After the fall

Helen (Aimee Rose Ranger) faces down the Trojan Women.

To paraphrase Browning, a theatre's reach should exceed its grasp - so there's no shame, I think, in Whistler in the Dark's earnest, well-intentioned, but rather flat Trojan Women, which runs through this weekend at the Factory Theatre.  Indeed, those rare souls starved for a shot of Greek drama done Old School may want to seek out this depiction of the terrible plight of the survivors of Troy, even if it doesn't quite gel as tragedy; for it's intelligent and clearly spoken, and unadorned by intrusive concepts (well, mostly); and thus something of the blunt horror of war does come over from Euripides' spare, unsparing text (here in a solid, if not quite inspired, new version by Francis Blessington).

More experienced viewers, however, may sense that even when innocent blood is being spilled offstage, there's little blood on the floor, as it were, in this pleasingly direct, but rarely raw, rendering. Indeed, this production is about as far from the over-designed, overheated posturing of the last Euripides we saw in town (ASP's Medea) as you can get.  Here, under the direction of Benjamin Evett (himself late of ASP), the actors never strike arty poses, and don't have to compete with the lighting design, either: the set is spare, perhaps vaguely Middle-Eastern - it's mostly cushions on crates, around a central tent (basically what you could carry with you on a battle plain), and the audience is pulled right up into the action.  This may be wrong, actually, for Greek drama, which depends on distance for some of its effects - but at least it keeps the focus on the acting.

But ah, there's the rub - the acting here is thoughtful but uneven, or rather it lacks the maturity that such a stark rendering of The Trojan Women requires.  The pain of experience - much less trauma - is hard to conjure at close quarters unless you've lived through it yourself, and as is sometimes the case at Whistler, there's a whisper of the undergraduate theatre major in the air of this production, with young people straining to convey a sense of devastation that's alien to their own lives.

This issue is further complicated by director Evett's one misstep into "concept:" he has given all the major female roles but one (Hecuba) to a single actress, Aimee Rose Ranger.  Now Ms. Ranger is a very talented and beautiful performer, with considerable resources at her command - but let's just say playing Athena, Cassandra, Andromache and Helen in a single production might daunt even Meryl Streep.  What's more, Evett's conceptual gesture doesn't give us much to chew on beyond a kind of blunt "I'm Every Woman!" statement that we'd expect more from the likes of Helen Reddy or Whitney Houston than Euripides.

Ah, Euripides; let's talk about him a minute.  In his day this playwright played second fiddle to Sophocles and Aeschylus, but his work eventually became far more influential than theirs; indeed, Euripides is probably the source of the hybrid mode that flowered as "tragedy" in Shakespeare and elsewhere.   What's more, in his work women come into their own for the first time in the history of the stage (even if they were originally played by men). Indeed, Euripides, like Strindberg and many other male writers, is obviously obsessed with women, and in a peculiarly multi-valent way (he has been called "a misogynist feminist," which comes pretty close to nailing what one senses of his psychological affect).

The Trojan Women almost schematizes this contradiction - through his portraits of these refugees, Euripides boldly sketches the helplessness of women in the Greek state - particularly when subject to the cruelties of war; and what's more, he creates one of the first great galleries of feminine types, from the noble mother to the amoral temptress.  Yet the playwright also points the finger: his women should beware women, for they weep at the whim of Athena (who fought for the Greeks, even if at the moment they've pissed her off), and the source of all their suffering is the insufferable Helen, whose beauty burnt the topless towers of their city, but whom Euripides hints (and Homer confirms) will get off scot-free, as her beauty counts as the baseline for what attracts men (and hence trouble of all sorts) to women in the first place.

You can sense in this subtext what probably tempted Evett to his stunt casting; but in simple dramatic terms - judging from other productions I've seen - variety is the spice of Trojan Women - indeed, its climax (Helen's infuriating self-defense) burns brightest before her victims' seething hatred (which is hard to pull off when the same actress is playing almost all the roles!).  As Hecuba, Rosalind Thomas-Clark does her best to keep those home fires burning - and elsewhere she's a welcome source of believable age and experience - but there's a limit to what she can do.  Luckily Ranger is at her strongest as Helen (although I prefer a more vulpine reading of the role), and she makes an adequate Athena.  It's at the extremes of Euripides' feminine spectrum that she falters; Cassandra has already basically been driven mad by her powers of foresight, of course, but Andromache, too, should be pushed to the edge of a different derangement when the Greeks ruthlessly decide to murder her son (so he will never grow up to avenge Hector, his father - Euripides has few peers in the depiction of the brutal calculations of war).  But alas, at this point in her career, Ranger can't quite deliver either extreme.

There are other moments to savor in the production - Nathaniel Gundy gives Menelaus a crude spark, for instance; but the chorus (whose role is always a tricky proposition) feels underdeveloped, and frankly the pace is never, shall we say, too swift.  Chris Larson has contributed an intriguing sound design, however, and Emily Woods Hogue's costumes and PJ Strachman's lighting (as ever) are apt.  The general thoughtfulness of the artistic team probably makes this a worthwhile introduction to Euripides; but it's hardly the last word on either this playwright or his Women.

Back to The Bacchae

"Euripides, I'll rippa dose!" Local girls get ready to tear some human flesh in The Bacchae.

To me, Greek tragedy always feels a bit like semaphore, transmitted across an ocean of time and space. We get the harrowing gist of the communication, but the fullness of the original experience - even its true form - remains elusive; we have to construct much of its theatrical context from scraps and hints and academic guesswork. Even the names of the characters remain open to debate.

But even if we were to identify its format precisely, Greek drama would still present a unique problem in terms of accessibility. Indeed, even to call it "drama" is something of a misnomer, because we've come to realize it's an elaborate synthesis of drama with something like opera and something like dance - all crossed with a Mass. We don't have a form like that. So any attempt to replicate it accurately would underline its strangeness to our sensibility, when it seemed like the most natural thing in the world to the Greeks.

Still, even as semaphore, these plays have enormous power, not because they limn "tragic flaws" but because they evoke so brutally the contradictions of human experience. Oedipus, for instance, tells us bluntly that we are unknowing conspirators in our own downfalls - and that the highest among us are actually guilty of the greatest sins. Euripides's The Bacchae has a similarly paradoxical edge: it both warns the ego against suppression of the id, while revealing just how horrifyingly far the id can go if it isn't contained.

To get at these ancient truths in the absence of the form that embodied them, most modern interpreters have settled on a set of conventions which the Whistler in the Dark production at the BCA largely follows, even if the group is presenting a new translation, by Francis Blessington. The design is simple but evocative; the movement modern-dance-y, accompanied by percussion (here inspired by Steve Reich's "Drumming," from Boston Ballet's recent "Black and White;" amusingly enough, my review is what drew director Meg Taintor to that ballet). The god Dionysos is played by each of the actors in turn, who make the transition by donning a golden mask - a nice genuflection to the idea that, like some pagan antecedent of the Holy Spirit, the god of orgiastic abandon can "descend" upon any one of his followers and possess them.

Unfortunately, the production falls, then rises in pretty much the same reverse arc that every production I've ever seen has: the opening evocations of the feminine bacchanals plaguing Thebes are blurry and loud, without being particularly unsettling (an understandable feminist bias often leads productions, I think, to sympathize too far with the madness of the bacchantes). But once the inexperienced Pentheus makes his fateful decision to join the crazed celebrants in female disguise, the proceedings are suddenly gripping, and often intensely so. This despite the fact that as Pentheus, young actor Phil Crumrine lacks the technique to suggest the internal conflict driving his repression of the irrational (and the feminine).

But here Euripides comes to Whistler's rescue: shifting from that problematic nexus of dance and song, the playwright delivers pithy scenes of almost unbelievable horror - including a mother who rends her own son limb from limb - which the new translation gives fresh life (it was hard for me to judge its earlier scenes due to all the drumming and shouting). And actors Curt Klump and Jennifer O'Connor (both at left) do justice to this intense material - particularly moving was O'Connor's sudden realization that she was toying with her own son's severed head (here that golden mask again, only this time drenched in blood). In O'Connor's quiet pathos, suddenly the deep meaning of this ancient semaphore came all too clear.