2 Greek plays find singular strength
Euripides’ plays “Hecuba” and “Helen” are as disparate in tone as hot and cold showers. In the former, the only joy is twisted and caveat-laden — for it’s joy that comes from revenge, joy born of tragedy it can’t erase but that metes out tragedy to another in return. “Helen,” by contrast, can feel as feathery and as fizzy as a screwball comedy, a flouncy caper humming along on a lightly combative romance that never digs too deep.
But in combining the two pieces into the two acts of a single evening of theater, “Hecuba/Helen,” Stanford Repertory Theater forges unexpected connections between the two ancient Greek plays, even if the production doesn’t fully live up to the concept.
The Trojan War, any war, comprises both winners and losers, both catalysts and collateral damage. To hear from only one side is only to nick at the truth; to hear from both is to hack closer to the thorny heart of the matter and to have each side enrich and flesh out the other.
Rush Rehm and Courtney Walsh’s adaptation, seen Friday, July 27, at Stanford’s Roble Studio Theater, casts Walsh in both title roles. As Hecuba, the former queen of Troy, now a slave to the Greeks, she’s already lost her title, her dignity and her people. Now the deaths
“Hecuba/Helen”: Tanslated and adapted by Rush Rehm and Courtney Walsh. Directed by Rehm. Through Aug. 19. Two hours, five minutes. $25. Roble Studio Theater, 375 Santa Teresa St., Stanford. 650-725-5838. www. stanfordreptheater.com
of two of her children loom. The Greeks commandeer her daughter Polyxena (Lea Claire Zawada) as a blood sacrifice to Achilles, while her son Polydorus (Shayan Hooshmand) is at the mercy of his greedy protector, Polymnestor ( Joe Estlack).
The script demands that Walsh mine symphonic range out of grief, that soupiest and most static of emotions, and Walsh isn’t always up to the task. A few bold choices, like a foray into song, lend new shading to suffering; she’s like Shakespeare’s Ophelia, at once fathoming too much and not fathoming at all, the song both a veil over a clouded gaze and a clear-eyed immersion into sadness, the likes of which those who hold onto sanity can never know. But elsewhere, the peaks of her mourning need refining. Successive wounds don’t register with the same impact. It’s like she saw them coming — which maybe Hecuba did, but that doesn’t make for much drama.
As Helen, Walsh faces equally formidable challenges from the script. After reportedly sparking the war that ruined Hecuba’s life (which Helen denies), she’s marooned in Egypt, fending off the suitor Theoclymenus (Douglas Nolan), waiting for 17 years for rescue by her husband, Menelaus (Estlack), who’s been with what he thinks is his wife but who’s actually a “phantom Helen” created by the gods.
The script never gives the couple a chance to seem in love, though, slackening the whole show’s mainspring. Even when Theoclymenus’ supposedly ardent love gets stymied, he abandons the whole suit as if he has another meathead scheme waiting around the corner.
The pleasure of “Helen,” rather, is in the hijinks of Helen and Menelaus’ trickery to get her out of Theoclymenus’ clutches, the Rube Goldberg mechanics of their bait and switch. Call it another, equally ingenious Trojan horse.
Even when stakes aren’t as taut as they could be, Aleta Hayes’ choreography for the chorus keeps “Hecuba/Helen” ceaselessly dynamic, finding ever more inventive ways to fill the cavernous black box that is Roble Studio Theater. This group of young women is constantly darting about the space, pitching, heaving and lunging their limbs, arranging and rearranging themselves like electrons that then pause for an instant to blossom into a kaleidoscopic pattern.
Elsewhere though, Rehm, who also directs, makes painfully literal choices, especially with projections. The constellation Orion appears for a few seconds when a character mentions it, and the same watery whirlpool pops up each time someone refers to Hades. Repeated images of flames and puffs of air look almost as cheesy as animations from ’90s-era websites.
Overall, though, the strength of the concept overshadows these quibbles. It’s always invigorating to witness one of Western theater’s titanic women, but to see two of them in implied dialogue with one another opens up a new range of possibilities, both for classic drama and for our own.