The Trojan Women a Love Story: A Postmodern Semiotics of the Tragic

Abstract

Charles Mee, before turning to playwriting, authored several well-known political histories. To the last of these, from 1993, he gave the ironically portentous title of Playing God: Seven Fateful Moments When Great Men Met to Change the World. With this deconstructive final word after two decades as a historian, he did not in fact abandon history, but began to write it in the medium of theatre. In doing so Mee has come to share a view articulated by Roland Barthes, who was once a university student of theatre and actor in Greek tragedies: the view that theatre, and Greek tragedy in particular, can illuminate our history as a story unfolding before us, allowing us to connect critically past with present as our best hope for the future. The American director Tina Landau, a frequent collaborator with Charles Mee, likewise believes that the ancient Greek tragedies helped constitute, articulate, and today still codify the structural base in myth and history of Western civilization. Accordingly, Mee and Landau have created a number of what they call ‘site-specific pieces’ adapted from Greek drama, site-specific in that they are created out of the specific material space and time at hand. One of these is The Trojan Women a Love Story which was developed and premiered at the University of Washington in Seattle in the spring of 1996. The production was based on Euripides' play The Trojan Women and Hector Berlioz's 1859 opera Les Troyens, which in turn retells the story of Aeneas and Queen Dido of Carthage from Virgil's epic, The Aeneid.