Tracking Trojan Women

Barnard’s production of Trojan Women and its historical antecedents.

By Jack Bradner

Illustration by Truman Dickerson

An email from my Lit Hum Professor popped into my inbox with the playbill for Barnard Theatre’s then-upcoming rendition of Trojan Women. Set in a Greek war camp, the play stages the aftermath of the Trojan War with Troy’s women detained and kidnapped by various Greek soldiers. On Oct. 17, Barnard and Columbia students recreated Euripides’ play with the Trojan women as immigrants detained in a refugee facility. 

Climbing into the gallery, I overlooked the chain link fence that caged the stage. Its iron barbs crept up the walls, reaching out toward the audience. With an equally brutalistic temperament, metal-rod bunk beds were backed against the walls and left the stage unfurnished save for a few mattresses and two aluminum benches. On either wing of the stage, grainy TVs were mounted above the set, omnisciently broadcasting real-time security footage of the stage through black and white static.

But as soon as Poseidon and Athena entered the stage, their costumes expanded the play’s historical scope beyond the confining set. Athena, Anaitzel Franco, BC ’27, stormed in with a worn military trench coat and what looked like an American M1917 or M1 “Steel Pot” helmet—each the dominant headgear for American infantry in World War I and II, respectively. Opposing her, gold trident in hand, an outspoken and dashing Poseidon, Bryan Jackson, CC ’26, strode into the stage donning a white suit with golden studs stitched about it. Poseidon’s costume brought to my mind various depictions of dystopian opulence: the Capitol citizens’ couture in The Hunger Games or the elaborate senatorial style from Star Wars. Even the reflective sheets scattered across the Trojan women’s cots looked like the high-tech multilayer insulation blankets used on futuristic spacecraft. Taken together, these images were historically dissonant: They tossed me into the future, into the past, and then into the future once more. 

Within Trojan Women, this tension between past and present acts as a thematic center for the play’s plot and mise en scène. Troy’s refugee women are caught between their destroyed Trojan past—lost family, culture, religion, and empire—and the uncertainty of their future as kidnapped sex slaves for Greek patriarchs. Cassandra, Kiana Mottahedan, CC ’26, a captive Trojan destined to be Agamemnon’s slave, shows how this tension is a catastrophic force. When she casts off her priestly adornments, she symbolically rejects her past role as priestess and her prophetic ability to see the future. Spatially, all of the Trojan women’s laments, joys, and embraces take place between the two televisions on set, which sporadically shift between displays of the Aegean’s churning depths and a burning urban landscape, among other prophetical visions. But further, Trojan Women’s dramatic inheritance adds onto the play’s thematic focus on past and future. 

For generations, directors have restaged Euripides’ tragedy to amplify different historical struggles. In the first century CE, Seneca the Younger reinterpreted Euripides’ Trojan Women through his own version, Troades, as part of the fabula crepidata genre (literally translating to “a story wearing Greek sandals”). Seneca’s play uses textual additions to, as some scholars argue, exemplify the Roman ideal of filial piety. In the 20th century, Trojan Women again encountered new histories. Jean-Paul Sartre adapted the play into the 1964 Les Troyennes, a version cognizant of and inspired by the Algerian War of Independence.

But there are numerous examples from modern memory, too. Femi Osifisan’s 2006 Women of Owu presented the Trojan women through the Yoruba Owu Kingdom in what is now Nigeria. The 2013 production Queens of Syria blended Greek antiquity with the actors’ personal narratives of exile from Syria. Charles L. Mee’s 1996 Trojan Women: A Love Story similarly blends the personal and mythological by incorporating the stories of Holocaust and Hiroshima survivors.

Trojan Women’s historical legacy has a unique relation to Columbia’s history. In 1915, English director Harley Granville Barker and his wife Lillah McCarthy, an actress, took Trojan Women, Medea, and Iphigenia in Tauris to City College Stadium, as a part of a tour of Ivy League universities. Performed during World War I, Trojan Women seemed more like the “Belgian Women,” as the Philadelphia Public Ledger recounted in a review of the play. Before the play, Columbia students clustered in 309 Havemeyer for a lecture on the Trojan Women and Iphigenia, presented by a representative of Barker and McCarthy’s forthcoming productions.

Another Barnard take on Trojan Women restaged the play during the then-ongoing Bosnian War. On Nov. 12 and 13 1993, Barnard Theatre staged Euripides’ tragedy in the Minor Latham Playhouse—the same place where I watched the most recent production of Trojan Women—and set it in Bosnia. Imagining myself sitting in the audience, I began to think about how the Columbia student in my seat on that Saturday night 32 years ago might have received the play. A photograph from the Daily Spectator’s coverage of the event gives some insight, depicting (what I presume to be) masked Greek soldiers standing over a captive Trojan woman lying on the ground in terror. Behind the actors, a chickenwire fence insinuates itself into the scene, caging the captive Trojan women.

Trojan Women concludes with the Greeks’ leading the captive Trojan women away from their homeland and into slavery. But no matter how many times Greeks take the Trojan women away, Trojan Women will keep coming back. From Menelaus’ suit-and-tie costume to the Greek soldiers’ plate carriers, baseball caps, sunglasses, and black gaiters, Barnard’s production of Trojan Women, on its own, was an effective invective against ICE agents today. By simultaneously acknowledging the play’s legacy, Barnard’s production reminds the audience that situating this rendition of Trojan Women in its long and continuing inheritance has a subversive power of its own. One of the concluding images on the set’s TV screens, a classical, marble statue with a photoshopped balaclava overlay metaphorizes both of these qualities. One might see the statue as the Trojan women, ever-defiant of Greek suppression. But I also see Trojan Women as the statue. It’s recostumed here for the refugee crisis and will no doubt be recostumed again in the future.