Review
by Lisa Drostova for the East Bay Express, Published January
2, 2002
There
Will Be No Trojan War presents a distant echo to our present conflict.
There is an uncanny
resonance in the way the people of Troy clamor for war and how easily
we as a people have accepted the current conflict.
BY LISA DROSTOVA
Probably the most
exciting response from the East Bay's theater community to recent events
is the Shotgun Players' decision to delay their original season-ending
show in favor of the ultra-timely There Will Be No Trojan War.
Also known as Tiger at the Gates, this was French playwright Jean Giraudoux's
attempt to envision the moment in mythic Greece after Paris' kidnapping
of Helen and before the onset of the ensuing ten-year war. While I know
there are those who might consider Shotgun's decision to stage this
play a blatant attempt to cash in on the war in Afghanistan, I think
audiences will find the play relevant and refreshing. And anyone who
put in the time at the Rep and John Hinkel Park last year for the Aeschylus
and Euripides stories, There Will Be... provides yet another
facet to epic events in ancient Greece, the hitherto untold story of
how Troy might have felt about the war that bore its name.
Giraudoux was not
only a playwright and journalist but also a veteran of the First World
War, and he obviously suffered the fatigue felt so strongly in the country
that lost more soldiers than any other of the combatant nations. One
out of every two Frenchmen served in WWI, and the nation wanted nothing
more at conflict's end than to rebuild her battered economy, reform
her corruption-riddled government, and live peacefully.
The really intriguing
thing about this play is that the context within which it was originally
presented is so morally ambiguous. Giraudoux favored Franco-Germanic
rapprochement (the parallels are clear in There Will Be -- Greece
represents powerful, militaristic Germany; Troy is peaceful, agrarian
France) and was willing to overlook Nazi atrocities. His mood was shared
by many of his countrymen who were prepared to sacrifice certain liberties
-- or even minorities (i.e., Jews, Gypsies, those troublesome immigrants)
-- if it meant they didn't have to fight another war. Eugen Weber in
his fascinating history of early 20th-century France, The Hollow
Years, quotes a veteran named Jean Giono, who said in 1937 that
if the worst part of Germany's invasion of France was that he would
become German, "For my part, I prefer being a living German to
a dead Frenchman." Even more troubling is a letter written by Simone
Weill stating that German occupation of France was preferable to war
even if it meant "certain laws of exclusion against Communists
and Jews."
Giraudoux understood
that there is an often-voiceless population that is irrevocably affected
by war. As Weber notes, between the wars France had a million more women
than men between the ages of twenty and forty; France was a nation gray
with women in widow's weeds. It often falls to women to denounce war,
yet just as often they do not have the political clout to stop it --
in 1935 when There Will Be was first staged, French women were
a decade away from getting the vote. Most of Giraudoux's voices against
war are female: Andromache's (Beth Donohue) pleading and impassioned,
Hecuba's (Trish Mulholland) incisive and colorful, Polyxene's (Sarah
Maslin) innocent. Helen herself is ambivalent, but we are led to understand
that she cares nothing about what happens outside of herself. Director
Patrick Dooley has chosen to make Busiris the fast-talking pro-war lawyer
more interesting by cross-casting the very funny Sabrina Klein, but
even Busiris eventually switches sides. Similarly, Giraudoux's men are
arrayed against peace -- whether their motives are simple bloodlust
(Michael Cheng's drunken Ajax), politics (Fred Ochs' smarmy Priam),
or gussied up as art (Clive Worsley as the poet Demokos) -- such that
Malcolm Brownson's thoughtful, troubled Hector stands out all the more
as a warrior who sees war clearly and wants no more of it. Giraudoux
casts gender politics in stark relief; Hector's manhood is questioned
because he stands with the women, while the women's protests are belittled
because as Demokos puts it, "They may say anything."
As important as
the questions There Will Be raises about the necessity or validity
of war, there are also the ones about how individuals and populations
work themselves up to war. The way the people of Troy clamor for war
resonates uncannily with how easily we Americans have accepted the current
conflict. When the crew of Paris' ship contradicts the story Hector
is trying to sell Ulysses about how Paris has not "insulted"
Helen, when Demokos applies his talents to the war effort ("The
mission of those who understand how to speak and write is to compliment
and praise war ceaselessly and indiscriminately"), and when Helen
chooses to ignore her complicity in the events, we see the ways people
respond to the possibility of war. Youthful excitement, convenient intellectual
justification, a turning away in favor of other pursuits -- Giraudoux
saw them all in his contemporaries, just as we see them in ourselves.
Dooley's casting
is inspired. Besides Shotgun regulars Donohue, Worsley, Mulholland,
Andy Alabran, Brent Rosenbaum, and Greg Lucey, we get John Patrick Moore
as spoiled, pretty Paris, who looks ready to throw a tantrum if his
toy -- the supremely confident and equally spoiled Helen (Roxana Ortega)
-- is taken away, Kimberly Wilday as a coke-snorting Cassandra, Malcolm
Brownson and Michael Asberry as Hector and Ulysses, and Sarah Maslin
as pigtailed Polyxene. Dooley's staging (the neutral set design, the
tape of historical personages crying out their war songs) is designed
expressly to indicate that all war is the same. But is it? Giraudoux
faced the prospect of life under German rule; are we bombing the heck
out of Afghanistan because we're afraid they will overrun us? While
the outcomes are all distressingly similar -- the devastation, the misery
-- all wars are not the same.
The genius of this
play lies in this and the other questions Giraudoux raises, as when
Ajax threatens to take Andromache, and Hector is torn between his desire
to defend his wife and his commitment to preventing a war with Greece.
Will his passion overwhelm his hard-won pacifism? When do we raise our
hand and when do we stand by, and how will we justify whatever decision
we have made? As Sabrina Klein has pointed out, there has been a real
paucity of public debate about the war in Afghanistan; I think audiences
will find that Shotgun's production will give them a chance to hear
some of their own fears and questions voiced publicly.
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Orignal
review available online at:
http://www.eastbayexpress.com/issues/2002-01-02/theater.html/1/index.cfml
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