Director's Note

 

Euripides premiered his Trōiades (The Female Trojans) in 415, and it endures today as the first recorded anti-war play. In his time, the play is thought to have been a warning to a younger generation of Athenians, set on battle in the Peloponnesian War against Sparta to urge caution about the ramifications of violence and the victims left in its wake. 

 

Our version, built for each shape-shifting, powerhouse of an actor, and penned by Sara Farrington, premiered in 2023 in an amphitheater not far from where Euripides’ Trōiades first played for ancient audiences. The stage was cut out of a mountain, and it was performed for an audience of 700 Athenians, bats feasted stories above our heads in the moonlight. We all felt palpably closer to these Gods the play railed against, like Dionysis himself had orchestrated the moment, a handful of theater nerds enjoying a kind of secret dream come true. 

 

At the heart of this play, however, is a sickening reality that our blue puffy winter coat is a placeholder for the innumerable lost to war. We have a seemingly inexhaustible human drive to destroy one another, that hasn’t changed in 2000 years, though our tools have become more effectively lethal. Since we began performing this play in 2023, thousands worldwide have been killed. In the past few months, even here at home the line They don’t kill civilians. rings with a prescient irony. 

 

We performed the play in Belfast, a city that still carries the weight of a conflict centuries old. Many in the audience remained in their seats after the play concluded even as ushers moved about in the house lights, quietly talking. I turned to the woman sitting next to me. “I am speechless,” she breathlessly whispered with tears in her eyes. I nodded and quietly held her soft hand for a few moments.

 

Although this senseless cycle of violence continues all of these years later, still does the resolve of those who resist. Storytellers and the viewers heeding a familiar, timeless warning.  

 

Civilian: What will I do?

Chorus: Isn’t it obvious?  The show must go on…

Civilian: But if it can’t?

Chorus: It must.

 

Meghan Finn, Director