Euripides wrote The Trojan Women nearly 2,500 years ago and based it on a war that had been fought many centuries earlier, the message to audiences is still relevant today, according to the Duke faculty member who translated a new version of the play for the production.
The Department of Theater Studies' production of The Trojan Women, currently running in Sheafer Theater, means to speak to audiences in a timely voice, said Peter Burian chair of classical studies, professor of comparative literatures and theater studies and dramaturg for the production. He and UNC-Chapel Hill professor Alan Shapiro translated the play for the production.
While the women of the ancient city of Troy are the characters in the play, the subject is war itself and the terrible consequences of war even for its survivors. "The overwhelming sorrows of the women of Troy, the brutalization of the world that follows Troy's fall, will still, if given a chance, tell us something we need to know about ourselves and the world we inhabit," Burian said.
Ellen Hemphill of the Department of Theater Studies faculty directs The Trojan Women. She said she was drawn to how the play underscores some of the unchanging aspects of war.
"Women and children are always the ultimate victims of war," Hemphill said. "They are not mentioned in statistics; they are not glorified as heroes; they are losers even if they were not on the battlefield ” they lose husbands, sons, fathers, and if they are in the battle zones, their homes, other children or their own lives. There is still that same brutality worldwide; women are raped and scattered and forced to move from their homes ” whether in Iraq or the Congo or elsewhere."
Hemphill is known for her use of movement and music and surprising settings to bring an audience closer to the emotional core of a production. To dramatize the timeless situation of war-torn women, she chose to take the "noble" women of Troy and put them in demeaning situations ” in circus acts, in circus costumes, in a burned out circus tent ” to show how their treatment as the spoils of war 'feels.'
"The relevance of Trojan Women to our own concerns is only increased by considering its immediate historical context," Burian said. "It was first performed in Athens in the spring of 415 B.C.E. A few months earlier, the Athenians, at the height of their imperial ambitions, had voted for a massive expedition to Sicily, the wealthy 'far west' of the Greek world; the great fleet was at that very moment being readied in Athens' harbor. And in the previous year, Athens had attacked the little island of Melos, which was guilty only of trying to remain neutral in the Peloponnesian War. When the Melians steadfastly refused to agree to Athenian demands, the fleet laid siege to their city; the islanders surrendered, and Athens razed the walls, killed all the men, and enslaved the women and children.
"Given this context, we can only marvel at Euripides' daring and wonder what the reaction of contemporary Athenians must have been to so bleak a vision of conquest," Burian added. "The Trojan Women dramatizes not the Greek victory, but Troy's fall, seen, with all her men gone, from the point of view of the women about to be sent into slavery. And at the center of it all is Hecuba, the old queen, on stage from beginning to end, absorbing blow after blow, loss after loss of everyone and everything she loves, of every remaining hope.
"What's Hecuba to us? She is the quintessential victim of the folly of war, who fights victimization with every means she has, until she has none left. She is every mother of a fallen soldier, a daughter raped, a child killed in cold blood. Yesterday, we saw Hecuba in the streets of Chile and Rwanda. We see her today in the streets of Baghdad and Mosul. When will we not have to see her again?"