Trojan Source

Beware of Greek plays bearing gifts.

No Neil Simon-ized night at the theater beneath this wrapping. Nor a Greek tragedy, per se. Not really. ... Well, kinda.

Kinda as in: carnage, Greeks and Alanis Morissette. Bombs, Troy and Depeche Mode. And that overgrown Trojan horsey reinvented as The Mother of All WMDs.

Not quite the mojo Euripides was groovin' to when he penned "The Trojan Women" in 415 B.C. But playwright Charles Mee's inventive incarnation, "The Trojan Women 2.0," parlays the saga of war's cruel aftermath and oppression into a drama both ancient and contemporary, horrifying and hip, and punctuated by pop songs.

"It's definitely not a musical, but a play with music," says Chris Mayse, founder/artistic director of the Atlas Theatre Ensemble, which unveils its version of Mee's variation on Euripides' vision tonight at the Onyx Theatre. "The characters' emotions get to a point where they have to communicate through song."

Mee's stylistic curveball modernizes the Euripides tale of the fall of the Trojans, crushed under the marching boots of the marauding Greeks. As Mee spins it, while the story still rises from the burning ruins of Troy and the ancient character names are maintained, the time is anytime. Today. Tomorrow. Someday soon.

"We've stuck with the Greeks and the Trojans, but the soldier characters are in a very nondescript military look, a black-ops kind of thing," Mayse says. "We didn't put the guys in desert camouflage or the women in burqas because it's about interpretation."

After an unspecified holocaust -- though references to "the flash" leave little doubt -- nearly all the Trojan men and boys are slaughtered. The women -- raped and forced into marriage or slavery -- struggle to cope with their demoralizing reality, sifting through this mountain of misery for a few pebbles of hope.

As the play opens, the women's ruminations on the devastation are wrenchingly real. The playwright fashioned soliloquies from conversations with Holocaust/Hiroshima survivors. As one character recounts:

"This is beyond knowing. I pray that I could pull it all inside my body, all the murder, all the cruelty, the ruin, the fire, the wounds, broken limbs, bleeding children, my city. Bring it all deep inside me so that I could understand."

"Once all the men are gone, it's about how all these women fight to be strong," says Jamie Carvelli, who portrays Andromoche, a woman whose family has been exterminated. "They're taking on the man's job of being strong because they don't have men to protect them anymore."

Brutal, yes. But "Trojan Women" leaves room for more than just doom. "There's a line, 'Life is better than death because there's hope,' and to me that's the resonant theme," Mayse says. "They take the stance like, 'We're going to set up a foundation, a groundwork for future generations to grow off of."

While the women initially wallow in apocalyptic despair, they eventually slip into casual chattiness about hangin' at the movies and nights at the opera, phasing into an oddly accepting lifestyle.

"They try to find some normalcy among this chaos because hope is something we have to keep in the back of our minds," Mayse says. "Even though it's buried with so much pain on top of it, there are great moments of joy when they revel in each other."

Though Mee largely molds the dialogue into verse, it's adapted to contemporary language and laced with profanity, with characters soon crooning the tunes of Joan Jett, Alanis Morissette, Depeche Mode and the Shirelles, among others, songs ranging from "I Love Rock and Roll" to "I'm a Bitch, I'm a Lover."

But for all the pop-song passions, the playwright still chills through simple words that not only evoke echoes of the past, but concerns of the present and cautions for the future.

One wonders what era, what nations, what conflicts a woman condemns when she declares:

"A world destroyed by the hands of those who thought themselves the creators of civilization."

Contact reporter Steve Bornfeld at sbornfeld@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0256.