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The Trojan Women a Love Story: A Postmodern Semiotics of the Tragic
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 January 2009
Extract
Charles Mee, before turning to playwriting, authored several well-known political histories. To the last of these, from 1993, he gave the ironically portentous title of Playing God: Seven Fateful Moments When Great Men Met to Change the World. With this deconstructive final word after two decades as a historian, he did not in fact abandon history, but began to write it in the medium of theatre. In doing so Mee has come to share a view articulated by Roland Barthes, who was once a university student of theatre and actor in Greek tragedies: the view that theatre, and Greek tragedy in particular, can illuminate our history as a story unfolding before us, allowing us to connect critically past with present as our best hope for the future. The American director Tina Landau, a frequent collaborator with Charles Mee, likewise believes that the ancient Greek tragedies helped constitute, articulate, and today still codify the structural base in myth and history of Western civilization. Accordingly, Mee and Landau have created a number of what they call ‘site-specific pieces’ adapted from Greek drama, site-specific in that they are created out of the specific material space and time at hand. One of these is The Trojan Women a Love Story which was developed and premiered at the University of Washington in Seattle in the spring of 1996. The production was based on Euripides' play The Trojan Women and Hector Berlioz's 1859 opera Les Troyens, which in turn retells the story of Aeneas and Queen Dido of Carthage from Virgil's epic, The Aeneid.
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Notes
1. Barthes, Roland, ‘Putting on the Greeks’, Critical Essays, translated by Howard, Richard (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972), p. 66.Google Scholar
2. Mee, Charles L. Jr, Playing God: Seven Fateful Moments When Great Men Met to Change the World (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1993).Google Scholar
3. The Trojan Women a Love Story is the second play of a trilogy on which Landau and Mee have collaborated; the first was Orestes, presented in 1993 at an old Hudson River pier in New York, and the third is Iphigenia.
4. Barthes, , ‘The Tasks of Brechtian Criticism’, Critical Essays, p. 74.Google Scholar
5. Six of them, including The Trojan Women a Love Story have now also been anthologized in Mee, Charles L., History Plays (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998).Google Scholar
6. Mee, Charles, interview with Denise Jarrett, 02, 1996.Google Scholar
7. Mee, Charles, Playing God, pp. 14–16.Google Scholar
8. This was the case for the second staging of The Trojan Women a Love Story, which took place in June 1996 in the East River Park Amphitheater where Joseph Papp founded his Shakespeare in the Park. Today the abandoned theatre is crumbling and overgrown, a visible and palpable text signifying its own historicity, and a richly layered context for the new event.
9. Ariane Mnouchkine also insists that the actors stay in present after present. See Bryant-Bertail, Sarah, ‘Gender, Empire and Body Politic as Mise en Scène: Mnouchkine's Les Atrides’, Theatre Journal 46 (1994), pp. 1–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
10. Tina Landau, public symposium, University of Washington, Seattle, 1 April 1996. See also Dixon, Michael and Smith, Joel, eds., Anne Bogart, Viewpoints (Lyme, NH: Smith and Kraus, 1995).Google Scholar
11. Hadas, Moses, Ten Plays by Euripides. (New York: Bantam, 1960), p. 173.Google Scholar
12. Mee, , Playing God, p. 15.Google Scholar
13. Ibid., pp. 13–14.
14. Ibid., p. 14.
15. Ibid., p. 15.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid.
18. Postlewait, Thomas, ‘The Sacred and the Secular: Reflection on the Writing of Renaissance Theatre History’, Assaph C, No. 12, 1977.Google Scholar This article was first presented as a keynote speech at the International Federation for Theatre Research Congress in Tel Aviv, Israel, in June 1996.