ARTicles vol. 7 i. 4: Trojan Barbie Playwright’s Note

In vain the surrounding land traces for us its narrow confines. One same wave throughout the world, one same wave since Troy rolls its haunch toward us. – Saint-John Perse

I encountered this poetic fragment some time after writing Trojan Barbie.  It was hand-written on the end wall of a long gallery at MASS MoCA.  Before it stretched a huge, rolling, broken wave of concrete, shot through with rubble and rusted metal.  This enormous object, sculpted by Anselm Kiefer, evoked a kind of rolling catastrophe—immobile, heavy, inert yet also implying the kinetic force of a wave whose effects we feel only as consequence.   This image, with its implication of colliding layers of time, became a shared reference point for director Carmel O’Reilly, designer David Reynoso and me as we began the work of translating my script into theatrical space.

Trojan Barbie also begins with a sculpture—one made by Hecuba’s young daughter Polly X, imprisoned in the camp of the Trojan Women.   It’s made from broken things, which are all that is left after an invading army has looted the ordered treasure of the Art Gallery.  When the sculpture is completed, the play ends; from the apparently random debris of childhood, everyday life and war, a pattern completes itself only when its remorseless logic (like Kiefer’s wave) is beyond arrest.

As Kiefer’s sculpture implies, we live in a time where past and present co-exist in violent collision.  Open any newspaper and quasi-Biblical images of weeping black-clad women beside raw graves jumble together with shopping catalogues and accounts of genetically engineered sheep.  The violent simultaneity of past and present is our everyday white noise.  How then do we witness the enforced spectacles of others’ suffering, given their omnipresence and lack of context?  Both close and far away, mediated visions of war, celebrity gossip, rape, shopping, political coups and romance are jumbled together in no particular order, until trauma crashes unforeseen through the front door.

Trojan Barbie collides past and present in a manner inspired by this aspect of everyday life.  My English tourist, Lotte, packs her dreams of romance and adventure into her suitcase, and travels to contemporary Troy.  There, the ground cracks under her feet, the past opens up and—like a vacationer in Mumbai during the bombings, or a back-packer in Thailand when the tsunami hit—she is flung into someone else’s apocalypse.

Despite my original brief to adapt The Trojan Women (for the University of San Francisco), I didn’t want to make a modern paean to Euripides.  His work doesn’t need it; The Trojan Women still speaks eloquently of the suffering of women in war.  Rather, I wanted to dramatize the illusion of our contemporary Western distance from such sufferings, exploring the humor, horror, hope, and despair generated between ancient and modern worlds and world views—which, after all, co-exist in our fractured present.

I also wanted to celebrate the resilience of women and find the joy in small moments—Lotte’s everyday dreams of romance; the fierce desire of young girls to live and create; the comedy and hope that spring up like common weeds in the cracks of history’s ruins.  Inside the driest desert is the murmured dream of the sea, and under the Greek poetry that immortalizes sacrificial virgins we can find living girls full of rebellion, botched home-made tattoos and too-short skirts.  Omitted from the official histories, they still re-invent themselves (like Polly’s sculpture) from the scavenged scraps of whatever they can find.

Christine Evans is an internationally produced playwright and the author of Trojan Barbie.

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