Announcing the Trojan Women Cast and Artistic Staff:

Funded in part through Meet The Composer's MetLife Creative Connections program.

Review: Director Elizabeth Huffman offers engaging 'Trojan Women'

by Richard Wattenberg, Special to The Oregonian

Sunday September 13, 2009, 12:50 PM

      Even though the Classical Greek Theatre of Oregon's artistic director of 16 years, Keith Scales, has moved to Eureka Springs, Ark., where he has assumed the position of artistic director of Shakespeare in the Ozarks, the company has not missed a beat.  Under the watchful eye of guest director Elizabeth Huffman, the company offers a thoughtful and engaging production of Euripides' classic tragedy "Trojan Women."

First performed more than 2,400 years ago, Euripides' play remains a powerful statement against war, but not because blood and guts are relentlessly splattered across our field of vision as in many contemporary war films. Euripides turns his attention to the victims of a war just concluded. While he reminds us of the danger confronting victors, in this case the Greeks, who push their thirst for vengeance too far, he focuses primarily on the suffering of the women and children of the vanquished city-state, Troy.  Certainly the shattering sense of loss and deep displacement experienced by the newly widowed queen, Hecuba, and the other surviving Trojan women is not unknown to women living in more contemporary war zones. Similar tragedies have played out in Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Darfur and countless other locations in the last 20 years. 

Productions of this play can call attention to the unchanging horror of war by utilizing costumes and scenery that suggest such recent conflicts, but this production eschews this kind of obvious attempt at connection.  The creative sets and costumes, designed by Torie Van Horne and Sarah Gahagan, respectively, set the action in an imaginatively envisioned archaic-Greek-looking world. The production's visual style, as well as occasional Greek-sounding textual interpolations that take on a kind of primitive rhythmic quality, may distance the play from the experience of a contemporary audience. Still, Huffman's skillful acting company vividly communicates the underlying emotional truths of the script, which in the Scales translation utilized here is accessible and poetically resonant.

Vana O'Brien's Hecuba has the earthy, unabashed strength of a survivor. Confronted with horror after horror -- the murder of her husband before her eyes, the loss of child after child, and finally the loss of her innocent grandson -- she may occasionally stagger under the blows and fall to her knees with a piercing scream, but she quickly rises again.  With her deep raspy voice she challenges her enemies in debate and scoffs at their arrogance, and in the end she confidently, if not hopefully, leads her fellow Trojan women into slavery.

The other women characters are equally well-defined: ileana herrin gives Hecuba's daughter, the distraught prophetess Cassandra, a frenzied, ecstatic energy as she dodges about the auditorium and stage, but also portrays the more gentle center to this character.  As Andromache, Jamie M. Rea captures the troubled and deeply felt pain of a wife forced to turn her back on the memory of her husband and a mother forced to watch her son dragged away to his death. Lalanya Cameron is also strong as Helen, the source of the war -- revealing the character's superficial heartlessness without slipping into parody. As the ever-present Greek messenger and emissary Talthybios, Doren Elias skillfully conveys intimidating authority without losing a sense of compassion. 

 A five-woman chorus singing its lines to Susan Hurley's often melancholic but appropriate original music -- music which also occasionally underscores actors' scenes -- supports the production's almost overwhelmingly seamless tone of lamentation.

 Worth noting is how this production deals with the question of whether the actors performing in classical Greek plays should be masked, as were the original performers. The answer offered here is an intriguing combination of face makeup and masks. The chorus members and most of the major characters apply fanciful makeup to their faces and wear masks on the back of their heads. Gahagan's masks are artful sculptures in their own right -- each conveying a hauntingly anonymous expression of sorrow. The effect gained from the masks when actors face away from the audience is often disturbingly evocative, but one might ask whether the actors could not have achieved similar effects with their own suggestively painted faces.

However one might finally answer this question, there is no doubt that this production abounds in artful creativity.

Richard Wattenberg, Special to The Oregonian