Charles Mee's Trojan Women 2.0

Here is a link to Charles Mee's take on The Trojan Women. The first act is based mostly on Euripides, but he also uses Berlioz's opera Les Troyens. Notice that at the end of Act I, Hecuba sends Aeneas off to build a new Empire and get revenge on the Greeks. In the second act, Aeneas ends up getting sidetracked in Carthage and falls in love with Dido. An interesting side note: at the end of the story, usually Aeneas leaves to found Rome and Dido commits suicide. Charles Mee leaves the ending up to people producing the play.

Which leads me to another plot-related thought: how one chooses to end a play really influences its meaning. And another way to determine what the significant events of a play are is to look at its ending. How are things different in the end of Euripides' play than they were at the beginning? Initially, we know that Troy has been sacked and the men all killed. If you divide the play into three sections--let's call them Cassandra, Andromache, and Helen--you can identify what happens more easily. Cassandra is given to Agamemnon, Astyanax is taken and killed, Helen is not killed within the scenes of the play (and Greek audiences would have known the eventual outcome of that), the Citadel collapses, Hecuba goes off to be enslaved by Odysseus. How is it that those things come about? Are they inevitable? And what situation do they set in place at the end of the play? (There have been quite a few productions of this play over the past several years, and many of them raise the question of what invading a country and wreaking havoc on its people leaves in its wake. Can you see any way of staging it that might have an opposite effect and argue for the necessity of war?)

Also, I proposed this one reading based on the idea of a balanced argument existing in the play that examines questions of determinism and free will: who can choose to do what in this play? But, as Obadiah pointed out in his letter and Jeremy suggested in his comments about what choice the characters have--there are of course many other interpretations. Considering the fact that this was performed for an Athenian audience during the war with Sparta over who would control Greece, and Talthybius and Menelaus are not just Greeks but Spartans, a somewhat different reading of the events is also possible. It may be a critique of the Athenian act of invading a neutral island during the war, but it also might be suggesting that Athens was acting more like Sparta at that point in the war. How are Athenian values different than those of Sparta? One might imagine that--at a festival celebrating the city-state of Athens--Euripides was celebrating the values of democracy and reason over militarism and violence (remember Hecuba's line "Greeks! Greeks! You love war more than you love being human."). The play could be arguing that traditional Athenian values are better for the future of Greece than Spartan values are.

This information might lead you to stage an interpretation that sets up a parallel with the conflict in the United States between red states and blue states. What if this was a play staged by and for Democrats in which Talthybius and Menelaus were Democratic politicians visiting present-day Iraq and condoning violence and torture? What if it was warning Democrats against acting like Republicans when it comes to war, because the United States under Republican rule is akin to Greece under the control of Spartans? How would this influence your interpretation of the play's structure, events and outcome? And, again, how could you stage it to suggest the opposite interpretation: have the men's actions seem necessary and inevitable and be sympathetic to the audience?