Helen (review)

Helen never went to Troy. Rather, Menelaus' beautiful wife has been ensconced for the last seventeen years in the opulent top-floor suite of an Egyptian hotel, which features a heart-shaped bed covered in wine-dark sheets, a spectacular view overlooking the pyramids, a stoically obsequious servant, and a few irritating flies. This is how the situation of the woman renowned as Paris' lover was envisioned at the Public Theater's premiere of Ellen McLaughlin's Helen. McLaughlin's heroine (Donna Murphy) admits to having flirted with her dull-witted husband's handsome Trojan guest, and she even concedes that she contemplated the adulterous betrayal that has made her notorious. But contemplation is as far as she got. As Helen herself tells us, the gods gave Paris a "copy" of his would-be mistress to take home, while they put her—the real Helen—in a kind of suspended animation in faraway Egypt. And here she has waited all these years for the war fought in her name to end and for Menelaus to bring her and her sullied reputation back to life.

Like McLaughlin's Iphigenia and Other Daughters, Helen is inspired by ancient Athenian tragedies. Its primary source is Euripides' Helen, which similarly imagines a loyal Helen waiting in Egypt for Menelaus to discover her and the truth about the phantom wife he has recovered from Troy. The setting of McLaughlin's play is overtly modern, however, with the Weather Channel on TV and talk of Afghan refugees. Gone are the supportive female chorus of Euripides' play and his subplot concerning Theoclymenus, the son of the recently deceased Egyptian king Proteus (Helen's erstwhile guardian), who seeks to marry the heroine against her will. McLaughlin's protagonist thus exists in virtual isolation; she is unwilling, though not exactly unable, to leave her suite and depends wholly on the Servant (Marian Seldes), the only person she has seen since arriving in Egypt, for contact with the outside world. Yet her strategy of passive waiting does not bring the outcome she expects. On this lonely day, Helen receives three visitors: Io (Johanna Day); Athena (Phylicia Rashad), whose appearance as the deus ex machina is strikingly situated at the play's center; and Menelaus (Denis O'Hare), climactically arriving in the penultimate scene. Unlike the knowledgeable Teucer of Euripides' tragedy, the cow-eared Io can provide no news about the Trojan War. Crass and callous, Athena tells of its outcome and Menelaus' subsequent disappearance at sea, but her bone-chilling explanation of why the gods permitted so much suffering to occur "for nothing, for a copy of you, for a rumor of a chick" ("Because you humans die so interestingly!") deprives both Helen and the audience of the closure that appearances by divinities typically provide in Greek tragedies. Although the weary Menelaus eventually realizes that he has stumbled upon his real wife, he nonetheless chooses to return to the suite on the floor below, where he has installed the "copy" Helen (who, it seems, will not miraculously disappear like the phantom of Euripides' play) because "it's too late now . . . it's not you they want; they want her."

Helen presents far more talk than action—often an awkward ratio in drama. Yet the play's structure and emphases made perfect sense in the Public Theater's production, which successfully conveyed McLaughlin's interest in the impact of talk (news, stories, gossip, myths) on expectation and action. This twenty-first-century Helen faces an informational crisis with broad epistemological implications. The Servant tells her a series of stories, all of which comment suggestively on her situation—but what is she to make of them? She struggles to get news of the war. Most disturbingly, she has no control over what people say about her; consequently, there are now throughout the world millions of "copies" of her, in the form of rumors and myths, who have superseded her in importance. Some responsibility for this crisis...