Theatre
The Trojan Women
by Laurel Fantauzzo
Tuesday February 7, 2006
The very moment I entered The Trojan Women: A Love Story’s performance space, I felt that something was amiss and the only warning posted outside the theater was that the play lasted over three hours. An ensemble creation led by Manhattan theatre darling Josh Fox, the production was an experimental interpretation that bore little resemblance to the original Charles Mee text.
However, as I entered the theater, there were the actors, nearly two dozen of them, in the upper levels of the theater. Their faces were in shadow, but the unnerving impression was clear: I had come to watch the actors, but the actors were watching me instead. It was a subversion of the most basic rule of theater itself, and it silenced the audience members as we took our seats.
The production began gently. A boy and a girl, both Caucasian and beautiful, sit in a car, in love. And yet Rachel Brown speaks of nightmares. "I want to live in a burning house with you," she says to the smiling Aaron Matteson. As they embrace there is the earsplitting sound of crashing and flames and war is declared over crescendoing acts of lovemaking. The proximity of love and violence is made clear. "All great love stories end in death," proclaims Katie Hartman.
Thus began an overwhelmingly vivid nightmare in which, from the first moment, every comfort was subverted as corrupt. This is because war itself is the ultimate subversion of humanity. In The Trojan Women a homecooked meal is not warm and fulfilling, but instead a discomforting series of missiles falling upon a family from above resulting in mashed potatoes exploding, a rain of lethal carrots and a cake flattened on impact. A hospital is not a place of healing but of chaos and death—a nurse has her eyes gouged out by a patient, fragments of flesh and fluid falling from her hands, while Rachel Brown draws a series of EKGs so numbered that the life they mean to show becomes meaningless. Sex is not an act of creation and love but of destruction and brutality, a soldier’s hips moving brutally against a gasping mother and her baby, a woman straddling and choking Aaron Matteson with the barrel of her pistol pressed deep into his mouth. In so many scenes, the terror of the performers is palpable. Their eyes cross, they shake and sweat; the tears pouring from their faces are real.
Yet in the middle of the second act, we are confronted by visions far more real than what actors can provide. Leah Rudnick, after the horror of a fictitious veteran’s hospital gone mad, calls the performers by name and descends to address the audience, setting up a slide projector and a podium. The object: to lecture on the complicity of even playwrights and directors—"even you, Josh!"—in glorifying the myth of war.
Rudnick began to show, without warning, slides of Iraqi civilians killed in Operation Iraqi Freedom. There was a man with his face blown off. A decapitated head. A child whose limbs had been burned from his body. A fragment of an arm bone, poking naked through charred flesh. "This is a good story," Rudnick chanted repeatedly, mocking.
"This is a leg," she says, as a dismembered limb appeared, "which is also a good story."
In one particularly upsetting part of the play, Neil Knox stalks the stage wearing his uniform and flight glasses, bearing a pistol. His character tells the audience about being a groundskeeper before he was a soldier.
"Trees wage chemical warfare," he says, describing the natural poison in leaves, before shooting a weeping woman in the head.
Later, Knox stood on a table, looking down at a prostrate prisoner in a hood. The effect—a leer upon his face, his figure muscular and ready—was terrifying. He knelt and punched the prisoner to the beat of Outkast’s "Hey Ya." Even in nature and in music, there is no peace.
Nor in love. The couple from the beginning of the play—Matteson, the reluctant soldier turned mad with vengeance, and Brown, the quiet witness who urged him to peace—confront each other for a final time. The men of the play are engaged in the most brutal kind of war, one waged from an office, with cold blueprints and clean hands (one cannot help but think of a certain house, colored white). And Matteson is the leader of them all. At Brown’s presence, the men draw their guns.
"Look at your breath in the air," she said to her former lover. "There is a warmth there, no matter what." She blindfolds herself. "And there is a clearness here."
She opens her arms, and the men point their pistols at her. Matteson makes no move to save her. The stage goes black. We are spared the moment of her murder, but we are spared little else. As it should be, in a play about war, in a world where war survives despite love—not the other way around.
