Sara Farrington is bringing the classics, but with a twist: she wants them to be accessible. Her play is called A Trojan Woman, and is a take on Euripides’ ancient Greek play, The Trojan Women, which first premiered in Athens in 416 BC as a protest against the Peloppensian War. Her modern version is by turns funny, highly accessible, engagingly theatrical, and also timely and moving. I spoke recently with Sara about her play which I saw in March this year at Luna Stage, in West Orange, New Jersey. The show will be touring to Belfast (November 29-30), and to London (December 3-9).
PH: You said you’ve seen a remarkable impact on audiences who have seen this piece. Tell me about the impact.
SF: This play does rise, I think, above the cesspool of politics, and I think there are very few plays that can do that. I think it has to be a play old enough to withstand time, of course. It has to be an ancient play too, I think, because a modern political play people can totally blow off, or it becomes dated almost immediately. But if it’s an ancient play that still moves people? That means something. But yes, amazingly, we have performed this piece in front of an amphitheater of 600 Greek people, super conservative American audiences and of course, progressive theater going audiences and the responses are always identical. We’ve been calling it a clarion call to people’s common humanity.
PH: That’s wild. It goes beyond the bounds of political leanings.
SF: I think so. A Trojan Woman reminds audiences of the miraculous sameness of being a human being. We all wake up in the morning and we do the same things over and over again till we die—brush our teeth, our hair, get dressed and like, try not to be an asshole minute to minute. You know what I mean? We care about little moments that actually could be expanded into like caring about each other and relating to each other.
PH: Do you think this play is even more relevant because of the recent election?
SF: Absolutely. Human beings naturally slip into tribalist mode and always have. In A Trojan Woman it’s Greeks versus Trojans, but of course there the Greeks had classes just like us, women, slaves, etc…Now in the US it is (and has always been) the rich versus poor. No matter what side we think we’re on, Democrat, Republican, MAGA Cultist, whatever, it’s always gonna be the rich tricking the poor into tribalising ourselves, in-fighting essentially, so we are distracted enough down here for them to keep control up there. It just happened on November 5th. And we are homo sapiens so we seem to consistently fall for it en masse. It’s our instinct. And it takes work and daily critical thought not to slip into our instinctual tribe mode. It’s hard to fight our instincts, but we can do it. The story of The Trojan Women is, in a nutshell, the eternal result of tribal war—the ruination of civilians, the poor, women, children. Like, what’s the point? What is the point?
PH: Does that go back to your play’s ethos, that “It doesn’t have to be this way?”
SF: Yeah. I mean, humans have tried. There were plenty of hedonist and enlightened movements in the ancient world, “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we will die!” ideology driven movements. I think A Trojan Woman pushes for this radical idea that we take care of our own species, you know? Our own species! When I say it doesn’t have to be this way, it really doesn’t. It’s our choice. If we as a species could only evolve out of, say, religion, which is so essential to tribalism and the root of so many wars and violence and ignorance, and realize that it’s us human beings in the driver’s seat! Not god or satan or whatever big daddy in the sky we choose to be afraid of. We are in control. That’s the real miracle. It’s weird how we refuse to collectively enjoy that.
PH: The concept of “the gods” factors heavily into this piece.
SF: It does. That is another reason why I’m attracted to the ancient Greeks—not only were they a pantheistic society but they viewed the gods on Mount Olympus as just as fallible and fucked up as we are on earth. A Trojan Woman, both mine and Euripides’, literally opens with Athena and Poseidon, two gods, arguing over how much or little they feel like caring about the humans in Troy. They are fickle and uncaring. My version of Poseidon is this kind of casually depressed surfer dude sea god lamenting the loss of his favorite resort town (Troy) and Athena, a warrior god who was originally rooting for the Greek army, but then suddenly deciding she really doesn’t like the Greeks anymore and asking Poseidon to make it a rough journey home for them. Then they vanish and never appear in the play again. Feels about right.
PH: One of your goals was to make this play accessible to audiences who might not otherwise be too familiar with it or classical language and references.
SF: Yes! In theater school and then later when I first started acting in New York (I started as an actor), I never liked the traditional version of The Trojan Women because to my youthful eyeballs the original felt like three hours of ancient Greek references and lamentation. I just didn’t understand it. I was actually in a staged reading of a new translation when I was a 20-something actor and I literally remember thinking: “I have no idea what’s coming out of my mouth.” I didn’t understand it. Later I realized of course, that it had to be me, I’m the idiot, right? It can’t be the play. It has to be me. But so now wait… I have to know all this ancient stuff to enjoy this? To understand this? How is that fair? Seems a bit elitist. So therein lies the problem. Euripides wrote for his audience’s ears and brains, as did Shakespeare, Moliere, Chekhov. But now, when we homo sapiens need the classics the most I think, we continue to translate and perform the classics in this dusty, lofty, precious, museum-y tone? Why? So getting rid of that tone is what my A Trojan Woman does really well, I think. It is profoundly accessible. You don’t have to know who Cassandra was or Queen Hecuba or Andromache or Helen or what the Trojan War was fought about. That’s on me. That’s my playwriting responsibility to smuggle that info in the story.
PH: A Trojan Woman is actually a one-woman performance featuring Drita Kabashi in every role.
SF: Yeah and she’s totally at home on stage in this. She’s got like, a Mick Jagger-ness about her, like totally agile moving from role to role. And she seems to be actually experiencing everything, almost like she’s possessed. The play manages to avoid that solo show trope of now I’m here and now I’m here and now I’m here and I’ll just change my voice and run around. Instead it’s more like she’s accomplishing this task of being a conduit for these iconic ancient characters.
PH: Meghan Finn directed the piece. How did you guys connect and what was working with her like?
SF: Meghan and I have known each other for a long time and actually studied at the same theater conservatory at The National Theatre Institute at the Eugene O’Neill Center in Waterford, Connecticut, although we were different years. We started making theater in New York at about the same time too, doing it ourselves, constantly hustling, feverishly devoted, you know? Which you have to be. She was directing, and I was acting, but then evolved into exclusively playwriting. Then in another parallel life move, we both went to graduate school at Brooklyn College with the evil Mac Wellman, who we both adore so much. And of course, I’ve done several of my shows at The Tank. Working with Meghan is like… I like to categorize theater makers into two basic obnoxious categories: Dreamers and Soldiers. Meghan is a Soldier—boots on the ground, hands dirty, works her ass off, takes the risk, pulls it off magically. And when shit feels insurmountable, just really big and risky, like touring this to Athens by ourselves (with our combined 4 kids) and now this sweeping UK tour, Meghan is always good for a zen “it’ll be fine.” And in this insane life we’ve chosen for ourselves, I am very grateful for an “it’ll be fine.”
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