ARTicles 2009: And the Myth Goes On

Eugene O’Neill updated the myth of Orestes to the American Civil War with Mourning Becomes Electra. Tennessee Williams dropped Orpheus Descending into the sweltering heat of a small Southern town. Martha Graham, grande dame of modern dance, used Greek myths to explore contemporary feminist conflicts. Richard Schechner’s Dionysus in 69, a counterculture war cry, turned the ambiguous god into a sadistic hippie. Each generation of American artists returns to the Greek myths to explore contemporary sites of cultural anxiety. In the mid-nineties, troubled by the war in Bosnia and the flood of refugees, Ellen McLaughlin turned to Euripides’ The Trojan Women. In the women of ancient Troy, she saw the women of Serbia and Croatia fleeing the chaos of genocide. McLaughlin created a new text from Euripides’ play. Her streamlined version was performed not by actors, but by refugees, in staged readings at the Classic Stage Company in New York. Each role was triple cast: Serbs, Croatians, Albanians—men and women from every side of the conflict were represented in each character. No villains remained, only the survivors. Uniting all factions, McLaughlin emphasized losses on all sides. Like the Trojans, these refugees no longer had a country, a city, a family. McLaughlin has since adapted eleven Greek tragedies, including Ajax in Iraq, an adaptation of Sophocles’ Ajax which she created in collaboration with the A.R.T./MXAT Institute for Advanced Training and premiered at the A.R.T. last fall. Turning also to Euripides’ The Trojan Women, Charles L. Mee wrought a wildly different creation: Trojan Women: A Love Story. While McLaughlin’s perspective was straightforward, Mee’s was kaleidoscopic. Mee wedded Euripides’ fifth-century play, Berlioz’s romantic opera Les Troyens, interviews from survivors of the Holocaust and Hiroshima, and the Kama Sutra—all scored to a mélange of music from Billie Holiday to Bow Wow. Mee’s work has been described as a collage: shards of characters, fragments of stories, and clashing emotions. Juxtaposing the blood of war with love songs, Mee examines the complex nature of the pain and violence we inflict on each other. Mee’s bits and pieces of heterogeneous cultures coalesce into a contemporary portrait. McLaughlin takes the classic text and overlays it with a contemporary perspective. Christine Evans, in Trojan Barbie, creates a world where the mythic and the modern crash. The past intrudes with more and more frequency into the present until they collide in the final moments of the play. Evans utilizes Euripides’ classic women, still struggling against male violence, but she creates poetry from contemporary idioms. She breathes life into Hecuba’s daughter, Polyxena, barely mentioned in the original. Re-christened Polly X, this punk rock teenager wobbles between childhood and womanhood. She grapples to create something, anything, out of the rubble of war. Waiting to be sacrificed at Achilles’ tomb, she attempts to create art from the broken remnants of dolls. The Trojan Women has provided a prism through which playwrights like Ellen McLaughlin, Charles L. Mee, and Christine Evans reflect contemporary cultural anxieties: power and sexuality, war and family. To understand where we are now, playwrights dig into the cultural closet. Their works rattle old skeletons with new stories to tell. Katie Mallinson is a second-year dramaturgy student in the A.R.T./MXAT School Institute for Advanced Theatre Training.