spears, penetrated the audience in the foyer in a phalanx, singing and chanting in Greek. From that instant on, the performance is deeply personal; one isn’t in New York or America. 

One is in Troy. Troy turns out to be all of us, everywhere, in all time.

The experience of the chanting, the pageantry, the presence of ethnic nationals from multiple countries including Kosovo, Cambodia and Guatemala, transcends any presumptions of a politically correct gesture to deliver a “world” performance. The multiple ethnicities and traditional textiles and garments, the presence of Asian and South American instruments and faces, blend together seamlessly. The drama isn’t just in the flesh and the blood, but already—from the start—in the bones of the matter.  Genuine.

Yet even at the start the marrow is also present. Andrei and his cast have tapped into something primeval here, something that reminded me of our trip to Lascaux earlier this year. Everything about the performance is drawn from roots that lie deep inside the soul: the textiles, the faces. The pageantry, the singing, the chanting, the lamentation of the women. 

This is how we used to be, the undertones reverberate: 

We cared.

We cared together.

My wife performed in this piece over 30 years ago when it was in its original form. Andrei remarked after the performance that back then, it was about Vietnam; now, it’s about #metoo. 

Yes, there is no doubt it was, and is, about those things, and in important ways. Perhaps the conceit of modern times, and the #metoo movement, however, is that our times can somehow own this issue —in the same way that we think we own everything else in our world.  The play reminds us that it has been forever there, and in timelessly important ways. There’s no denying the intelligence and emotional vitality that saturates the performance with this impression. Men have been involved in abusive relationships with the opposite sex for as long, it’s certain, as they have been involved with war… men, it seems, are perpetually bent on destruction. Hell is a town we build in our own shop and carry on our own shoulders. 

It’s all there. Yet the Trojan Women has more than enough muscle in it to rise beyond the obvious and do some heavy lifting that crosses over from the physical to the metaphysical. The play is also about mysteries that can’t be expressed with words. The fact that the whole performance is in Greek adds a powerful impetus. One’s ordinary intellectual mind has no choice but to take a back seat to events; it’s assigned a job it rarely undertakes in modern "entertainment.” It has to think. Without direct access to the words one expected to explain everything, one finds oneself experiencing everything through one's sensation – the physical presence, the movements of the actors, vibrations of the sounds—and one’s feelings.

It turns out, surprisingly, that what’s taking place becomes more important without the interference of one’s ordinary mind. Its meanings are wordlessly magnified. One finds oneself using parts to sense and to hear and to see; and one discovers, surprisingly, that these parts not only have powerful intellects of their own (whoever knew that?) but that they can in their own ways know even more than the ordinary intellectual mind, with all its glib answers, could ever know. 

Perhaps that sounds immaterial to the progress of the play; and perhaps you want me to tell you all about what happens, and how great the actors were or weren't. (They were.) But in a certain sense that’s hardly necessary. We already know that Troy was sacked, and the women were raped, murdered, or enslaved. That happens here, as well; but the way that the piece taps into our sense and feeling of ourselves brings home the fact that we’re all in Troy. It was there before we humans built it, and it’s still here in us now. 

Invasion, struggle, lamentation, enslavement: is this our legacy? Is this all we have to offer one another? 

The opening processional ends. Time surrenders itself. We enter the darkness: the womb of the theater, in which… perhaps… something that physically, viscerally speaks to this can be found. The audience is in a herd, standing as a crowd that witnesses. We’re penetrated by the warriors with their spears, shuffling, circulating, shoving us aside to make way for events. 

Cassandra appears, waving flames of warning. We are going to destroy one another.

But of course, no one is listening. Even the audience, presumably the wiser due to our exalted status as observers ex machina, can’t understand: her language, a language of prophecy and doom, is foreign to us. Perhaps, like the Greeks, even if we could understand her, we wouldn’t want to. We believe too much in destinies and damnations to allow them any alternative. 

The action unfolds, with the ritual washing and sacrifice of children, the chilling ululation of the mourners, the caging and humiliation of Helen—stripped and raped by a chimeric man-bear in the same way that Greek soldiers will soon strip and rape those selfsame females who persecute her. Over and over again, the audience, still standing, is pushed aside as the cages circulate. We are in the middle of it. 

Like so many have done through so many periods of history when atrocities are perpetrated,

We do nothing.

The doorway to something more ancient that our memories, already cracked, slowly yawns open wider into the abyss of irony and tragedy. We used to lament the dead, loudly, with the cries and anguish of both our human and our animal parts. We used to do it together, as a community. 

In fact, everything was done as a community: war, death, mourning. There were no political divisions here: in the struggle between tragedy and humanity, a stake used to be driven in the ground around which all could gather. Lamps were lit; even the children participated. Corpses were stretched out in simple shrouds, death allowed its place.

How very different than today. How very, very different.

   I wish I could say there were some answers here, but there aren’t. What there are are questions, reawakened, as though from some vast slumber of the soul. Where did we come from? Who are we? Where are we going to?

I left this piece emotionally moved, touched by something deeper than ordinary life. In my own investigations of meaning, the central question seems to revolve around what it means to be human. This piece of theater is a direct practical investigation of that question, accessible to everyone. 

There’s a moment, a powerful moment, at the end of the play after the murders are complete and death has had its way not just with the living victims but even with the corpses, where the women are bullied and herded as animals in chains.

 Suddenly the processional of anguish and confrontation stops. 

The herd of women, facing outwards in an almost—but not quite, because a quiet dignity suffuses it— pathetic circle, look directly into the eyes of their captors, the men, and a long moment of silence ensues.

They have to see each other. They must see each other—

as human beings.

In the face of death, disaster, and tragedy, a new respect is born here. What will come of it is unclear; but the ground floor of it is that there is no escaping the struggle and the suffering of our humanity. There’s a symbolic moment at the very end, perfectly executed, that binds the whole cast together in that action as they enter the hold of the ship that will take them away from Troy.

Let me be clear enough: one doesn’t like this play. It is a piece of genius. It’s brilliant. It’s disturbing, exhilarating, inspiring. But it isn’t there for one to like. 

To love, perhaps; but like real love, to be earned, one has to be willing to suffer the pain it inflicts.

For myself, I loved it. It’s a living thing that should be shown again, 

and again, 

and again.

May your heart be close to God, 

and God close to your heart.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.