ARTicles vol. 7 i. 4: Dolls of War

Christine Evans was born in England and raised in Australia and New Zealand. After an early career as a circus performer and musician she started writing plays. In 2000 she won a Fulbright Scholarship to study playwriting with Paula Vogel in Brown University’s MFA program, after which she completed a PhD. She now lives in Providence and teaches playwriting at Harvard.

Gideon Lester: Trojan Barbie tells the story of a British tourist, Lotte, who goes on vacation and finds herself in th middle of the Trojan War. How did you start writing the play?

Christine Evans: I was commissioned by the University of San Francisco’s Performing Arts and Social Justice Program to adapt Euripides’ Trojan Women for their students. That first incarnation was quite different from the play we are staging at the A.R.T. It was called The Doll Hospital, and it was enormous and somewhat chaotic, with a cast of twelve. In the process of writing the play, I thought about what adaptation means. I’m not interested in simply taking a play and dressing it in modern clothes without creating a real dialogue between the past and the present. The longer I spent with Euripides’ plays the more foreign they seemed to be. The Greeks were obsessed with honor and revenge; their values and emotions were very differently organized than ours. I loved that sense of strangeness, of our distance from the past. I came to realize that this strangeness is contemporary to our own postmodern experience, where different cultures and ways of thinking and living are smashed together without any intermediary e softening.

GL: That clash of past and present makes Trojan Barbie funny in surprising ways.

CE: Right. The humor comes from the collision of worlds and values that simply don’t understand one another. It’s about incongruity and juxtaposition. Theatre has to entertain—I wanted to write a political play that wasn’t earnest, that captured some of the feeling of actual daily life in a media-saturated society where war is on every screen but nowhere you can touch.

GL: Lotte repairs dolls for a living. Why did you choose that profession for her?

CE: While I was writing the play I became fascinated with the before-and-after photographs from doll hospital websites. The images of broken dolls are eerie, like pictures of bodies in a war zone. Then they can be mended perfectly—unlike real humans—with every trace of trauma erased. I loved that tension between the doll and the human, between what can be repaired and what cannot, and it gave me a way to show that one person’s war is another person’s inconvenience.

GL: You’re an Australian playwright living in the U.S. Why is the heroine of your play English?

CE: It was partly a tactical decision; I didn’t want Trojan Barbie to be seen as a simple allegory of America at war. I’m more interested in exploring the differences between a modern Western sensibility and other cultural modes as they coexist and collide in the 21st century. Also, England has a long literary (and colonial) history of practical, adventurous women who stride boldly off on safari or to the Amazon or through Africa, and I wanted to reference the absurdity and ethnocentrism of such adventures while also paying affectionate homage to the women who undertook them.

GL: The play’s title, Trojan Barbie, refers to a sculpture made from broken dolls. It’s a beautiful image; where did it come from?

CE: It was invented by my brilliant niece Ciella when she was eight years old. My mother and I took her to an art museum in Australia, and they were showing a modern sculpture exhibition. There were artifacts made from broken bottles and a broken piano hanging on the wall. In the car on the way home she said, “I’m going to get a big piece of pink cardboard and nail all my broken Barbie dolls around it in the shape of a heart, and I’ll call it ‘Jurassic Barbie.’” That image, and the story of this little girl creating something from what she’d encountered, have stayed with me for ten years.

GL:Trojan Barbie is full of these contrasts—the young girl making something both beautiful and violent, a familiar character who’s sent into a very foreign environment, the clash of ancient myth and modern news.

CE: When I go to the theatre I’m less interested in seeing my own life identifiably reflected on stage than entering a world that is recognizable yet strange at the same time—that reorders the way I see everyday things.  The poet Marianne Moore describes poems as “imaginary gardens with real toads in them” and that’s what I aspire to create on the stage—a dream with a hard core of truth inside it.

Gideon Lester is Director of the A.R.T.’s 08/09 Season.

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