The Trojan Women

To begin at the beginning, we come in and see black and steel wreckage, rising to the flys in perfect proportions, a portrait of desolation. The orchestra--tympani, an organ, and an electric guitar--play a Greek sounding overture, a mixture of sirtaki and danse macabre.

You can hardly see the seam between the set and music and the rest of the show, so perfectly do they mesh. For Thomas Babe has forged a magnificent Trojan Women out of many disparate elements--Greek theatre, American language, rock and roll music.

Babe's adaptation adds the brass of the American idiom to Euripides' sterling verse, and every line rings true. His new version of Trojan Women is--from the brilliant sex metaphors of Cassandra's speech to Hecuba's point-by-point indictment of hypocrisy--incisive and beautiful dramatic poetry. It should be published.

But the sheer drama of this play is so intense that it often makes the words of the script sound insignificant. The stage movement flows like burning lava. Babe is the rare director who can make a character say more in utter stillness than in long speeches. Time after time he strikes precisely the right movements, theatrical but true. His direction is smooth as a Rolls Royce and has the same quality of moving you without jarring you. When he uses shock, he uses it almost gently, to elict passion.

What makes this Trojan Women such good tragedy is that it shows off passion without self-consciousness, and we extend our sympathy to meet it half way. It uses a passionate form of music, rock and roll, so naturally and so well that it may be that long-awaited theatrical millenium--a real rock and roll musical. Bradley Burg's score, which, when it is not playing off organ beeps against tympani thumps, is airing subtle and poignant melodies, may well be the best music he has written.

The lyrics, which I believe are by Babe, Timothy Mayer, and Hugh Buckingham, often stammer with varied rhythms, and are always clear and powerful.

Philip Champagne can make points with lights. They flood and ebb with the play's emotions. The costumes, which are contemporary and therefore risk drawing blatant parallels between politics Then and Now, are just suggestive enough. The make-up is masklike, an old cliche of American Greek tragedy--but the Keane eyes and chalk faces are so stark, the scars and gore so real, that this makeup has nothing to do with cliche.

The cast plays all the complicated parts, with all the stops pulled out, with astonishing insight and energy. We always know where each character stands, exactly what the chorus feels. Joan Tolentino and William Bramhall play a heart-rending scene that leaves no doubt about the horror of execution; later, in a living newspaper scene, the chorus takes hysterical delight in an execution. Both times we are strongly affected because both times the actors' pjositions are deeply clear. In a universally good cast, Dan Deitch stands out for his droll performance of a machine-like soldier, and Mardee Kravit for the complex, funny woman she makes of a doe-eyed Helen of Troy.

Wisely, this production does not try to make Euripides sound as if he were lamenting the war in Vietnam.

"Fate, as the poet says, makes bad jokes." That was Euripides' sad comment on life, and today it can still make us think and cry. Especially if it is put on the stage with skill and passion. Thomas Babe has embellished an ancient theme with the trappings of 1967, and the result is such a success that few of us who saw his Trojan Women will soon get over it.