Arts Listings

Here is the end of meaning; here is loss beyond comprehension.” A former queen—only the day before, queen of a great city—finds herself and her entourage of young women captives after their home has been overwhelmed by stealth, burned and demolished. Before they are taken away to a new life as slaves, as chattel in a foreign land, there are confrontations with other women that would seem to define, or refine, the terms of their grievous situation.  

Or are they only further twists and turns to a widening vortex of hopelessness that swallows up any personal understanding or expression? 

Aurora Theatre Co. is staging Ellen McLaughlin’s adaptation of Euripides’ tragedy, The Trojan Women, directed by Barbara Oliver, company cofounder, who also directed McLaughlin’s version of Aeschyus’ The Persians for Aurora a few years back.  

The cast of a dozen, who play the royal captives, a great beauty seemingly set free, a soldier and a god, are gathered on John Iacovelli’s set, strangely reminiscent of the Vaillancourt Fountain on San Francisco’s Embarcadero, a sprawling urban wreakage of chutes or passages that echo the outcries around them. 

Foremost among the forlorn bunch waiting to go into exile is Hecuba, played by Carla Spindt, one of the Bay Area’s finest actors, at her best in the head-on scenes with a daughter and two daughters-in-law: mad prophetess Cassandra (Sarah Nealis); brave Andromache (Emilie Talbot), Hector’s widow and mother of an infant prince; and the cause of the war, Helen (Nora el Samahy) in furs and designer sunglasses, ready to leave with her Greek husband for home after 10 years in Troy. 

The scenes revolve in mood and (not just speaking musically) attack. Cassandra is hysterically exultant, yet it is only when she approaches the others, telling them their fates in a reasonable tone, that they draw back. She calls the Trojan captives and dead happier than the Greeks, who will return home after a decade fighting as strangers to their dearest.  

In a hot debate that ends with her hazing, Helen claims she is as much at the mercy of the men who have claimed her as the new captives now are. Adventuress or canny survivor? “No scream of pain ever moved you.” Hecuba scoffs at her claims and taunts that her abandoned Greek husband will now dispose of her. “You think he will kill me? After ten years of fighting for me?” Helen shoots back. 

Andromache, the admired widow, expresses her guilt and her anger over the lost hero, her husband: “I envy him. The dead ask too much of us.” She will be the first to walk to the Greek ships, after her child is taken from her by a sympathetic but implacable Greek soldier (Matthew Purdon), tough and nice cop in one. 

“I am ... the mother of all confused and lost. It will be up to me to make order of this chaos.” Hecuba’s lines prove true of her role in Euripides’ play as well.  

Called “the most tragic of the poets” by Aristotle, Euripides ransacked the still new form of tragedy to find resonances, dissonances, contradictions and parodies—even burlesques—that would go beyond metaphor, beyond the symbolism of mythic figures to touch the deepest ambiguities of the human condition. 

The Aurora program refers to his psychological dramaturgy—the cliche since post-Romantic “well-wrought” plays became the stock-in-trade for a century of theater and film aimed at the middle class. In France, birthplace of that form, Parnassian poet Lecomte De Lisle translated Euripides in clear, resonant versions that have no parallel in English. 

As with the grand lines of Aeschylus’ Persians, Ellen McLaughlin at many points fulfills what poets like Witter Bynner (who translated Euripides at Isadora Duncan’s behest) have striven for: to “make it new,” in the words of Ezra Pound, who tried his hand at Sophocles, while his old friend H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) rendered one play and many choruses of Euripides, himself a poet of deliberate anachronisms. 

Side by side with fresh, perceptive lines that open up what the tragedian saw to us, 2,500 years later, there are the many famous rhetorical lines, those that (ironically) helped bring us more of Euripides, whole plays and fragments, than of both Aescylus and Sophocles, preserved for study by students of rhetoric, lawyers and other public speakers.  

The translator, director and actors all seem tentative at best with these passages. The best moments are in Helen’s argument with Hecuba, Andromache’s lament, the Greek soldier’s exhortations—all pretty straightforward. Like a baroque or modern dramatist, though, Euripides found a way outside of dialogue with these ambiguous statements, big (and questionable) truisms. Nobody seems to know, dramaturgically, what to do with them. 

In close dialogue, argument or some of the choral passages (choreographed by MaryBeth Cavanaugh), the Aurora production illuminates the awesome tragedy of the defeated for another audience of “the victors,” as it was in Euripides’ time. The other, more radical theatricalities of the tragedian get muffled or lost.  

Introducing the play as Poseidon, walking the ruined streets of “the only city I loved” and urging the captive women to sleep happily, is another fine actor, Julian Lopez-Morillas, though awkwardly costumed on yachting whites and braid. 

“I dreamed of a city ... my home,” intones Hecuba. “To the ships. It’s over!” barks the soldier with the sound of what’s left of Troy tumbling down.  

There’s really no conclusion, just departure from the scene. As at the end of other tragedies by this contradictory poet, as that other, modern poet and prophet of a new theater, Artaud, put it when claiming Euripides as predecessor: “We just don’t know where we are.” 

TROJAN WOMEN 

Through May 11 at the Aurora Theatre, 2081 Addison St. 843-4822. www.auroratheatre.org.