Photo: A Trojan Woman, which played New Jersey’s Luna Stage in 2024, stars Drita Kabashi. Photo courtesy of Luna Stage / Provided by KSA PR with permission.
Sara Farrington’s new play A Trojan Woman, based on Euripedes’ The Trojan Women from 415 BCE, will soon begin a weekend engagement, July 25-27, at the Powerhouse Theater at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. The show is set in the aftermath of the Trojan War and follows a woman and her child as they try to make sense of the ruins around them, according to press notes.
A Trojan Woman previously played at King’s Head Theatre in London and Luna Stage in New Jersey, among other places. A more expansive United States tour that will include regional theaters and college campuses is being planned. The Powerhouse production is directed by Meghan Finn and stars Drita Kabashi in the title role.
Recently Farrington exchanged emails with Hollywood Soapbox and opened up about the anti-war message of her adaptation. Her other plays include BrandoCapote, CasablancaBox and Dr. Uncanny Presents: Moreau ’96, among other works. She is also the co-founder of the theater company Foxy Films. Questions and answers have been slightly edited for style.
What did day one of this project look like? What inspired you to put pen to paper?
Day one — such a good question. Originally, this piece was a commission from the Interbalkan Festival for Ancient Drama in Athens, and director Meghan Finn literally gave me the choice to adapt any Greek tragedy I wanted, which was a gift. I am an acolyte of the ancient Greek playwrights. They invented everything — story, acting, playwriting, theater itself, of course. But I committed to Euripides’ The Trojan Women not because I loved it, but because I didn’t understand it.
I’d read it, seen it, even performed Cassandra in it once when I was an actor. But I didn’t get it — it was starkly different from the other Greek tragedies. It opens with Poseidon and Athena arguing about whether they should care about the suffering humans below, and then the rest of the play just felt like women lamenting. Strangely, very little happens onstage, too. But because it’s Euripides, I knew I was wrong, missing something, so I was curious. My entire playwriting practice is driven by an innate curiosity to know things I don’t know. So I think my lack of understanding of The Trojan Women had me put pen to paper.
I don’t speak Greek and certainly not ancient Greek, which is what Euripides wrote in, so I spent a year with every translation I could find, also watched play versions. And there’s this awesome film version from 1971 with Katharine Hepburn, Irene Papas and Vanessa Redgrave, directed by Michael Cacoyannis. That’s probably the best version out there.
Once I did that, when I got actually writing, I first excised all the ancient Greek or academic-seeming references a modern audience couldn’t relate to. I then de-museum-ified the tone, rolled it around in the dirt, modernized the language, made it sound and feel like me — a contemporary, powerless mom witnessing violence the human mind is not programmed to witness. Once I had processed the original like this, I got it. Of course it’s a lament to uncaring gods, and nothing happens. That was Euripides’ whole point about us as a species. He invented the protest play by courageously holding a mirror up to the then bloodthirsty Athenian government (who had only weeks before ruthlessly invaded the tiny island of Melos, killing all 600 men and enslaving the women and children) and saying look at yourselves.
He is using the Trojan War as a parable. It’s good to remember that the Trojan War happened 1,000 years before Euripides’ time, so he’s referencing the ancient Greeks’ ancient Greeks. The impulse in anyone adapting The Trojan Women is the same — placing a modern war inside it and holding it up as a mirror to modern society.
How much of the text is an adaptation, and how much is created anew?
My version actually exists inside an act of modern warfare, specifically, an early moment in the Russian war against Ukraine that affected me deeply. Tetiana Perebyinis, 43, and her two kids, Mykyta, 18, and Alisa, 9, were killed as they fled on foot from their suburb of Irpin to Kyiv. The moment was photographed by Lynsey Addario of The New York Times and came to represent Russian brutality upon Ukrainian civilians.
I borrowed Tetiana’s story for the piece, their escape on foot, their needless deaths. The opening line, too, is inspired by what I can only assume she was thinking as she ran to that bridge: “They won’t kill civilians. They won’t kill civilians. They won’t kill civilians.” It’s repeated throughout, a reassuring, but totally false mantra. I actually borrowed visuals from that photo, too — their brightly colored coats, specifically.
The ancient Greek part of this play exists inside that moment of attack and the actor’s realization of it, so that serves as the framing device. The “Trojan Women” part of the play, as mentioned above, is me processing the story through my own voice and playwriting style. I made it very contemporary, refreshingly unscholarly sounding, and actually very funny throughout (which I think is the best way to deliver tragedy). But the basic story comes from Euripides and so simple: Enter Gods, Enter Hecuba, Enter Chorus, Enter Messenger, Enter Cassandra, Enter Andromache, Death of Astyanax (which is the only action in the play), Enter Helen of Troy, Exit Messenger, End. It really is beautiful in its simplicity.
Did you conduct historical or literary research to better understand this historical time period?
Definitely, that’s where my curiosity drives things. There isn’t a lot known about Euripides, but I do know he was a deadly serious guy, humorless, according to Aristophanes (who actually wrote a play about him, totally spoofing him, called The Women Of Thesmophoria). He was very anti-war, as we see in Trojan Women, but my favorite thing about him is he was an experimental theater maker.
The Athenian government’s general consensus on him was he got in his own way — that’s why he only won the City Dionysia only four times (he had a play in the competition 22 times). The year he entered Medea into the contest, he came in last. Why? Because unlike everyone else, he wrote plays about women, he examined the psychology of characters, he gave voice to victims of war, he shone a light on the awfulness of Athens at war — wonderfully ahead of his time. Trojan Woman does all of that in one play. Plus, every character is female except for Talthybius the Messenger. I have a popular Substack called Theater Is Hard where I imagine what I think the Greek theater world was like. I like to think it wasn’t all that different from the theater world now. (I’m secretly working on a play about it.)
Why was it important to have this tale also comment on current times?
For a 2,500-year-old play, it is alarmingly current. It makes me so sad that it works with every time period and every war, that we keep doing the same things over and over again, expecting different outcomes — we’re an insane species. The final speech in the play speaks to why I think [this]. It’s this long, lean speech I call the “No Speech,” which was inspired by choreographer Yvonne Rainer’s No Manifesto.
The specific details make me very emotional. It sums up what is robbed from generation after generation in war, and it’s the everyday stuff, the pedestrian stuff we take for granted. If a child civilian dies then, according to the speech, they get, “No birthday parties. No school plays. No homework. No little jeans ripped at the knees. No new shoes. No trampolines. No flirting. No girls. No boys. No breakups. No cool hair with gel, etc.” I intended for the delivery here to be tortuously slow, as if lifting each robbed experience up to the gods for an explanation. Or better yet, a bitter offering to them, a sacrifice.
This final speech is what this play personally means to me. It’s why I’ll never understand why men would rob mothers and children of these specific joys. How dare they? Who are they? And it’s not just foreign wars, of course. It makes me think about how many American kids die just because they went to school one day — what that did to their parents. And so the speech goes on and on: “No dances. No late nights laughing. No phone. No bike. No car…”
How long did it take to write the play?
Only three or four weeks of active writing, but the research and mental marinating period took much longer, maybe a year, which is still very short for me. Most of my plays take 3-7 years from idea to premiere. It takes a long time to get a play right, really long. I’m not a page-to-stage playwright. I have to work with actors and director. My teacher in grad school, Mac Wellman, said that the actual writing process of a play should only be three weeks (he was delightfully specific). It’s the other stuff that takes years — rewrites, readings, workshops, rehearsals — and that’s if an elusive production can be obtained.
What do you hope audiences are talking about as they leave the play?
What a waste of time war is, to say the least. We are here once, just one time. How idiotic, how cruel, how presumptuous, to have political and religious ideologies that rob people of their one time around. I’ll never understand it. Life can be so joyous, but en masse, the homosapiens’ default setting seems to be destruction. I think homosapiens can evolve out of our destructive instinct; we just have to work at it every day — like, actively. Not many men (and wars are man’s work, I think) are willing to do that. Introspection means pain.
What’s next for the work after this July engagement?
Our brilliant producer, Carol Ostrow, and her production company, Stop The Wind Theatricals, is soon planning a U.S. tour to arts centers, colleges and universities with this piece. We plan to bring it to international festivals as well. It’s all at stopthewindtheatricals.com. I think touring this work is so important, and I intentionally built it as a portable piece. I know this is something people say a lot, but this play actually does change hearts and minds. I’ve seen it happen. We did a run in MAGA country once, and it broke right through. So the goal is to get it in front of as many people as possible to remind them of what’s true.
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
A Trojan Woman, written by Sara Farrington, will play July 25-27 at the Powerhouse Theater at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. Click here for more information and tickets.
Sara Farrington is the writer of A Trojan Woman, based on Euripedes’ The Trojan Women. Photo courtesy of the artist / Provided by KSA PR with permission.