Beate
Hein Bennett
“Ruin,
everywhere ruin…” The Trojan Women
No one in the dramatic history of the Western world has driven home the horror of genocidal war and absolute destruction more than Euripides in “The Trojan Women” (415 B.C.) after Athenian forces sacked the island of Melos and forcibly deported the women and children into slavery. It was during the height of the Peloponnesian Wars which raged for sixteen years (431-404 B.C) caused by the imperial rivalry between Sparta and Athens. Euripides (480-406 B.C) was perhaps the most outspoken critic of war and its tragic effects on women and children; he was also the most “modern” and radical voice. Our millennium, like most centuries, began in violence and continues to beget unspeakable horror. As men seem determined to kill for no other purpose than to exert autocratic power, the women and children become expendable pawns and victims, mostly nameless but no longer faceless. What Euripides described in his plays is now provided by journalists and photographers for public TV “consumption”-- the faces of horror: old women, young women, children from Irak, Syria, Afghanistan, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Yemen, Congo, Honduras… and now, as I write this review, the images from Ukraine relentlessly pound our consciousness.
But what about the history across the American continent of using
women and children as commodities for servitude? As “property”?
As commercialized or trafficked sex objects? And finally what about
the history of female Black and Brown slavery in white male dominated
colonial societies? This includes the fate of Indigenous women and
children resulting from wars and official actions against Native
tribes in the history of all the Americas.
Costume Designer Mary Symczak dressed the women in simple earth tone frocks with woven belts; the men are in red shirts and black pants, intimating fascist uniforms. Set Designer Kanako Nagayama with Art Design by David Martine endows the space on one side with an Eagle Totem Pole set on a Greek column and a painting of a Brave with his woman riding alongside; center upstage hangs a painting of three teepees; an actual teepee for entrances, some broken Greek columns, two tree trunks, and the sandy-colored ground suggesting the shore complete the set. Lighting Design by Marsh Shugart creates a warm ambience, except for one scene of a silhouetted dream-like combat between two combatants. Hannah Louise Barnard choreographed all ritualized movements.
Diane Fraher, Osage/Cherookee, and Founder/Director of AMERINDA, observes in her program essay about the parallel between Native story-telling traditions and the ancient Greek theater’s ritualistic narrative dramaturgy. As the production process got underway, the Russian war on Ukraine broke out. She noted, “a Native elder told me he saw a televised image of a small group of unarmed people huddled in a city center praying and hoping for deliverance. He said he thought about how our people felt when they were brutally attacked and colonized. Once again women and children are bearing the brunt of masculine aggression. Someone is attempting to force people to give up their land and identity. If women have always had to bear the brunt of war, then they have also learned how to survive… Just as the strength and endurance of a living Native matriarchy does today, so too another matriarchy far away will do so in days to come.” |
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