In the Iliad-inspired synth-pop musical The Trojans, disaffected warehouse shipping fulfillment workers escape the humdrum by reenacting a dramatic chapter in their town’s past when the high school football team Trojans were chasing a state championship. But on-field competition with a rival school turns into off-field violence when the star running back quits and the quarterback’s girlfriend falls for the other school’s art-minded Paris stand-in. Despite the Cell’s postage-stamp sized theater, writer Leegrid Stevens’s boasts an outsized cast, set, choreography, and sound system, but does it entertain? Reviewers Loren Noveck and Lorin Wertheimer discuss.

LN: I wish that I had refreshed my memory on the Greeks before I showed up for The Trojans; two thirds of the way through, lightbulbs started going off that this character is Achilles or Patroclus or other names that are vaguely associated in my mind. 

LW: One of the really exciting things for me when I see an adaptation—I think of Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres, or James by Percival Everett—is how does this map to the original text? But here, the relationship to The Iliad didn’t make sense. Heather, the character analogous to Helen of Troy, was with the Trojans and stolen by the Greeks, which is confusing. And at first the analogy in the plot had football stand in for the field of battle, but then it turned into real battle. 

LN: Did you ever see Anne Washburn’s Mr. Burns? I think it’s more that kind of thing; they’re not doing the Greeks, they’re doing the reverberation of what does a myth cycle turn into in the memory of a small town? The Iliad is only the loosest springboard.

LW:  That’s not what it felt like to me. It felt like a mashup: retelling The Iliad, but just taking random bits and throwing everything up in the air and seeing where it landed. 

LN: I think if you take the point of this to be about The Iliad, then you’re absolutely right. I’m taking the point of it to be something else entirely that’s using The Iliad as no more than scraps of raw material; the real action of the piece is a group of workers in a warehouse seeking distraction from their soul-killing jobs by reenacting a story, steeped in weird nostalgia, about the past of this time and place. 

LW: I was very distracted by trying to figure out what I was watching. And an adaptation of The Iliad would be more interesting than watching this on its own terms, because on its own terms, it didn’t feel like there was that much there. The Trojans is set in essentially an Amazon distribution center, but it didn’t have anything to say about working at Amazon other than people don’t want to do that work. It takes place in a football-obsessed small town, but didn’t have anything to say about life in small town Texas because it didn’t seem to know much about it. I’m not into synth pop, so I wasn’t taken by the music (also by Leegrid Stevens). And why have something so overproduced in a space as small as the Cell? The advantage of a space this small is intimacy, and to do this reverb musical, you’re losing that.

LN: I guess what I really did enjoy about it was the no-holds-barred approach. It felt like—and this marks me as old—but it felt like the early NY Fringe Festival, where you were thinking big and using small means to make big theater. I loved that about it. It reminded me also of the New Ohio’s Ice Factory festival—wildly ambitious but not fully cooked, which is some of my favorite theater. 

LW: Yes, taking risks is great, and this certainly was taking risks. But not all bets pay out. The music all sounded the same to me. I didn’t have emotional engagement in the characters on either level. The story was clear, but what was I supposed to be hoping for with the character of Heather?

LN: I think what they’re all hoping is to be the one who gets out of this small town–most of the boys are hoping to get college scholarships to play football; Heather dreams of seeing Italy. But none of them does–because everything goes wrong–and the characters in the warehouse are the next generation of people stuck in a town whose economy has crashed even farther than it had in the 1980s. So ultimately it’s a tragedy. And they’re reliving these glory days that were actually pretty terrible, but maybe less terrible than now.

LW: That’s the other thing about the premise. The character Doug–the narrator of the play-within-a-play–would be doing anything to avoid telling this story; this is the last thing that he’d want to recount, how he became violent and was involved in a brawl that ended up possibly killing people for no reason, and the football team failed too. 

The Greeks are telling The Iliad to create a mythology that will motivate the present day Greeks to fight against the Persians. Why is this story told? I have no idea why the people in the warehouse want to relive these events. Only one of them was actually there, and that person wouldn’t want to re-experience it, and everybody else, why is this story something that they want to tell? 

LN: There was no cause to the war of 1812, to follow a running joke within the show that ends up making a point about war’s pointlessness. 

LW: All war is ultimately rather pointless, and that is certainly a valid take on The Iliad, and a valid take on the War of 1812 (which did have causes). But it’s not a valid reason to to tell a story that there is no other reason to tell. I was confused by the framing device, and there were no resonant characters.

LN: I don’t think you’re supposed to get invested in the frame story particularly. 

LW: But then why does it exist, from a storytelling point of view? Why are we using this framing device, other than that’s what The Iliad does? 

LN: I stand behind my argument that it’s purposeful. In this very alienated modern world where there is no meaning in our jobs, there is not a lot of meaning in our day-to-day human relationships, where do we turn to create or find that meaning? And whether it succeeds at creating that context or not, we can disagree on, but I think what they were trying to do is to look at what do we consider the foundational myths of our micro culture? You know, who are our gods, who are our heroes? The star football player who walks away after being called a slur; the prom king and queen couple; the artsy boy from another high school who doesn’t care about football.

And to be fair, the culture that they are describing comes more out of 80s movies than it does out of actual life. You can take that as a virtue or flaw, depending on how you feel about Heathers or Pump Up the Volume. I am a child of the 80s, and I do have a soft spot for that whole thing, soundtrack and all. I agree that it could have been richer if it was more rooted in the people who were the storytellers as well as in the story–and especially would have motivated Act 2, where the characters essentially break into the warehouse after hours to finish the reenactment after they get busted by their boss. That would have carried more weight and maybe said more about this moment, where, apropos of nothing, we might be as a nation about to go to war for no goddamn good reason.

LW: The play is saying something about storytelling and the importance of storytelling, and the power of storytelling and it made me reflect on theater itself as a medium for telling stories. 

LN: I think also about the failures of storytelling, right? This idea that you’re picking up on is, why are these characters telling these stories? They shouldn’t want to tell these stories, none of them actually come off well. I do think that’s part of what it’s about. It’s like they’re stuck with these foundational myths that don’t actually serve anybody. 

LW: I come to the theater to experience emotions and ideas and hear a story, not necessarily a linear story, but to experience some kind of catharsis, and that motivation doesn’t seem to exist. They are telling a story because that’s the conceit, but there’s no desire for catharsis. I don’t know what they desire because I don’t know anything about them. I don’t know why I’m listening to the story if I don’t know why they’re telling the story. 

LN: I didn’t feel like that was unclear. They’re telling the story, in this environment that is trying to atomize them all into ever more aggressively into cogs and machines, to feel some sense of human connection and to valorize, even if wrongly, a community’s past. Did you see In the Amazon Warehouse Parking Lot? That had some of the same sense that you build a community out of the blocks that you have at hand, right? Even if they don’t serve you, and even if they’re not what you would ever have intentionally chosen. I liked the part at the beginning where one character stood up to say, I’m Keeley–the Achilles equivalent, a hero in the internal story–this time. I agree that it would have added a layer if we saw how or why the warehouse characters mapped themselves into the inside story. That only happened in tiny moments, like what seemed to be a real-life couple casting themselves as Achilles and his boyfriend Lucas.

LW: It seemed like a missed opportunity. And because I felt disengaged, I was getting distracted by the littlest of details, like the cigarette that Daris, the artsy boy, has–is that supposed to be a prop cigarette that the character Daris is smoking, or is that supposed to be a real cigarette that the warehouse employee playing Daris is smoking? And if it’s a prop cigarette, why do they have a prop cigarette in the warehouse? And if it’s a real cigarette, then then it’s violating OSHA rules…and I was going down rabbit holes for things that were not important. 

LN: I guess when you give something the gloss of an 80s teen film, and explicitly make it an exercise in nostalgia, I’m willing to suspend my disbelief as much as I was in the 80s. (Though I hated the Heathers stage musical, so my enthusiasm for tongue in cheek nostalgia has its limits.) I was happy to let this wash over me and be in it. And it had that downtown energy that I miss so very much. I cut it a lot of slack on those grounds alone.

LW: I did like some of the technical elements, like Christopher Annas-Lee’s lighting, with that sharp contrast between the work lights and the neon. And I liked Simon Cleveland’s set—all the boxes made the right setting. But then they didn’t take advantage of it. 

LN: I felt like the claustrophobia of those box towers, looming so far overhead and making the space feel taller than it is long, was taking advantage, along with details like marking the safety area on the floor, which served a very practical purpose in keeping audience limbs out of a small playing area where there was some major fight choreography. And I thought it was ballsy to do that much fight work (Bradley Cashman and John Morgan are the fight choreographers) with the audience that close. 

LW:  I thought the football dancing (choreographed by Melinda Rebman) was nice but that was 45 minutes into the second act, and everything leading up to that point was visually flat. 

LN: That’s so interesting, because I thought it was visually very clever, all the car chases on pallet jacks. I thought the way they used the space was really smart, the kind of negative space behind the plastic curtain. And the costumes (by Ashley Soliman), all assembled from packing materials with this improvisational quality that was clearly very intentional.

LW: But at the beginning of the show, they’re grabbing football helmets, very literal pieces of costume. They were violating that found object principle, and they only fully embraced that in the second half of the second act. 

LN: I disagree there–the helmets were workers’ safety helmets; they took them off the wall of the warehouse. The T logo on them came from the name of the company; it was on all the boxes. I felt like it all made sense in the given world.

LW: There were definite props, you know. Someone had pompoms. 

LN: Well, to be fair, everything is a found object in an Amazon warehouse. And I guess I was overall more impressed with the feeling of on the fly creativity. 

LW: I felt like it was too late for me by the time that creativity really kicked in. I thought that they saved their good choreography and their good costuming and even the songs in act two were better. 

LN: It is not the show that you’re gonna walk out of humming the music, but I don’t think the songs are meant to stand alone. It’s got an ambient aesthetic and the style of the music is part of that aesthetic. 

LW: I guess then there was too much of it. Having said all that, I appreciate what you were saying about the scrappy creativity. I just would have liked to have it serve some end. To go back to The Iliad, love or hate it, it was serving an end. It’s been taught 3,000 years or or whatever, and the last 200 years or so, it’s been taught as a way of upholding western hegemony and to tell a story of the superiority of Western civilization. That’s why we continue to tell the story. It’s not a great reason, but it is a reason and I can reject that reason or I can accept it. 

LN: That kind of small town America, football team put us on the map, ideal is often held up as the core or the apotheosis of what it means to be American. And I feel like this is doing the same thing with that myth as The Iliad is with the war story: what that really all amounts to is men fighting. Maybe over a woman who wants to get away more than she wants to be engaged in any of their nonsense. And it ends in tragedy for everyone, and the one guy who maybe survives it is just trapped to repeat that story for the rest of his life. So, does it work? Maybe, maybe not, but that’s what I think the shape of it is.

LW: How did you feel about the performances? 

LN: It was all very arch and stylized (by director Eric-Paul Vitale). It felt like a 1980s music video. That’s the performance style. It was people playing roles of people they were not, explicitly cast across gender and race, and I don’t think you are ever meant to forget that. 

LW: I think again, going back to the lack of identifiable characters in the framing device, it’s harder to perform a character presenting this other character if that first character is nonexistent. 

LN: I would agree with that on some level, but the presentational surface is kind of the point. 

LW: I guess the other problem is that since it’s such a disaster, why does anyone want to tell the story? And that also has to do with the fact that there are not really characters that are telling us. 

LN: On the other hand, there are many parts of the South where they still tell stories of all kinds of Civil War battles that didn’t turn out so well for anybody. So, you know, you tell the stories you’ve got no matter what they actually are or say. 

LW: Were there individual performers who spoke to you?

LN:  I was impressed by Daphne Always as Lucas; that character was underwritten until the end, but then comes out strong with a powerhouse song and a key role in the final battle. I also liked Deshja Driggs’s Heather. The character spins her wheels a little bit, but Driggs kept her as the driving force.  

LW: I really did like–and again, this came so late–but when Heather started talking about transferring, I thought that was clever but why does it take until ten minutes before the end? 

What was your feeling about the script? 

LN: It’s an experience in the theater more than a thing I will analyze line-by-line. Another thing this show reminded me of was The Wildness, which was done at Ars Nova with the band Sky Pony a while back. It had that quality where the script on its own doesn’t capture the experience. 

LW: It felt to me like they were auditioning for a bigger space. 

LN: Well, they were sold out tonight. But Loading Dock Theater–the company run by Leegrid Stevens and Erin Treadway, who plays Keeley here–specializes in small-space work. 

LW: I guess I just don’t understand why not imitate the structure of The iliad. Why not have the Heather character go from the Greeks to the Trojans rather than vice versa? I’m okay with them conflating the timelines and having the stuff with Helen of Troy happening at the same time as the battle. That makes sense dramatically, but the things that don’t make sense are the pieces that feel arbitrarily mixed up. Like Sondra, the Cassandra character, I didn’t understand why she was in love with one of the football players. 

Or, there was a Trojan horse joke at the very end. They could have done something that was part of the story, but instead, it felt like, let’s give this Amazon worker a baby so they can make this joke. The things that you are more forgiving of, I think, are the things that really felt not thought out to me, maybe because I am more literal. When there are choices made that feel arbitrary, it doesn’t feel respectful to the audience to do something half assed. I think a stronger script could have been much more enjoyable. 

LN: I’m giving them more credit for intentionally walking away from what they started with than you are. You are crediting them with sloppiness and I’m seeing intentional pastiche. It may work just because I am less familiar with the underlying material, so I don’t have a stake in whether it’s respectful.

LW: You’re certainly more interested in nontraditional or less conventional approaches to theater, and I admire that. I just get bored and start counting lighting instruments.

LN: I have definitely had counting the lights moments, but I’m much more likely to do that in a traditional well-made play that feels like it would be better on TV than something that, whatever its hit to miss ratio, is an Experience in the room, which for me, The Trojans was.