‘Barbie’ Revives, Revises Tragedy

“History is dead!” shrieks Polly X, Hecuba’s murdered daughter in Professor Christine Evans’ most recent play “Trojan Barbie.” It is a jarring exclamation, but one that is dead on. What is most disquieting about Evans’ “Trojan Barbie” is not the tattered, plastic body parts hanging over the set, but its intense focus on personal suffering rather than a macro-overview of a historical event.

“Trojan Barbie”—which had its world premiere at the American Repertory Theatre on Saturday, March 28—follows Lotte, a British doll repair-woman, who goes on vacation in modern Troy. There, she stumbles into calamity, finding herself in an all-female concentration camp where rape is rampant and death, inevitable. At the camp, she meets several broken Trojan women, including Hecuba, who finds her family growing smaller by the hour, and Andromache, who clings desperately to her only immediate family—her son.

The play is based upon Euripedes’ “Trojan Women,” a tragedy that traces the lives of four Trojan women awaiting their fates after the fall of Troy and the deaths of their husbands. “Trojan Women” focuses on war’s inhumanities by depicting personal histories and the intimate—almost palpable—pains of its heroines. Like Euripedes’ play, “Trojan Barbie” draws its poignancy from the intimate. Scenes of warfare and violence are hauntingly relatable because of their extra-temporal nature; these hate crimes are timeless and place-less.

“Trojan Barbie” presents an un-reality; for example, the play is set in “modern day Troy,” a fictional extension of an ancient city. The travesty of men aggressively raping women in concentration camps—as presented in the play—is an atrocity unattached to a specific time or place. It is almost as though Lotte falls into a rabbit-hole, only to emerge in a wreckage of smoke and mirrors. The reality of the play is disorienting, and solid ground exists only in the characters’ personal sufferings.

The eerie presence of dolls furthers this surreal effect. The play flirts shamelessly with the line between doll and human, one that it figures as flexible and thin. Lotte, for example, treats her doll “patients” as though they are real people, and Andromache’s beloved “son” is a large doll. It is interesting that Lotte first recognizes Andromache’s son as a doll but later treats it as a real person.

Lotte’s (and the audience’s) intuitive failure to recognize the play’s barbies as real people seems to be a statement about society’s callousness in treating suffering people as plastic objects. Lotte admits that the British media disregards the suffering of Troy’s women to focus on her own “heroic” escape; it is this sort of skewed dehumanization that commits the Trojan victims to doll-hood.

Despite its thematic ambiguities, “Trojan Barbie” has a distinct intrinsic rhythm that keeps it moving. Its transitions are marked by a staccato of percussive sounds—lively, yet portentous. A line of lights on a wall in the set also turns rhythmically on and off to further demarcate transitions. As if to the drums of war, the play marches to an internal beat, and its fury of personal devastation crescendos to the climactic shattering of the play’s illusions.

The set design under the direction of David Reynoso is precise and meticulous in its details, and most importantly, it works.

A string of mutilated doll parts hangs ominously over the milieu of the stage. The rubble of the setting is a constant reminder of war’s devastation. Significantly, this scene of ruin is not specifically Greek or Trojan, modern or ancient. The set instead pays homage to the play’s presentation of personal history.

As Evans writes in her Playwright’s Note, “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.” To be sure, the play’s plasticized playthings transcend both time and space to tell a more universal human story.