After The Trojan Women, Common Ground Arts Society. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective Photography.
By Liz Nicholls, .ca
There is a certain inevitability that theatre artist Amena Shehab would find inspiration from Greek tragedy in creating (with Joanna Blundell) her first and “very personal” play. After The Trojan Women premieres Saturday at the Backstage Theatre, in a Liz Hobbs production under the Common Ground Arts Society flag.
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In so many ways The Trojan Women, Euripides’ tragedy of 415 BCE, one of the theatre repertoire’s most powerful explorations of war, its aftermath, and the heavy price paid by women, tells a harrowing story of displacement and migration that speaks to her own. Shehab’s is the story of a refugee fleeing the perpetual war zone that is the Middle East, on the move country to country, leaving from Qatar and finding a destination here in 2013, with her three children, ages 15, 12 and 3 1/2 at the time.
playwright Amena Shehab. Photo supplied.
As a Palestinian born and raised in a Syrian refugee camp, Shehab couldn’t help but be struck by the uncanny geography of the Euripides tragedy — and the image of the enslaved women of the vanquished Troy across the sea from Greece, home of the victors and at their mercy. Izmir, on the Turkish coast — a name carved into the collective consciousness in 2015 news stories of millions of dangerous Mediterranean crossings towards Greece — is not far from ancient Troy.
“Always people leaving the shore, the same shore, with the same destiny. Three thousand years of fleeing from war,” as Shehab puts it. She’s thinking of the people she knows, her own relatives, desperate on the shores of Turkey, terrified but hopeful “trusting the sea more than the land. And when the the sea, in a boat, is more stable than the land, well….”
Stephanie Bassala in After The Trojan Women, Common Ground Arts Society. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective Photography.
Is human history one long, eternal war? Shehab is inclined to think so. “It never goes away. Ever. Ever. Ever. Death never stops.” She says “the characters we chose are fictional. But the stories, blended, are real,” says Shehab of After The Trojan Women, in which a trio of modern Syrian women and the women of Troy — Hecuba, Cassandra, Andromache — are fleeing war and occupy the same shoreline, across time. “We’re talking about women’s suffering, children’s suffering, the human stories…. It’s not a news story or a documentary; it’s the human story that makes (the Euripides tragedy) live for three thousand years….”
“It’s women who pay the price for war, and it’s a very expensive one.” It’s the point Euripides made all those centuries ago. Shehab cites a telling line from her play. “Now the men are back in the dark earth and the women remain.”
And the Middle East, where east, west, north and south intersect is “a messy kitchen,” as Shehab puts it. “Many people cooking meals, and boiling, and everyone involved.” It’s an axis of money and power and the men who “take over, rule everything, make the rules….”
Autumn Strom, Tatiana Duque, Jasmine Hopfe in After The Trojan Women, Common Ground Arts Society. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective Photography
“What’s home?” There’s a question that doesn’t have one answer in Shehab’s experience. “I lived in many countries. And I try to make a home where I go, to survive and have peace where I go, even in small places, even an office…. Home for me is a concept not walls.”
It’s a lesson Shehab learned as the youngest of 10 children in a Palestinian family that’s been constantly uprooted by war since 1948. “My mother lost both parents and a brother at 12, and lived through five wars…. Nothing is impossible. As women we learn how to survive. Life will never be easy. My mother would say if your heart falls down, pick it up and run. Don’t ever give up…. If you don’t run and do something, you will lose.”
Shehab studied classical theatre (with a specialty in theatre criticism!) in Damascus and worked as a TV producer before returning to her first love, the stage. She met her British writing partner Blundell, a journalist for Al Jazeera English at the time, when they were both living in an international compound in Qatar, with people from around the world. They’ve never lost touch.
“When I left home I tried to close the doors behind me,” says Shehab, who’s friendly, warm, and intense in conversation. “But the doors are heavy.” And I couldn’t really close them.” There was a human story to be told. As Horeya, one of the Syrian women, says, “I want my story to be told.”
How does Canada figure in her story? Shehab smiles, and remembers her younger self, a Grade 7 girl, in Al Yarmouth refugee camp, where Canadians had assisted in building the first real school there, “with real classrooms, not an old house….”
“The Canadian flag was there. And a Canadian soldier arrived from the embassy — clean clothes, beautiful! — for the launch of the school. We had a translator and I was the host, and read a poem. The guy took my hand and said ‘thank you’. And I said ‘one day I will go to Canada’. And he said ‘you’ll need a jacket!’.”
In Canada Shehab and her kids have found a home. “I’m happy where I am!” she says. You know if you’ve prevailed, she thinks, “if your kids come out of the school smiling.” Hers do. “We did this together,” she says of becoming Canadian en famille, adapting to a new language, new weather, new customs, new food, new air. “I jump off the cliff: I start learning English; I start to act.” She laughs, “I’m brave and I’m crazy. I don’t look; I just jump.”
Edmonton audiences saw her in the Maggie Tree production of Nine Parts of Desire in 2017. Since then, she’s appeared onstage regularly, including Dave Horak’s production of E-Day, and a solo show, Hagar: War Mother, that played the Edmonton Fringe in 2023, and the Edinburgh Fringe in 2024. She’s the coordinator of The Shoe Project, a Workshop West/ SkirtsAfire initiative to empower newcomer women to tell their stories.
And now Shehab is a playwright with a story to tell. In 2019, Blundell came to Edmonton and “we spent three weeks in my basement” working to make a play. What followed, after the forced hiatus of the pandemic, were workshops in London and in Toronto. “And now our baby is ready to see the light,” Shehab beams.
Tatiana Duque, Julia van Dam, Monica Gate in After the Trojan Women, Common Ground Arts Society. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective Photography
The script may be in its ninth draft. “The structure has changed,” says Shehab, who writes in Arabic and then translates. “But the story, never.” Hobbs’s production isn’t a small undertaking by the standards of indie theatre: nine actors, including six characters, with a Greek chorus of three. “The chorus is the voice of the people.”
“You can destroy a city. But a story lives forever.” That’s Shehab’s mantra. “I don’t believe in messages. I believe in feelings and stories, and sharing. I can’t change the world. But I can tell the story.”
PREVIEW
After The Trojan Women
Theatre: Common Ground Arts Society
Written by: Amena Shehab and Joanna Blundell
Directed by: Liz Hobbs
Starring: Tatiana Duque, Michelle Todd, Monica Gate, Kristi Hansen, Annette Loiselle, Julia van Dam, Stephanie Bessala, Autumn Strom, Jasmine Hopfe
Where: Backstage Theatre, Fringe Arts Barns, 10330 84 Ave.
Running: Saturday through Feb. 8
Tickets: tickets.fringetheatre.ca
