Two Kinds of Anguish

...But playing in the round brings the performers within spitting distance...

...Euripides asked himself what war is like when one looks straight at it...

...In the last act, the dybbuk has taken possession of her and at her father's urging a rabbi endeavors to exorcise it...

...To make it appear Provocative or Relevant To Our Time...

...Isn't Andromache still alive...

...The play was written by S. Ansky in Russian and not, as is commonly supposed, in Hebrew or Yiddish...

...another, Polyxena, lies sacrificed on the tomb of Achilles...

...But a statement of this kind explains little about the intent of the play...

...they chose instead to behave like barbarians and treat their victims as spoils...

...But with the burning of the city Euripides strikes down Hecuba's last hope...

...A number of times the Trojan women actually praise their dead for having fought gallantly...

...Hasn't Cassandra predicted the downfall of the Greeks...

...At the core of each act you find a sharp antithesis...

...They have fused and acquired a common patina of long usage...

...when it does, Troy begins to turn into Our Town...

...One discordant note sounds...

...An assault on the Melians had ended barely one year before Euripides' play appeared...

...It makes no attempt at characterization as we tend to expect it today, but this absence of "real people" works as another advantage in lubricating the action and letting it flow unimpeded between reality, ceremony and myth...

...Euripides was no mere pamphleteer or griefmonger fulminating against the obvious horrors of war...

...They touch and stroke the girl's white satin bridal gown with their gray hands until she is repelled and/or tempted into a trance...

...Yet it has elements of all these species, as well as big moments that are contrived, and well contrived at that...

...Miss Hamilton doubtless meant well in recruiting Euripides to an antiwar cause, but The Trojan Women does not "look straight at war...

...In act one it is expressed by the student Chanan, a pious youngster who has dared to dip into the forbidden Cabbala and whose soul, in the form of a dybbuk, later invades the body of Leah, the girl he loves...

...the memory of that courage is perhaps their only consolation...

...Greek theater does not need to come down and shill for our sympathy...

...In this era of pushbutton megadeaths the daily reviewers are hardly to blame if they rise righteously to the program note at the Circle in the Square (just as they came out powerfully for The Blacks when sales gimmickry and a misleading production made that work look like a civil-rights tract...

...He was called the poet of the world's grief...

...Even in prose, though, this is a monarch among plays, and probably the best value in theatregoing so far this season...

...Thus, the line of the play is not a straight decline...

...The opening scenes are an announcement and summation of the anguish to be explored...

...Now the antithesis is personified, soul against body, in Leah the living girl who speaks in the voice of the dead Chanan...

...The very lack of definition in the roles makes it possible, too, for the players to give themselves up communally to the story as if they are devout celebrants at a service...

...Dudley Fitts has remarked that "modern English shuns the kind of rhetorical elevation" that is the flesh of Euripides' writing, yet Richmond Lattimore's translation of The Trojan Women makes good English poetry...

...The director, Michael Cacoyannis, who recently filmed Electro with Irene Pappas, a brilliant camera and appalling subtitles, evidently picked the Hamilton version over the several others available because it achieves narrative thrust at the expense of textural subtleties...

...The program note, written by the translator Edith Hamilton, informs us that The Trojan Women "was set upon the Athenian stage by Euripides . . . with the deliberate intention of showing war up for what it is...

...showing the hideousness of cruelty and the pitifulness of human weakness and human pain...

...These words are a scattering of sentences taken from Miss Hamilton's introduction to the play, entitled "A Pacifist in Athens" and published, significantly enough, in 1937...

...For other reasons, too, a certain remoteness might have helped the presentation...

...Evgeny Vachtangov, to glide from theatrical to religious rituals and back with no change of language and no hiatus in the staging...

...Chaim Nachman Bialik subsequently translated it into Hebrew and so permitted the director...

...She is not allowed to lapse into the comfort of total despair...

...A man inhabiting a woman— that is the consummation of the play, profoundly religious and at the same time intensely sexual...

...Hecuba's husband and sons have already been slain...

...Euripides epitomizes the Trojan nation in Hecuba, the widow of Priam, heaping on her all of Troy's suffering...

...Chanan talks of a sin that is refined until it becomes as pure gold, a lust that is refined until it becomes the Song of Songs...

...The conquerors, Euripides was saying—and taking a risk in saying it—might have shown clemency...

...her only living grandchild, Astyanax, the young son of Andromache and Hector, will be flung from the walls of Troy and broken, and Hecuba herself made over to Odysseus as his slave...

...Then, methodically, the tragedy moves in close to the principals, alighting at last like a bird of doom on Hecuba...

...The open stage at the Circle in the Square has always been a mixed blessing...

...they have also lost their edges so that even the movement, of which there is a great deal, seems mutilated and worn...

...And finally, the Greeks set fire to the remains of Troy...

...Miss Hamilton opted for prose typeset into verse— a numb, grammatical language in the style of E. V. Rieu's Homer...

...this is the recorded voice of Rod Steiger as Poseidon...

...Before her wedding Leah is required to dance with a crowd of beggars, grotesques drawn from Brueghel—"The Census at Jerusalem," for example— and prefiguring the creatures displayed by Bunuel in Viridiana...

...her daughterin-law Andromache has become the property of Achilles' son...

...Not that the story is indecisive...

...In the second act the antithesis is a physical one...

...A classic of a different stripe has arrived at the Little Theater, where the Habimah Theater is lodged until late in March...

...The playwright has Hecuba imprisoned in a shrinking cell, yet he keeps opening a window for her to run to...

...It is not a tragedy by any means, nor is it stiff like a melodrama, nor innocent and quaint like a mystery, nor blustering like pageantry...

...As a team the cast submits heroically to the disciplines imposed by Cacoyannis, who wrenches an impressive evening out of the drama, even if he brushes impatiently past some of the details for the sake of a mounting and overwhelming conclusion...

...In this play he sounded the deepest depths of that grief...

...May not Astyanax return as a man—she thinks this before she is told about his sentence—and recapture Troy...

...Habimah claims to have preserved the original staging and now, 60 years after Vachtangov took it over, you cannot properly separate the play from his shaping of it...

...It describes the aftermath of one particular conflict, from which it draws a parallel for Athenian audiences...

...It climbs momentarily after the delivery of each blow...

...This play is the answer...

...This play is to Habimah what Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme is to the Comédie-Française or Miss Julie to the Royal Dramatic Theater of Sweden: breadand-butter and art—that is, an art sandwich...

...Won't Menelaus punish Helen...

...You would probably have to invent a category —inter-communion?—for the play and another—tragedia dell'arte?— for the style...

...What then is this Dybbuk...

...Now one of her daughters, Cassandra, is to be taken back to Mycenae by Agamemnon...

...It is Ansky's dramatic triumph, an image as original, terrible and simple as that of Prometheus before the pit, Oedipus wearing two bloodied holes in place of eyes, Tartuffe at the feet of Elmire or Hecuba alone on the stage of Troy...

...the Athenian army had killed off all its Melian prisoners and taken their wives and children into slavery...

...Its three plays are coming up (unfortunately) in sequence rather than in repertory, and the first is that curio The Dybbuk...

...Not at all...

...ON STAGE By Albert Bermel Two Kinds of Anguish WHEN A drama of the dimensions and complexity of The Trojan Women wins a modern staging, what point is there in pinning on it a cheap medallion that reads "anti-war play...

...Miss Hamilton's translation, like her introduction, simplifies and flattens—and thereby romanticizes —Euripides...

...Jane White gives Helen a majesty of presence and a sonority of speech that none of the other actors quite manages to measure up to, although Mildred Dunnock as Hecuba does compensate for her smallness with unremitting devotion and genuine salt tears...

...To complete her degradation, Hecuba is accused by Helen of having instigated the war by giving birth to Paris...

...It gives the director generous room for deployment, and Cacoyannis, who is credited with the "choreography" as well as the direction, sends his chorus swooping and wailing across every part of it—now in compact squadrons, now splashing outward—or holds them together in a kinetic stillness...

...Yes, that's what happened to Captain Ahab: he was swallowed by the god of the sea...

...This was two years after Jouvet had presented Giraudoux's The Trojan War Will Not Take Place (produced here under the title of Tiger al the Gates), which suggested that when enough people want a war, it cannot be prevented by lofty talk or rational persuasion...