DetailsCreated: November 17th, 2014
Taylor Dougherty – Staff Writer
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War is a subject that we are all somewhat familiar with. Whether it’s by hearing about it from the media or family members, to even personal experience – war is an unavoidable part of our lives in some form or fashion.
But none too often do we think about why we do it and how it affects us. UAB Theatre attempts to answer some of those questions with its new original production, “Women of War.” “Women of War” runs from November 12th-15th and the 19th-22nd at the Alys Stephens Center. General admission is $15, $6 for students and $10 for UAB employees and senior citizens. For more information visit UAB Theatre’s website at www.uab.edu/cas/theatre.
Directed and co-written by UAB alumna Rebecca Harper and co-writer Professor Karla Koshinen, “Women of War” started out as an adaptation of Euripides’ tragedy, “Trojan Women,” which focuses on the women of Troy’s perspective and experiences of war after the Greeks overtake the city of Troy. But after encountering copyright issues and other technicalities, Harper and Koskinen decided to write their own version which turned into “Women of War”.
Like “Trojan Women”, “Women of War” focuses on women’s different perspectives of war, but Harper and Koshinen’s show combines real stories of women, men and children from around the world, as well as poems, songs, text from versions of “Trojan Women” and other pieces that Harper and Koshinen wrote inspired by real circumstances, and presents them through the eyes of ten women. In the show, these ten women have no names, only numbers; you know nothing more about them other than their perspective. They share a bare red and black lit stage for the entirety of the show, all the while helping each other come to terms with PTSD, defeat, victory, loss of self and home and many other issues.
“I’ve done “Trojan Women” as a one act before, and I was really interested in what else I could look at in that story,” Director Rebecca Harper said. “What I found when I was working with “Trojan Women” is that people sometimes get very bogged down in the particulars of the myth itself instead of really being able to listen to the bigger questions that are being asked. So that’s kind of how the idea started of stripping away every bit of detail about geography, about time period, about what specific war; and then we could talk about bigger issues, the universal themes, the things that keep being recycled.”
“If we were doing a piece on say the Gaza Strip or Syria, anyone who watched the show would be seeing it through their own lens of their own particular biases,” Harper said. “If you take that away and you look at what we as human beings are doing to each other in warfare and the fact that after thousands and thousands of years of civilization we haven’t seemed to be able to get past this cycle and find a better way, I think then you can look at it with much more of an objective view.”
Through the process of this show the cast has become very protective of the material and feel a personal mission to make these sure these stories are told the right way. “You always hear, in reports, about the death count or what soldiers did that day but not a lot of times do you really hear what women go through,” cast member Taylor Richardson said. “We say, ‘oh they went through this terrible thing,’ but never once do they really say that these women were tortured, that these women were in fear for their lives. You also never hear about the aftermath of some of these women, so I think for me I have to tell this woman’s story. I need to out her story out into the universe so that someone knows who this woman is, what she’s gone through, and that it’s not okay.”
