Autumn Strom, Tatiana Duque, Jasmine Hopfe in After The Trojan Women, Common Ground Arts Society. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective Photography
By Liz Nicholls, .ca
The centrepiece of the stage is a gory altarpiece that looks a red tree upended, or maybe a giant artery wrenched out by its roots.
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Alison Yanota’s striking design for After The Trojan Women cuts to the heart of the matter, literally and figuratively. There’s never a wrap on war; there’s never a war to end all wars, as the world continues to demonstrate. And women have never stopped paying a heavy price — in grief and suffering and loss, as displaced survivors. “The men are back in the dark earth, the women remain.”
From the eternal topicality of Euripides’ great anti-war play The Trojan Women — performed first in 415 BEC in the aftermath of the Trojan War and adapted ever since — a pair of contemporary playwrights, Amena Shehab and Joanna Blundell, have taken their cue.
In their ambitious new play, After The Trojan Women, produced by Common Ground Arts Society, they find a continuity across time in the plight of women wrenched from their home by non-stop wars in the Middle East. Three contemporary Syrian women and three women of ancient Troy find themselves on the same shore, looking across towards Greece, destiny or fate depending on how you figure it.
The former are fleeing the upending violence and lethal chaos of their homeland, and stopped by the sea mid-narrative. The latter — Hecuba, her problematic seer daughter Cassandra, her daughter-in-law Andromache — are victims on the losing side of the Trojan War, soon to shipped off to slavery in Greece as the commodities, the spoils of war. Separated by thousands of years they may be, but both trios are mourning the human cost of war, the loss of husbands, children, home, prospects, hope.
There’s no shortage of adaptations of The Trojan Women, which hits home in every age. After The Trojan Women, though, is unusual in that it throws women of ancient Troy and contemporary Syrian women actually together on the stage, in conversation, in a liminal space, so they can compare notes, so to speak.
It’s a vivid theatrical idea, visually and verbally, but one that seems to require more than a little exposition, in two cadences of language that slide into each other. Bold, yes, and a context for remarkable gut-wrenching real-life stories from modern Syrian women. But straddling classical tragedy this way by counterpoint is all a bit beyond the dramatic resources and weight of the production directed by Liz Hobbs.
Tatiana Duque, Julia van Dam, Monica Gate in After the Trojan Women, Common Ground Arts Society. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective Photography
“We’re all in this together” doesn’t seem to quite rise to the occasion that’s been set up. The Syrians are only mildly surprised to be sharing a beach with Hecuba and Cassandra, and vice versa. But in addition to their annotations — “war brings nothing but mindless pitiless violence” — the Trojans have to explain to their modern sisters, and us, who they are and what their terrible prospects are, for one thing. There are periodic invocations by a moon goddess (impressively delivered by Tatiana Duque); there are moments where a sort of Chorus forms, to comment. As proposed by the goddess, the search for a happy story is pretty much doomed in this female company. “A happy story? Seriously?!” as one of the Syrian characters says.
It feels like a lengthy process, where repetition is the point. And, as it unrolls onstage, you can’t help longing for more about the haunting, and horrifying, stories of individual Syrian women, and less time spent on establishing the classical framework.
In any case, a cast of nine, variable in experience, do really commit to the show. And there are stand-out individual performances, Annette Loiselle’s for one, as Hecuba, a queenly mother figure whose family has been decimated by war. Kristi Hansen plays a hard-edged, sardonic female prison guard, a fascinating character who stands her ground when attacked by her Syrian sisters and crumbles when the truth about her fiancé is revealed. When she says “wanna hear a story?” we do … hers. And it’s a startling one.
After The Trojan Women, Common Ground Arts Society. Photo by Brianne Jang, BB Collective Photography.
Michelle Todd as a fierce, grieving mother, and Monica Gate as a mother whose daughter has vanished in a checkpoint incident create characters whose stories do eventually land, in the midst of the rather cumbersome theatrical complications.
All the characters get big moments, but their impact is reduced by scenes that seem to be there to re-establish what we already understand about the insight that war never goes away and what was true in 415 BEC remains tragically current now. “We tried to escape war, and we ended up in another one,” says Huriya (Todd).
Yanota’s lighting against a backdrop of translucent plastic drapery captures a disturbing sense of elusive reality — internal organs in motion? — behind the scenes. Rebecca Cypher’s costumes and Ashley Weckesser’s sound score are there to reinforce the sense of time as an echo chamber where time gathers but doesn’t move forward.
The stories of survival against the odds, and unthinkable human losses suffered by women: these are the worthy heart of After The Trojan Women. “I never wanted to leave home,” says one of the Syrian characters. And look what happened. This is a country populated by immigrants and refugees who know something about the world that we should need to know. “Ordinary life is a privilege.”
REVIEW
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: through Feb. 8
Tickets: tickets.fringetheatre.ca
talked to co-playwright Amena Shehab, a refugee herself, in this preview.
