Hecuba and ISIS?
Are al-Qaeda and ISIS channeling the ancient Trojans?
The brutality of Homeric Greece may "fit our modern world like a blood-soaked glove,"
says dramatist Ian Belton '94. He's at Skidmore to guest-direct the U.S. premiere
of a powerful reworking of Euripides' tragedy Hecuba, about the Trojan queen whose defeat in war only spurs more violence.
The play runs April 8–10 and 14–17, with curtain times at 8 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays
and 2 p.m. on Sundays, at Bernhard Theater on the Skidmore campus. Tickets ($12 general
admission, $8 students and senior citizens) are available through email, Facebook, or phoning 518-580-5439. Please note that the production contains sexual content
and nudity.
The work is from Irish playwright Marina Carr, who has won Irish Times, Dublin Theatre Festival, and other prizes and fellowships for her adaptations of
classical and Shakespearean tales to illuminate very contemporary problems. In her
Hecuba, as the Trojan War's final battle cries die down, there are reckonings to be made
and slaughter ensues, highlighting uncanny parallels to today's geopolitics as well
as modern issues of gender, race and religion. In a world where the violent supplants
the humane, the play asks, does it matter who wins and loses?
Award-winning writer, filmmaker, and director Ian Belton adds, "Rather than lament
the carnage that envelops them, the characters of Marina Carr's Hecuba are wracked with the perverse desire to defile, to cherish, to possess, to consume,
to devour. Is this insanity? Or does it mirror ISIS, GitMo and the mass refugee deaths
that roll in daily with the tides of the Mediterranean?" With an M.Phil. from Trinity
College in Dublin, Belton has taught acting and directing, been involved in stage
and film productions from New York City to Singapore, and won John Gielgud, Andrew
W. Mellon, and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, among other honors.
The play, published in 2015, has been produced only once before, by the Royal Shakespeare
Company in Stratford-upon-Avon. The Skidmore production features music composed by
Erik Sanko, the New York City musician and puppet-maker who co-founded the renowned
collective Phantom Limb.
