Playwright: Lucius Annaeus Seneca
At: Goodman Theatre, 170 N. Dearborn St. Phone: (312) 443-3800; $15-$40
Runs through: May 4
We enter the auditorium to see the stage swathed in a sort of shower curtain, making us wonder if the decor for Mary Zimmerman's interpretation of this classic tragedy will include water, as in the Tony Award-winning Metamorphoses. The play begins, however, with a deafening roar of jet fighters overhead, whereupon the curtain drops abruptly to reveal a razed landscape strewn with rubble, through which ragged women, their wrists bound by zip-cuffs, scrabble lethargically.
The cataclysm engendering this devastation might have occurred only in myth, but to us in 2003, the tableau calls forth recent memories of 2001's attack on the World Trade Center, just as the khaki uniforms worn by the soldiers recall newsreel footage of the ongoing conflict in the Middle East—a directorial concept worthy, if hardly original. But for all its attempts to draw parallels between the ancient world and our own, the events propelling our story predate Geneva Convention restrictions—we do not, nowadays, demand the death or enslavement of enemy leaders' families, for example—with the result that our understanding of the vanquishing generals' motives is rooted more in intellectual distance than in visceral immediacy.
But while rational contemplation of the issues might suit Euripides' definitive version of The Trojan Women, the later rewrite by the Roman Seneca is replete with speeches written to showcase the declamatory acting style of HIS day. And so despite their playing space's intimate quarters, Kyle Hall's Pyrrhus bellows like a drill sergeant, indicating—what? bloodthirstiness? egotism? his status as, not an administrative, but a FIELD officer? Wendy Robie's Andromache also rants and keens in a voice ravaged by what we are to assume is grief, but more likely attributable to the thick dust billowing from the aforementioned rubble.
Haste, says the proverb, makes waste. Zimmerman is accustomed to developing her shows at much greater length than this production's five-month gestation period. A carefully selected cast makes the most of their orally driven text, but the uneven integration of The Trojan Women's disparate elements—notably, the unprecedented introduction late in the action of a Philip Glass song—attest to the folly, in art as in war, of allowing expediency to exercise priority over readiness.