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Arts & Letters

The Helen of Troy whom we all know from our youth was central to an alternative story already current in antiquity. In that tale, the legendary beauty did not go off to Troy with her lover, the Trojan prince, Paris, but rather was spirited away to Egypt while a phantom Helen was fought over on the battlefields before the walls of the city. Euripides, who was attracted to recherche and less obvious stories, made this version into a play. Ellen McLaughlin, who adapted this Euripidean version, previously made a contemporary version of Euripides’ Iphigenia in Taurus. In that dramatization of another variant story, Iphigenia is not sacrificed on the altar at Aulis, but rather is substituted by a fawn and is spirited away to live among the Taurians. 

The narrative outcome of these two dramas is unusual. In both, a woman, kept against her will in a remote place (from the Athenian perspective) by a powerful male, is finally rescued through the clever stratagems of another male who, after much struggle, arrives at her side. These dramas have “happy” endings; they mostly resemble the structure and ethos of Hellenistic prose fiction, a kind of prototypical romance, in which star-crossed lovers, after many a struggle, are reunited and live happily ever after. In Euripides, the rescuer is in one instance a husband, in the other a brother. Clearly enough, these are not typically “tragic” dramas.

But then what is typical? We know so very little about the context in which ancient drama was performed, and so small a percentage of the plays written actually survives that an intelligent generalization is not possible, although often attempted. One ought to limit the definition to a series of dramatic iambic verse dialogues or monologues broken up by lyric choral passages. That is the one enduring truth of extant Athenian tragic drama. McLaughlin is on record as declaring that “I’m involved with the formal structure of Euripides’ Helen.” She has, however, abandoned choral passages, which make contemporary audiences squirm since they are so static, so inherently undramatic – although perhaps not originally so. We have neither the music nor the dance; the words are so frequently platitudinous that we must imagine that the excitement lay in the first two elements.

Depending upon the words of the chorus can be tricky. McLaughlin’s Helen has its share of preachy passages, which are perhaps a contemporary stand-in for the chorus – the talk about refugees or the horror of war, for instance – but they bring the action to a complete halt. Refugees, actually, were not much in evidence in antiquity, since the women and children of sacked cities were sold into slavery while their menfolk were killed – a much tidier demographic processing than nowadays. But McLaughlin is talking to us obviously. Still, she imagines that Euripides wrote anti-war plays, Helen being one of them, The Trojan Women another, and that, in speaking out against war, she inhabits his creative skin.

It is difficult for this critic to imagine, however, that, in the radical democracy of fifth-century BCE Athens – engaged in a life-and-death struggle with Sparta – strong criticism of war would go down with the man who chose the scripts, the citizens who paid for the productions, or the audience of ordinary citizens who watched. Yes, Euripides, like his fellow dramatists, does speak of war as one of the ghastly truths of ancient life, but, obedient to the essence of the tragic sense of life that filtered all of ancient Greek thought, he sees it as inevitable. McLaughlin cries out to change things.

She has also eliminated the Egyptian king from Euripides’ text, and, with him, the scenes and schemes whereby he is tricked into handing Helen over to Menelaus (or, as his name is spelled for some reason in this production, Meneleus). This maneuver radically alters the play; there is no longer that delicious and strange resemblance to James Bond movies or Raiders of the Lost Ark, a dramatic charge one never gets from, say, Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus or Aeschylus’ Oresteia. The gain is significant, however. Helen is no longer a prize to be sought, but a person. The bold, original, interesting feature of this play is that Helen is conceived as a personality. Suddenly, one’s acculturated notion of Helen as an icon, a trophy, a man’s appendage, is shattered as McLaughlin reveals what it is like to sit out life hidden, bored, and empty while a phantom performs for men’s desires. Instead of the comic-romance narrative of the lovers’ reunion, McLaughlin has very cleverly made a tragic, dramatic Sleeping Beauty, whose returning husband’s kiss requires that she assume the phantom’s role if she is to wake up. It is an astounding take on Helen. One thinks of The Iliad’s Trojan elders accepting their city’s destruction for the sake of her beauty, or of The Trojan Women’s Menelaus dismissing Hecuba’s arguments for Helen’s punishment, or his rehabilitation of her in The Odyssey as though she were no more than a cat trapped in a tree that has been brought down and set once more on its cushion before the fireplace. This is a very new Helen, indeed.

In this play, Helen sits out the war in a luxury hotel in Egypt, bored, alone, not able to get any news of the war on television. It is the woman trapped in the unapproachability of her perfect physical beauty. Donna Murphy is brilliant as the bored beauty, smart, sophisticated, ignored, jumpy, and always beautiful with no one on hand to appreciate it. Tony Kushner has directed her into holding poses, which is an instinct of which an icon cannot let go. The blue-white of the lighting plays to the pose as well, as does the set, designed by Michael Yeargan, whose work in opera seems to have influenced him here. The esthetic and sensibility of ancient Athenian tragic drama have much in common with the tradition of grand opera, in fact, perhaps most of all in the sense of larger-than-life characters enacting their lives as a declaration or advertisement to their audience.

Kushner suggests this sensibility by having the characters play to the audience more than to each other onstage. Helen’s hotel room is an elegant, vast space between a lavish, metalwork elevator, which one finds in the older Cairene luxury hotels to this day, and an enormous circular bed set with a dark red coverlet and rust pillows. Between these runs a transparent backdrop with a black patterning that is repeated in the carpeting at the apron of the stage, and which recapitulates the iron pattern of the elevator. Over it all presides the vast, ornate roof of the Public Theater’s Martinson Hall.

Helen has only a maidservant to speak with, a role hilariously realized by Marian Seldes, whose hand gestures parody one-dimensional temple carving, whose makeup is that of a silent-film Egyptian priestess, and whose voice and cadence match both gestures and makeup. It’s campy, but Helen, the face that launched a thousand ships, is campy in the twenty-first century. She is just one more over-the-top Norma Desmond who makes the pictures so big. These are wonderful strategies to get the audience to see the baggage of myth Helen must carry with her.

McLaughlin structures the play on a series of arrivals into the hotel suite that emphasize Helen’s passivity, the eternal dilemma of the beautiful woman who lives on the reaction of those who behold her. The visitors bring the same kind of interruption to the proceedings as ancient choral passages. The scenes would be better and the play tighter if the visitors talked less, however. When Io describes her wanderings, she becomes, McLaughlin seems to be saying, the world’s archetypal refugee. Moreover, she is the victim of Zeus’ lust and Hera’s jealousy, just the human walk-on in the divine soap opera. No different really from Helen, who explains how she was just a bribe offered to Paris in return for naming Aphrodite winner in a heavenly beauty contest.

The more problematic visitor is Athena, whose lengthy discourse on the gods’ sadistic cruelty seems alien to ancient ideas of theodicy, and quite does away with the notion that the Trojan War was the result of the lustful masculine confusion of sex, possession, conquest, and narcissism. If they hadn’t had Helen, they would have had to invent her. Phylicia Rashad is wonderful in her sensual swagger, the silvery glitter of her gown in her emphatic pacing and turning underlining the divine control over things. But Kushner has misdirected her, it seems, since hers is much more the behavior of Hera, the anxious, would-be glamour queen, than Athena, the stern warrior goddess, whose wardrobe one imagines would be far more tailored and probably guaranteed not to attract the male eye.

So the frozen beauty queen wasn’t really Helen. She thinks perhaps that she loves Menelaus; at least she can be very sympathetic to the suffering she imagines for him when he realizes she has run off. Menelaus, when he arrives, seems to love her, too. We are centuries away from the heroic age, deep into Hellenistic romance. And yet there is the tragedy, too. Helen, if she is to get out of her isolation, and leave her retreat, must do it on her husband’s terms, take on the definition the male world imposes, and become the Helen we all know. Pour les femmes, plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose, n’est-ce pas?