I have puzzled and puzzled about this production. Meghan Kennedy and Kimber Lee preserve the approximate shape of Euripides' great tragedy. Their text rarely echoes his lines directly, but it includes scenes of sharp, cadenced prose or blank verse that evoke the terror and hopelessness of brutally widowed women left in tattered clothing, dirt and desperation.
In particular, Kate DeBuys as Hecuba is magnificent. She projects a stunned concentration in which only the steel of her aristocratic upbringing keeps her functioning.
Almost as good is Lesley Gurule as Andromache, widow to Paris and mother of the doomed infant Astyanax, even though the adapters have turned her into a stumbling drunk with bottle in hand, so blinded that she pays no attention to the child in the perambulator she is pushing. Was it a stage glitch that during her entering maneuver up and across a low platform she managed to dump the kid entirely? Little matter, because Kennedy and Lee have imagined a woman so insensible to motherhood that she and all the women in the huddled group don't hold the child but leave him bundled in the pram.
When you adapt a piece of this power, authority and antiquity, you are presumed to have a concept. What's going on here? Is the company trying to make The Trojan Women more relevant to today? To challenge the traditional relation by altering characters or relationships? Do those burned-out television sets hint at some psychological apocalypse? We really don't know.
Read more and view images at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .
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