Out West Arts: Performance at the end of the world

Euripides’ Helen is one of those reminders that there hasn’t been anything new since antiquity. It is as arch and post-modern as anything you can think of with its deconstructed storyline and revisionist aesthetic. The play, which is currently being presented by The Getty Villa as their annual theatrical offering in the outdoor amphitheater this fall, is slyly modern, a stance only abetted by Nick Salamone’s adaptation directed here by Jon Lawrence Rivera for Playwrights’ Arena. Written just years after The Trojan Women, Euripides returns to the fall of Troy and the fate of the beautiful Helen by retelling the legend with a completely different narrative capturing another co-existing version of the fate of those who were so intimately involved in the fall of Troy. This time around, we find Helen living on the Egyptian island of Pharos where she was magically transported at the time of her original kidnapping from Menelaos and replaced with a double who was carried onto Troy and the arms of Paris. She has sat by and tragically waited and wondered over the fate of her husband and people for 17 years and knows nothing of her double’s existence in Troy. Thus when Menelaos and some of his soldiers wash ashore on their journey home, the two fail to immediately recognize one another until they eventually align to escape the despotic rule of Theonoe and Theoclymenus.

Helen may not have Strauss’ music, but it certainly has the fun of Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s libretto for Ariadne auf Naxos. Even more so in this adaptation which casts Helen, the chorus and many of the other characters as Hollywood movie star archetypes including Elizabeth Taylor’s Cleopatra and Vivien Leigh’s Scarlett. The point, of course, is that the most beautiful woman in history has been unfairly demonized and in fact is just a woman waiting for the return of her husband and misunderstood by so many. It’s a crafty and reasonable gesture on Salamone’s part especially for the chorus. But it doesn’t always work and the metaphor fizzles out long before the play is over. It can also be disturbing at times as Hattie, the slave to Theoclymenus and Theonoe in this version, is directed with relentless reference to the character of Mammy from Gone With the Wind. The minstrelsy is supposed to come off as more ironic commentary, but it doesn’t always succeed, creating some sitcom style laughs in pockets of the audience over the play’s short 90 minute running time.

But the show, which makes excellent use of the amphitheater’s space, still drives home the intellectual magic of Euripides work with its morphing of twice told tales through their very repetition. Rachel Sorsa stands at the center as the discarded queen in hiding and manages to keep things crisp without descending into parody or camp along the way, a temptation that can easily creep into this material. I was also enamored with the three choristers – Melody Butiu, Arséne DeLay and Jayme Lake who milk their Hollywood femme fatales for gags but also were able to side step playing them as mere practical jokes. This Helen is good for the Getty and it provides audiences here with one of the most watchable shows the Getty Villa has yet put on. If you get a chance, it comes recommended before it closes on September 29th.

Labels: Getty Villa

The SITI Company cast of The Trojan Women (After Euripides)

For a few brief moments in September each year the Getty Villa in Malibu comes to life with live theater. Due to the the wonts of the inhabitants of the tony surrounding neighborhood, these adaptations of classical dramas, performed in the amphitheater, are fleeting as if they were only on loan to the Getty, not unlike contested antiquities that were once the museum's but now come and go to their countries of origin. The Getty's productions involve a variety of visiting artists and this year they welcomed Anne Bogart and Tadashi Suzuki's SITI Company and a new adaptation of Euripides' The Trojan Women. Actually to get technical about it, the SITI adaptation is entitled The Trojan Women (After Euripides) in what the program notes indicate is a gesture to recognize that the company has done some significant excavation on the play in order to recognize the many historical overtones audiences may see in the work thousands of years later on.

The nature and extent of these revisions, however, conducted under the guidance of director Bogart and playwright Jocelyn Clarke, may not be quite as radical as the above statement might suggest. Characters have been deleted and others added. A newly written Odysseus appears at the end to interact with Hecuba, and Athena is nowhere to be found in the introduction. The women's chorus is replaced by a male eunuch priest character and there is greater emphasis on the idea of the Greeks committing a cultural genocide in the conclusion of this lengthy war. The costumes are classically inspired but contemporary with Helen dripping in jewels and the men all in business suits. And yet, the language and minimal sets outside the surroundings of the Getty Villa gives the play a distinctly unadorned feel. The changes are incorporated so well that there is little sense that this adaptation has strayed far from what audiences might be otherwise familiar with.

Even with significant changes, the story remains largely uneventful. Four Trojan royal women - Hecuba, Kassandra, Andromache, and Helen (who is not really a Trojan at all) lament the loss of their city and people and await being taken to their new separate fates in distant Greek lands. Not unlike a Wagner act, the action mostly occurs before and after the 100 minutes depicted in the play so much of the drama is in the storytelling. Despite this I was riveted throughout, even without lush Romantic German music. The performances were gut-wrenching. Akiko Aizawa's Kassandra was mad and perfectly tragic while Makela Spielman highlights Andromache's pain and nobility. But the actor at the center of the proceedings is Ellen Lauren as Hecuba. Lauren rages with white-hot anger and heartbreak but manages to keep things from boiling over into parody. The male characters are more ancillary here, but J. Ed Araiza makes it clear that Menelaus will buckle under his reunited wife's seduction. Brent Werzner's Poseidon haunts the stage for nearly the whole show following his opening monologue in his identification with his beloved lost Trojans.

The influence of Asian theater traditions is evident in Bogart's calm, meditative movements that seem restrained even in moments of great activity. Actors are specifically posed in ways that look self-conscious to contemporary audiences. But this is a perfect setting for such tactics, heightening the cultural distinctions of the Trojans from the Greeks and giving everything a more majestic feel. Of course, if you don't already have tickets for the show before it closes at the end of September, you are probably out of luck in that, as usual, they are long gone by now. But the SITI group has managed to add another satisfying reputable production to the Getty's theatrical track record to date.

Labels: Getty Villa, LA Theater Reviews