The play of hope in spite of suffering
Writers: Ephraim Robinson and Madelynne Van Roekel
The Drama Department will be performing “The Trojan Women” by Euripides, translated by Nicholas Rudall, for this semester’s mainstage. Lucy Gallagher, junior English and drama major, calls the play a “gut-punch of tragedy.” The play takes place immediately after the Trojan War, when the Trojan women are being carted away as concubines and slaves.
Written for an Athenian audience in 415 B.C., “The Trojan Women” gives voice to war victims. Gallagher, who plays Helen, says that at its heart, the play “is about people suffering.”
Sienna Abbott, a senior drama major who plays Hecuba, says “This is the grief and suffering of the world before Christ came.”
As Hecuba, Abbott is never alone on stage. The chorus works as a support system for Hecuba while on stage, but all of the actors have a support system off-stage as well. They rehearse 15 hours a week, and in that time together, they learn from their guest director to be bold enough to be embarrassed, and honest enough to achieve something meaningful.
Matthew Gray is the guest director of this semester’s mainstage play. He enjoys directing college students because it reminds him of why he became a director and an actor in the first place.
He says that college students “Hunger for knowledge and understanding [the] craft [of acting].”
Gray grew up in the DFW area, but he went to New York City to try to make his breakthrough in acting. In 2003, Gray moved back to DFW with his wife.
He advises actors to “…continually reinvest in defining [their] own success.”
He soon realized that he wanted to start his own theater company, which was impossible in NYC. So, he moved to DFW. In the same year that he returned to his hometown, he and his wife started the Classical Theater Company in Plano, TX. The Company disbanded in 2007, but Gray’s reputation in the DFW theater world has only grown since then.
In 2023, he directed Sophocles’s “Antigone” at the University of North Texas. Now he has come to direct “The Trojan Women” at UD at the invitation of Stefan Novinski, the interim chair of the Drama Department.
The play was chosen because it has a cast of nearly all women, and the Drama Department has many talented actresses at the moment. This play makes full use of their skills. Indeed, Gray has especially enjoyed working with UD students.
“UD has its own flavor and its own style of student,” he says. “You guys are super unique in that pretty much everybody is intelligent and an overachiever. It’s great to come into a process where the cast knows more about Greek mythology than I do.” He added, “The level of talent and work ethic [in UD’s actors] is super high.”
In last semester’s play, “The King Stag,” all the actors wore masks, and everything was full of fun. Though “The Trojan Women” was originally a masked play, Gray has opted for a performance without masks. He wants to extricate anything that keeps the audience from being fully involved in the play. Therefore, we will see the tears of the Trojan women, glistening in their own eyes.
Abbott says, “As an audience member, my hope is that you will be able to experience the grief with [Hecuba].”
At the end of the play, Hecuba, the “Queen of Grief” as Poseidon names her in the play’s opening, says, “We will walk on.” In response to this, Gallagher says, “There is still hope somehow in living… Somehow, there is still something good in life.”
Performances for the “The Trojan Women” will run Apr. 2-12 in the Drama Building.
You can see Sienna Abbott again this summer, performing as Bianca in Shakespeare Dallas’ “Othello.”