Playwright Sara Farrington spoke about her play “A Trojan Woman,” which will be performed at the Powerhouse Theater at Vassar College from July 25th to the 27th.
What inspired you to write “A Trojan Woman”?
I committed to Euripides’ The Trojan Women not because I loved it, but because I didn’t understand it. I’d read it, seen it, even performed Cassandra in it once when I was an actor. But it was starkly different from the other Greek tragedies.
It opens with Poseidon and Athena arguing about whether they should care about the suffering humans below and then the rest of the play was just women lamenting. Strangely, very little happened onstage, too. But because it’s Euripides, I knew I was wrong, missing something.
My entire playwriting practice is solely driven by an innate curiosity to know things I don’t know— so The Trojan Women it had to be. I spent a year with every translation of the Euripides I could find. I first excised all the ancient Greek references a modern audience couldn’t relate to.
I then de-museum-ified the tone, rolled it around in the dirt, modernized the language, made it sound and feel like me— a contemporary powerless mom witnessing violence the human mind is not programmed to witness.
Once I had processed the original like this, I got it. Of course it’s a lament to uncaring gods! Of course nothing happens!
That was Euripides’ whole point about us as a species. In one unexpected theatrical gut-punch, Euripides invented the protest play by courageously holding a mirror up to the bloodthirsty Athenian government (who had only weeks before ruthlessly invaded the tiny island of Melos, killing all 600 men and enslaving the women and children) and said look at yourselves!
I felt compelled to do the same thing. It’s so sad to me that we humans still bother with war, with violent political and religious ideologies.
Euripides agreed 2,500 years ago it was a needless waste and yet this play effortlessly slides into every time period and every war.
What did writing this show teach you about yourself?
It’s the final moment in the play that taught me the most about myself, I think. It’s this long, lean speech I call the “No Speech,” (which was inspired by choreographer Yvonne Rainer’s “No Manifesto.”)
The specific details in the final speech make me very emotional. It sums up what is robbed from generation after generation in war– and it’s the everyday stuff, the pedestrian stuff we take for granted.
If a child civilian dies then, according to the speech, they get “No birthday parties. No school plays. No homework. No little jeans ripped at the knees. No new shoes. No trampolines. No flirting. No girls. No boys. No break ups. No cool hair with gel.
I intended for the delivery here to be tortuously slow, as if lifting each robbed experience up to the gods for an explanation. Or better yet, a bitter offering to them, a sacrifice. This final speech is what this play personally means to me.
It’s why I’ll never understand why men would rob mothers and children of these specific joys. How dare they? Who are they? And it’s not just foreign wars, of course.
It makes me think about how many American kids die just because they went to school one day– what that did to their parents. And so the speech goes on and on: “No dances. No late nights laughing. No phone. No bike. No car…”
How does it feel to be a playwright in the digital age? (Now with streaming, technology and social media being so prevalent)
I’m split right down the middle on that. I’m two playwrights in one body, really– with my and my artistic partner Reid Farrington’s theater company Foxy Films, I make big, untraditional contemporary work rooted in new media, often with tons of tech.
My play CasablancaBox was like that, a seemingly impossible dance of projected light and live actors who interacted seamlessly with tech— there was a projection cue almost every minute—and all of it was baked into the script.
I couldn’t have accomplished that show in a non-digital age. Conversely though, I also make “poor theater,” which is the complete opposite. Poor Theater is my first love and what I was trained in, which is where A Trojan Woman lives.
I am an acolyte of Grotowski and Meyerhold and I love Artaud. Those guys are artistic heroes. They were (still are) the antidote to technology.
They dared us into an archeological dig of our own selves, emotions, our grotesque humanity, and to be brave enough to present it on stage. The digital self can be peeled away, but the emotional self is an endless unspooling.
What do your plans for the future include?
So excited about what I’m making right now. I recently obtained the rights from Severin Films to adapt my favorite documentary into a musical.
The doc is called Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau, directed by David Gregory and it’s a breakdown of the catastrophic making-of the equally catastrophic 1996 Dr. Moreau movie with Marlon Brando and Val Kilmer. (If you haven’t seen it, the movie is unwatchable).
My musical adaptation is called Dr. Uncanny Presents: Moreau ‘96. I wrote the book and lyrics, my artistic partner Reid is directing and the music is composed by the legendary downtown NYC musician David Van Tieghem.
David is also starring as Dr. Uncanny, my fictional UHF/public access TV host who guides the audience through this horrific movie.
Literally, everything that could go wrong while shooting this movie, went wrong— it started off as an indie art film with a tiny budget, but ballooned into a mega-budget action movie, first directed by an artist, who was fired and quickly replaced by the abusive John Frankenheimer.
The colossal egos of Marlon Brando and Val Kilmer hijack the process, a warlock’s curse is cast and broken, the 100 extras playing Beast People grow drunker, higher and more sexually active, hurricanes destroy the Australian jungle set, and by the end, the original director sneaks back onto the set in a dog costume, determined to torch the place. And all of this really happened. I summoned all my powers to write this musical.
I have not had a show on Broadway yet, but I’m daily manifesting it to be this one. We are presenting a first workshop staged reading in Nyack, NY at Rose Hall at Prohibition River on Oct 16th at 6:30PM as part of the Nyack Live Arts Phoenix Festival.
We have a small and mighty skeleton crew cast for this one including Abe Goldfarb (who just performed at Powerhouse in Alex Brightman’s piece!), Kevin R. Free, Alissa Finn and Zoe Van Tieghem and David Van Tieghem.
What is your advice for young and emerging playwrights?
I write a popular Substack called Theater Is Hard where I talk a lot about this stuff (Subscribe! It’s cathartic!) So some of the following is Theater Is Hard stuff I’ve gone deep on.
Here are some things I wish someone told me when I was younger (or maybe they did and it all bounced off my gigantic young ego):
About ego: There is you, there is the company, there is the play itself. The play itself is what everyone and everything is in service to. Theater cannot be about you. It has to be about the “3rd thing.”
In the same way that there is a wife, a husband and a marriage— the spouses must work together to maintain that marriage. If it’s all about one person, everything falls apart. (Kate Valk at The Wooster Group taught me this.)
About networking: The people you meet in school and in those early years making stuff? Those people are priceless. Hold fast to them. Those are the people, that is real networking, not bullshitting your way through a cocktail party.
About fear: Today’s theater world can be mean, sparse, competitive, exclusive and judgmental. This might make you scared. That’s ok. Just do it scared. “Do it scared” has become a mantra of mine. As a textbook introvert, I need this.
About opportunity: Self-produce. I repeat, self-produce. Do it yourself. Be willing to put your own money into your plays. Be willing to go into debt, if you must.
If you aren’t willing to invest in your work, how can you expect anyone else to? If it weren’t for me self-producing my own plays, I would have, artistically, nothing.
No runs of plays, no Off-Broadway premieres, no regional premieres, no tours, no resume, no plays published, no agent, no experience, no collaborators, no connections in the theater, no MFA, no community, no nothing (sorry, another “No Speech” but it’s true.)
About instinct: Trust your gut on everything. If you have a bad feeling, get out. Beware self-gaslighting. This has been a hard one for me to learn.
I started professionally acting and playwriting in 2002-ish and it was a very different world. I used to think that if I sacrificed my own well-being to the theater, it proved my dedication and commitment.
Warriors suffer and I was a warrior! I viewed abuse, from others and myself, as the price of success. I tolerated it, because I never learned not to. So don’t do that. Be your own agent and manager.
What does the word success mean to you? (My favorite question)
Success means work. Really, really hard work. Every day. All the time. There is no shortcut to being an artist. There’s no contest to win. It’s not a competition. It’s a lifetime of work to create a body of work.
Success is not fame, it endurance, not quitting. So if I’m working, then I’m successful. I work tirelessly at playwriting or workshopping or rehearsing. The whole 10,000 hours thing. It takes me years of work to make a single play.
There is a story Tennessee Williams told about meeting Picasso when the painter told him: “Art is not a precious thing. Art is work, no different from a day laborer showing up every day to lay bricks.” This is my philosophy, too.
I think the absolute best definition of success came from the great Richard Foreman who told me: “If you’re still doing it, you’ve made it.”
What would you like to tell our readers about “A Trojan Woman”? (What’s the one thing you want them to get out of it)
Send the script to the January 6’er in your family. We presented it once to a MAGA-heavy audience and it worked wonders. Temporarily, at least. (It’s published at Broadway Play Publishing).
To learn more about Sara Farrington, check out her official website, and follow her on Instagram.
