The Trojan Women
Directed by Andrei Serban
Featuring artists from Cambodia, Guatemala and Kosovo and La MaMa’s Great Jones Repertory Company
Please note: This is an immersive performance.
You will be standing for the first thirty minutes after which time seating is available.
La MaMa’s 1974 The Trojan Women was an internationally acclaimed, groundbreaking production that influenced generations of artists and transformed the way people thought about theater and performance. The creative team was searching for a universal form of communication that could speak to audiences across language and cultural barriers. In this production with new global collaborators, the Great Jones Rep continues to explore how theatre can be a unique means to address contemporary issues.
Please note: This is an immersive performance.
You will be standing for the first thirty minutes after which time seating is available.
The remarkable, many-decade trajectory of Andrei Serban and Liz Swados’s ground-breaking production The Trojan Women has been transformed into an international enterprise that now crosses political and cultural barriers to great and resounding effect. The Trojan Women Project is a must-see event under the auspices of the legendary La Mama and I am looking forward to experiencing the great gathering of forces that is coming our way.
– Anne Bogart
ABOUT THE TROJAN WOMEN PROJECT
The Trojan Women Project sends artists from the Great Jones Rep to communities worldwide to work with actors, musicians and designers in re-creating the music and staging of LaMaMa’s groundbreaking production of The Trojan Women, first produced by Ellen Stewart in 1974.
The Trojan Women is an old story – the play is more than 2500 years old. But its themes – war, displacement, violence against women and children, genocide – continue to be relevant throughout the world. For this reason, The Trojan Women Project seeks to engage with communities where there is a recent history of conflict, and a desire on the part of these communities to use theater as a means of addressing contemporary issues.
Using the text, music, and scenarios originally developed by Elizabeth Swados, Andrei Serban and the Great Jones Repertory Company, workshops focus on the exploration of sound and gesture. In rehearsal, actors and musicians are encouraged to incorporate their own instruments, music, dance and design elements into the production. The workshops and rehearsals lead to performances for their communities, after which the material remains with the participants to use in their future work.
The Trojan Women Project Festival is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts and a grant from the Trust for Mutual Understanding. Major funding for the festival and the Trojan Women Project comes from Helen Kent-Nicoll and The Nicoll Family Fund.
Additional support provided by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Howard Gilman Foundation, Google Matching Gifts Fund, The Ima Miller Foundation, the van Itallie Foundation, and The Sequoia Foundation.
ABOUT THE TROJAN WOMEN PROJECT FESTIVAL
The Trojan Women Project Festival celebrates the 45th anniversary of La MaMa’s seminal 1974 production of The Trojan Women, originally created by Elizabeth Swados, Andrei Serban, and the Great Jones Rep and produced by Ellen Stewart. The two-week Festival marks the culmination of five years of cultural exchange between The Trojan Women Project and artists in Guatemala, Cambodia, and Kosovo. Established in 2014 by members of La MaMa’s Great Jones Repertory Company, the Trojan Women Project is an international outreach program that facilitates community-building workshops and productions of The Trojan Women in areas of recent or ongoing conflict. As the centerpiece of The Trojan Women Project Festival, artists from three different countries will join the Great Jones Rep and director Andrei Serban to stage a bold new production of The Trojan Women, with themes of war, displacement, and violence against women and children that remain strikingly relevant today. The two-week festival will include performances of The Trojan Women, panel discussions, workshops, and presentations of original work by the festival company.
FEATURING
Arthur Adair
Sheree V Campbell
Yuna Ella Clark
Richard Cohen
Cerentha Cook
Ixchel Tuyuc Cux
Jamari Burrows Davis
Maura Donohue
George Drance, SJ
Eugene the Poogene
Victor Javier Flores
Sara Galassini
Edis Galushi
Michal Gamily
Berta Lidia Chirix Garcia
Edlir Gashi
John Gutierrez
Paul Harris
Yael Haskal
Kim Ima
Onni Johnson
Qendresa Kajtazi
Skender Kapllani
Chansina Khon
Isabel Harper Leight
Daniela Markaj
Julia Martin
Liam Lui Martin
Fiona Lui Martin
Victor Hugo Martnez
Mattie McMaster
Amina Khloe Meredith
Randi Leeanna Meredith
Valois Mickens
Adam Parker
Halleli Gamily Peleg
Lisbeth Jaquelin Sirin Peren
Grace Phelan
Maya Celeste Rivas
Bill Ruyle
Kim Savarino
Ros Sokunthea
Chanborey Soy
Branislav Stankovic
Stefan Aleksandar Stojanovic
Shigeko Sara Suga
Xoshil Martinez Taracena
Yukio Tsuji
Ilire Vinca
Mirian Lisbet Chacach Xocop
Mia Yoo
Perry Yung
Produced by La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club
Directed by Andrei Serban
Composed by Elizabeth Swados
Costume Design – Gabriel Berry
Original Set Design – Jun Maeda
“Most of the time I write about plays, good, bad, or indifferent. Once in a while, I get to write about the theater. It always sends shivers down the back of my typewriter. Now is one of those times. The immediacy of Mr. Serban’s theater far transcends the narrative notion of knowing what happens in any literary sense… makes you feel such basic emotions as love, suffering, anguish, disgust and fear, at a level not so far removed from reality. Andrei Serban’s trilogy of Greek plays is an event in a new theater.”
– Clive Barnes, The New York Times, October 20, 1974
“We are far away from Euripides and from Greece. We are elsewhere, embedded in a barbaric world. That is how we must feel when seeing Trojan Women which LaMaMa Experimental Theatre brings us like a ceremonial coming from all corners of the world, where all languages are spoken at [the] same rhythm and with a similar impulse”.
– Pierre Marcabru, France Soir, October 10, 1975
“It was in 1974 that the experimental Romanian director Andrei Serban and the young composer Elizabeth Swados caused a sensation with their feral, incantatory approach to Greek tragedy…..Twenty-two years on, the collaborators….have returned to LaMaMa with a triumphant revival of Trojan Women, a 90-minute fragment of the original Fragments of a Trilogy….”
– Peter Marks, The New York Times, December 17, 1996
“The Trojan Women was revived in December to celebrate La MaMa’s 35th Anniversary. It’s a potent reminder of the theater’s capacity to transcend time and place, to live in the here and now, and yes, to remind us of what it was like when such precepts were part of our daily vocabulary. I considered myself fortunate to catch this piece when it was last revived at La MaMa in 1987, and it remained with me ever since with the power of a recurring dream.”
– David Kaufmand, Downtown, January 15, 1997
“Throughout history, women have been subjected to violence and unfair treatment. They’ve been victims of war and forced displacement, political conflict, physical mutilation and genocide. They have suffered at the hands of sadists, and of those who believe that women are weak and helpless…..This sad reality is what drives La MaMa’s The Trojan Women Project team to tour the globe …….Taking part in this project, Cambodia’s Amrita Performing Arts organisation recently collaborated with La MaMa to stage a powerful performance that transcended ordinary theatre.”
– Agnes Alpuerto and Say Tola, Khmer Times , March 2, 2018