A new outlook

Alright Romeo and Juliet has never been one of my favorite plays , i could never get over the fact that they had to go and kill themselves in the end. However i really enjoyed going over the iambic pentameter with the different scenes in class. I've never done some thing like that before and it was an interesting experience for me. It was just a novel way for me to reread key areas in the script i also really liked the reading the play backwards. It really does help to see how everything is put together and how the play is going when you actually sit down and try to determine what cause in the play had what effect or vice versa.
Looking at the Romeo and Juliet in that way has helped me out a lot with resurrecting a little of my interest in one of the most famous of Shakespeare's plays.

This stuff really works!!!

So, I’m in the first blocking rehearsal for Hamlet. We’re doing what’s called “feeding lines” where an ASM or other actor stands behind you and quietly says your line to you before you say it out loud (this enables you to look at and respond more naturally to your environment and unencumberedly act on impulses). I have all of four lines in this particular scene so I’m just taking in words and repeating them, looking for relationships to manifest.
When I get the time I pull out my script and look at the lines I have. I’m speaking to the king about my son who is standing just behind me:
He hath, my lord, wrung from me my slow leave
By laborsome petition, and at last
Upon his will I sealed my hard consent.
I do beseech you give him leave to go.
I take a pencil and mark the iambic beats. I find every word follows a straight weak/strong pattern except for “wrung” and that screws up the regular rhythm for the remainder of the line.
This tells me I was pretty much beat down verbally by my son until I gave in. The regularity of all else leads me to think I keep a quite formal and proper reserve for the king but, as is a Dad’s way, I put a small guilt trip on my son for how far he was willing to go to get his way. (I’m good at that, as well)
Finding this pattern also helped immensely in getting the lines memorized. Even though it’s a very short passage, it’s a challenge for me to get Shakespeare’s lines down quickly. I pretty much had this by the end of that run through (don’t contradict me, Rocky).

Walking Backward in Another Man's Shoes

I have to say, I am blown away by how my initial ideas about a script can evolve and even leap off their original track after one of these classes. I think if I were to stage The Trojan Women now I would probably be most interested in- and even sympathetic for- Talthybius.
I keep driving home to my section students “all you have is the words on the page in front of you” when I ask about particulars in a script. Given that- and how the murder of a child is horrendous, obscene, and in no way forgivable- I feel pulled towards the struggle that must be going on in Talthybius’ mind. The idea of “choice” in our discussions is always tainted with a very modern sense of the word. I’ll again say he had a choice but his two options were horrid: 1) sell his soul, do his duty, and watch an infant be crushed or 2) try to hide or in some other way defend the baby and be killed in some wonderfully painful way and the baby still dies and the Greeks still enslave the women.
What would I do? I’d like to say I’d die rather than be an accomplice to a baby being made the brunt of such bigotry and hatred…but I might be as much as a coward as Talthybius.
As for today’s class, I went into it ready to throw the Friar to the wolves. He did perform a secret marriage and when he had the chance and opportunity to let it be known he lied by omission (and commission as well!). His speech in the final scene fell pathetically short in my mind to excusing his complicity.
Then we start going backwards and my sense of vengeance get turned inside out! In allowing Juliet to be alone, not forcing her out of the tomb, the Friar truly- and finally- gave Juliet her chance to be “all grown up” – even for a minute. Its more consideration than she would have received from her own family. I submit he very well may have absolved himself by this act and later confessing the whole train of events, but we didn’t finish analyzing the entire play. Who knows…its probably all Peter’s fault. :-)

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?

The Trojan Women in a contemporary context

While reading this play, I had no idea how one would stage this tragedy in a contemporary context. With a directing background, I always try to think about how I would stage whatever play I am reading. This play stumped me though; probably because I was not quite sure what I was reading (yes, I'll admit it). After class the other day, I felt like I had a better grasp on what the play was about, and the background of Euripides definitely helped me get there. I wondered if there were any contemporary events that could parallel with the events of the play.
I knew nothing of sophism (with the exception of a Seinfeld episode, I think?) before class the other day. It reminded me a lot of Existentialism and the school of Sartre and the like. I went back to my contemporary philosophy notes to find some information that might help me out with this potential similarity. It just so happened that Sartre adapted a version of The Trojan Women. His version focused on the philosophy of Existentialism along with colonization and imperialism in Southern Asia.
I thought about Africa. After spending a month there this summer I find it hard not to do so. The countless civil wars and imperialism ran through my head as I thought about staging this Ancient Greek play in DR Congo, or Rwanda, or Sudan. I think these contemporary conflicts have a lot of similarities to the plot of The Trojan Women. The continent is overrun with the consequences of war, as is the setting in Euripide's play.

The Trojan War, etc.

I had a lot of thoughts after today's class. First of all, it occurred to me that if I am going to leave so little time to discuss certain elements of each play, I should give you as much background information as possible well before we discuss the play. So thanks to Jeremy for an excellent presentation on Euripedes and his role in Athenian drama, which gave us a lot to work with when approaching The Trojan Women. Here's some more stuff that might help you. First, this website is a very useful encyclopedia of mythology that will give you some background information about the play's characters. Second, here is some information about the Trojan War.

Here is what we discussed about the play's character lineages today, and what has happened before the play begins: Hecuba was the wife of Priam, King of Troy. Before the play begins, Priam and all of the men of Troy have been killed after the Greeks entered the city in a big wooden horse. This includes Hecuba's son Hector, husband of Andromache and brother to Paris, whose relationship with Helen angered Menelaos and instigated the Trojan War. Given that Euripides was using familiar Greek mythology, here, it is interesting to see how he deals with the re-telling of the story of the burning of Troy.

A couple of things that stood out to me as Jeremy was speaking today: this play was performed at the City Dionysia after a particularly contentious act by the Greeks. In Nicholas Rudall's introduction, he writes that

One year before the performance of The Trojan Women, Athens had invaded the island of Melos, which was greek but determinedly neutral in the war between Athens and Sparta, the Peloponnesian war. Athenian forces captured the island, put its men to death, and enslaved it s women and children. This barbaric act provoked the people of Athens. (3)

With that context in mind, and also considering that (as Jeremy pointed out) Euripides was influenced by sophist thinking that was skeptical about the possibility of knowing any complete truth, what meaning can we attribute to the plot of the play (or lack thereof) and how it is constructed? Also, what do you make of the fact that the location of the play was in a non-Greek country that had been invaded and its people enslaved? How does that knowledge influence your understanding of Talthybius and his entrance into the world of these mourning women?

Before class on Wednesday, try to outline in your mind (or on paper!) what the significant events in the text are. Make a list of what actually happens. Does each event seem inevitable, given the circumstances that precede it? Does it lead to other events that come after? Or do these things just happen to conveniently fall where they do in the plot?

Also, look closely at the Prologue between Poseidon and Athena. Then read from where Menelaos enters until his exit, focusing on the conflict between Helen and Hecuba in the middle of the scene. What does this argument represent? What is its outcome?

One other important thing that came out of today's class: there was a brief dispute about whether or not the major event of the play could be Hecuba's fall from queen to slave. This is a really productive debate to have, because it could determine how you might stage the play. When reading the play for production, if you decide that the story you want to tell is that of Hecuba's enslavement, the weight you give each scene and the outcome of each would be slightly different than if you think the most important event of the play is that Menelaus decides to take Helen with him to receive her punishment back in Greece. Does that make sense? I guess what I'm getting at here is: ultimately, what difference does it make how a plot fits together? And how can a theatre artist's analysis of a script influence its meaning?

Does this play build to a climactic moment, do you think? Are there a lot of complications? What would the point be after which everything changes? And does the ending offer any resolution?

Finally, how might you stage this play in a contemporary context? If you were going to direct it, where would you choose to set it, and why?

Okay, I think that's all I have to say for now. Please feel free to respond to any of these questions in comment form, or in the form of a longer blog entry! See you on Wednesday.

Euripedes' The Trojan Women

I have never been one for reading things written during the BC times without some sort of translation to “dumb it down.” The language is always so elaborate and extensive. The writers can go on and on for pages and only accomplish making one or two points. After a while of reading, I realize that I’ve been sitting here with my eyes going back and forth over the sentences and have absolutely no clue what it is that I just read and what I’m supposed to get from it. This is how Euripedes’ play, The Trojan Women, read for me. I found myself after a while having no real clue as to what they were talking about and only getting a broad sense of the fact that their city has been destroyed, families killed and that life was, simply, miserable and would be until the day they died. I glanced over to see how much more I had to read, and my heart sank just a bit.

I realize that I sound extremely pessimistic and whiny—my apologies. I do have an appreciation for where they are coming from and that theatre has been around a lot longer than just the past 100 or so years. I did some looking up for information about this play and found some translations and even some video clips of groups doing both Euripedes’ words and the translations which definitely helped in my reading of the play. Using these other sources helped me to follow along with the general idea of what was going on even without the specifics. Reading these words off the page does not give me anything emotionally. I understand that, “Ah me! ah me! What else but tears is now my hapless lot…” (Hecuba) is said out of her depressed state, but having to dissect those words so thoroughly eventually leads to a loss of emotion for the reader.

Reading it and watching it would convey two completely different ideas of this text. I’m certain that if I had the opportunity to sit down and watch it acted out in front of me by a talented performer who had done the research and had really delved into the character that my heart would be breaking.

I wrote this entry, obviously, before we have even had the opportunity to discuss the play in class. I have every intention of going into class with an open mind and hope that the presentations and discussions will open my eyes a little bit to what I’m missing while I just read it. I wanted to share my initial reactions.