A Note from our Director:

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This piece has been one of my most challenging artistic projects to date. Trojan Women is so big, so nuanced, so ancient, and pulls on so many heartstrings, that it is difficult to write or speak about this it in broad strokes or linear sentences. But I know I can say this much:

 

Someone once told me that producing a play is like casting a spell. I have since learned what she meant through this show. The themes and events of the play start revealing themselves to you in the room, in your life, and on the news- as if you are casting a spell on the world around you with the text. The spell these actors have cast has forced me to wrestle with many things: the unfathomable strength of women in times of crisis, the comedy that accompanies hopelessness, the often unheard sorrow of the Matriarch whose world crumbles before her, the complexity of male allyship in a world of gendered expectations, the bottomless sorrow of women who cross borders and lose their children, and, perhaps most importantly, the way hate irrevocably poisons and permeates community, down to its roots.

 

This is a story of women surviving, sometimes at the expense of one another, and sometimes not. At the end of each run, I am filled with a heavy sense of gratitude for Helen, Hecuba, and Cassandra (and all of these ancient, archetypical women and men), precisely because they have endured these things so that we do not have to. Their stories allow us to imagine a different world and give us the tools to build the community we want - one where we fight for each other, believe each other, and heal each other.

 

As Hecuba offers us directly, "All is well. Had God not taken us in his hand and thrust our high things low, we would not be this splendor, and our wrong an everlasting music for the song of Earth and Heaven."

 

So welcome to their everlasting splendor, or to their spell. Welcome to Troy.

 

Love,

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Olivia Buntaine

Artistic Director of Project Nongenue