“The Trojan Women” is an immersive, gruesome representation of the aftermath of the Trojan War, of the atrocities women faced in 540 B.C., and what they still face.
“It’s so timeless and important,” said third-year English and theatre student Jamie Boller, who plays Hecuba in the production. “We think we’re so much more advanced than Ancient Greece, but these atrocities are still happening and will still happen.”
This ageless Greek tragedy by playwright Euripides and translated by Nicholas Rudall tells the tale of one miserable event piled on top of the next and how the human soul internally and outwardly grieves when hope seems almost obsolete. Audience members follow the unraveling of the women of Troy after their city has been destroyed, members of their family have been brutally slaughtered (and they’ve been given the explicit details), and they don't know what lies ahead.
War can cripple the spirit in multiple different forms — Hecuba is petrified by the news that she will be sold as a slave to Greek General Odysseus, while her cursed daughter Cassandra, who has been driven mad, is ghastly ecstatic about becoming General Agamemnon's concubine having forseen her own death soon after.
“Some themes are the resilience of the human spirit, how human beings manage grief, how it manifests itself, how we survive in the face of war and great tragedy and violence,” Boller said. “I think these women have such a strength.”
At the play's opening, audience members are seated in a room behind the stage where they listen to Athena and Poseidon discussing how to reprimand the Greek armies as a watchman paces back and forth keeping an eye on the audience, making audiences members feel like prisoners as well.
Eventually, audience members file out to their seats where the cast is sleeping inches away sleeping or folding blankets in complete desolation. The audience is thrown into the center of the action, knocking down the barrier between actor and audience member and allowing the play's grief to be felt more viscerally.
Director and fourth-year theatre student Kelsea Woods had looked to explore and implement this immersive style of theatre since her sophomore year. Last summer, Woods took a few workshops in London with an immersive theatre company — now, she's trying to translate what she learned into “The Trojan Women.”
“It’s something different. There’s excitement, there’s danger, there’s a community of people coming together despite their world falling down around them, and it’s really a testament of what it is like to go through anything and to know what it feels like to be part of a great community,” Woods said. “Really, it’s a celebration about being human.”
For cast members and the director alike, communicating the travesties and war crimes committed against women were extremely important to the creative process. The cast tried to replicate the specific emotion of being “left” and not knowing what to expect next. The cast and crew also looked to women in today's Syria as current models of affected women to discuss the physical and emotional trauma rape brings. They came up with real world situations and analyzed what could actually happen to them in these given circumstances.
“This play is all about the enemy — this play is all about the Trojans who were the enemy at the time, so think about the people who are supposedly our enemies in war,” Boller said. “Remember that they’re humans and innocent people are going to suffer from your political agenda.”