 | |||
| FEATURES | BLOGS | DAILY DIG | GEAR |
TROJAN BARBIE
Is not a Barbie girl, nor in Barbie’s world
By DAVID DAY
del.ico.us
reddit!LG.jpg)
Whether she knew it or not, playwright Christine Evans is participating in the 50th anniversary year of the iconic Barbie doll with her world-premiere performance of Trojan Barbie coming up in Cambridge. "It's just the strange randomness of the world," she says on the phone in a charming Australian accent. "I was one of those horrible little girls who just wanted to play bow and arrows when I was a kid ... I was not a Barbie girl."
And Trojan Barbie is not for kids. The play, written by the award-winning Evans, travels back through time, layering on allegories and modernizations of stories of Euripides' Trojan Women. "The thing that really struck me was the condition of our post-modern lives. We live in a time where a lot of different years are colliding at once. One day there is a story about the cloning of sheep on the television and on the next channel, you see images that look like they could have come out of biblical times: women weeping in black beside graves."
Evans is serious business in the world of theater. On top of stints at Brown and Harvard, Evans 'won the Jane Chambers Playwriting Award in 2007 for Trojan Barbie. This production at the A.R.T.'s Zero Arrow Theatre is the latest in a series of shows this year written or directed by women, who are dominant in the American theater landscape these days. "This particular play is a pretty good fit for A.R.T. because they often work with classics and modern interpretations," she says. "And it has been a really collaborative process on top. I feel very welcome here to the company, I mean all rehearsals. And I've been talking with my director for a long time before we got into rehearsals."
Director Carmel O'Reilly has the challenge of staging the complex work, which begins with a girl building a sculpture out of broken Barbie dolls, and ends when the sculpture is complete. Sounds simple enough, but between those two events, Lotte Jones, our doll-repairing hero, has to travel to Turkey, ancient Troy, a Trojan detention camp and elsewhere. The characters are no Snoopy and Sally either: Hecuba, Andromache, Menelaus and Talthybius all make appearances. As Evans describes the staging: "It's designed like an archaeological dig. There's this idea that time is lying perfectly in way with the past at the bottom and the present at the top," she says. "If you make the wrong step, you fall down through it."
But don't expect Mattel to show up at the premiere. "The idea for the sculpture came from my niece. She has this idea to make a sculpture out of smashed up Barbies and glue them onto something pink in the shape of a heart and call it 'Invention Jurassic Barbie.'" But that's the extent of Barbies onstage. And there will be no merchandising tie-in.
"I wish!" says Evans. "Then maybe I'd get rich as a playwright."
TROJAN BARBIE
THROUGH 4.22.09
AMERICAN REPERTORY THEATRE'S
ZERO ARROW THEATRE
CORNER OF MASS. AVE. & ARROW ST.
HAVARD SQ., CAMBRIDGE
617.547.8300
TUE-THU/7:30PM, FRI-SAT/8PM, SAT-SUN/2PM
ALL AGES/$25-$52
AMREP.ORG/TROJANBARBIE
