As their last show of Winter Quarter 2018, the DU Department of Theatre presented Euripides’s “Trojan Women,” directed by Allison Watrous, two weekends in a row, showcasing the talents of the department by means of a dark, violent and captivating drama.
“Trojan Women,” at its most basic, tells the story of the aftermath of the Greek taking of the city of Troy. Audiences accompany Hecuba (Annaleisa Friednash), former Queen of Troy, and other women as they cope with the rubble and squalor of their beloved home of Troy. The women have had their hair hacked off, their husbands killed, their children murdered and their freedom taken by men like Menelaus (Isaiah Adams), Talthybius (Jack Trembath) and the rest of the Greek soldiers. Humanity, war, womanhood, family and sacrifice are all dealt with against a stunning and hazy background set meant to be the ruins of beloved Troy.
The play was unsurprisingly well-performed. Each member of the 15 person cast embraced his or her role, and audiences could not help but become emotionally invested in the story. Standouts included Friednash, Grady Hicks as Andromache, Lois Shih as Helen and Isis Usborne as Cassandra, though the stoic violence of the men and the bone-chilling screams of the other women were just as effective and captivating. Long monologues—each of which was a feat of memorization—carried the show, along with careful and pained body movements, to create an unsettlingly real vision of death and destruction in Troy.
Off-stage participants in this show should not be ignored, either. The artistic and production teams clearly worked tirelessly to create lighting, sound and effects that made the play feel cohesive and real.
All this said, “Trojan Women” itself seemed like a strange choice for a production. It is, in a way, characteristic of the issue that the DU Department of Theatre sometimes faces: superb student actors do their best to succeed in performing a play that is, at its core, just sub-par. The show feels slightly displaced in time, due to the contrast of long gowns of ancient times and full modern-looking military uniforms with guns. The show is also incredibly dialogue-heavy, so it feels like one monologue after another. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but coupled with the archaic language of Euripides and the necessity of historical background knowledge in mythology and ancient times, focus and understanding occasionally wavered. The talented actors managed to pull viewers back in when this happened, but this and the darkness of the actual plot made the show a bit exhausting to watch.
As a whole, however, “Trojan Women” was an excellent production. It’s clear that nearly everyone in the department played a role in creating the show, and viewers left the Byron Theater a bit shaken—especially by the striking ending in which Hecuba lights herself and her dead grandson on fire—but thoroughly impressed.
The DU Department of Theatre is already hard at work for productions next quarter, including a staged reading of “12 Angry Men” and two cycles of the Senior Capstone Festival.
