In a theater landscape littered with productions of Charles Mee’s pop culture mashups of Greek tragedies, Jean Giradoux can’t get any respect. But Giradoux’s 1935 elegant tragicomedy, “The Trojan War Will Not Take Place” (translated and retitled in 1955 as “Tiger at the Gates” by British dramatist Christopher Fry) deserves fresh attention, particularly in an age when the cries for war ring loudly, no matter the casus belli. Sadly, in Giradoux’s vision, that’s pretty much all the ages in the history of humanity. (Though, in retrospect, it’s easy to argue that taking up arms against the Nazis was a bloody necessity.)
Promethean Theatre Ensemble’s revival of “Tiger at the Gates,” directed by John Arthur Lewis, takes a stark approach to the material. The gray battlements of Troy and the rusty, rickety gates of war in Jeremiah Barr and Kaitlyn Grissom’s set suggest a subdivision in its last gasps more than a prosperous kingdom painted in glorious and noble words by poets across the millennia. Even Rachel Sypniewski’s colorful but slightly tatty costumes look like the leftovers at a consignment shop’s going-out-of-business sale.
No wonder a vision like Michelle M. Oliver’s Helen bamboozles the Trojan graybeards like Jerry Bloom’s Priam, despite Helen’s own indifference to Troy and to callow Paris (Nick Savin).
This Helen only likes what she can see in bright colors (and that only in fleeting glimpses) and doesn’t concern herself with psychological motivations. “I don’t like knowing about other people’s feelings. There is nothing more embarrassing,” she tells Jared Dennis’ Hector, who is determined to avoid yet another war. Yet in Oliver’s performance, Helen is not a vapid doll, but rather a woman accepting of fate and incapable of false sentiment. “I think of unhappy people as my equals. I accept them, and I don’t think of my health and my position and beauty as any better than their misery.”
In Giradoux’s telling, it’s the old men past the point of martial danger and the pundits — er, poets — who’ve never crawled onto a battlefield who crave war as a force to give their lives meaning. And it’s the women who register the clearest protests against that mindset. Jamie Bragg’s cryptic-but-sardonic Cassandra, Elaine Carlson’s ribald Hecuba (who describes war as “the bottom of a baboon. … Scarlet, scaley, glazed, framed in a clotted, filthy wig”) and Heather Smith’s anguished Andromache carry the emotional weight.
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Lewis’ staging sometimes falters under the weightiness of the arguments; the mordant wit of Fry’s translation could use some sharpening here to make it feel less pedantic. But this is a rare opportunity to see a play that tackles the complexities and contradictions of why human destiny seems so hard-wired for warfare, and why the tiger at the gates is always sleeping with one eye open.
Review: “Tiger at the Gates” by Promethean Theatre Ensemble
3 STARS
Through April 25, Athenaeum Theatre, 2936 N. Southport Ave.; $22 at 773-935-6875 or prometheantheatre.org