THE TROJAN WOMEN
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The Chicago Actors Ensemble has chosen to bracket Euripides’ play with a rather peculiar beginning and ending, which suggests a certain inconsistency or incompleteness of interpretation. This production opens, in a dense haze of dry-ice fog, with a modernized prologue that sets the scene in a hip, irreverent tone. And at the end, after the final scene of hopelessness and devastation has been played out, the actors skip back onstage for their curtain call grinning from ear to ear as if they have just performed Oklahoma! In between, they stage The Trojan Women as one long, desperate wail interspersed with unconventional movement and line readings, an indication that perhaps Chicago Actors Ensemble could not decide between a traditional interpretation and a more offbeat contemporary one.
In Mary Derbyshire’s nihilistic adaptation, there are no gods. The characters of Athena and Poseidon have been eliminated, and Poseidon’s prologue has been reworked into a rhythmically bankrupt rap number that offers such cringe-inspiring lyrics as “Poseidon was pissed.” All the male characters have also been eliminated, including Menelaus, whose duplicitous and malleable character provides a fair amount of the intrigue in the original text.
