This has been the greatest disappointment of the year.
Harsh, I know, but true.
It's hard to leave expectations at the door, especially after seeing wonderful plays at the Getty Villa. Not only is the Villa my favorite place in Los Angeles, but I have also seen wonderful performances there: Agammemnon, Peace, Elektra, and The Trojan Women.
But Helen is an adaptation of Euripides' original that tries to do too much. In its overly ambitious effort to try to do too many things, it leaves excellent critiques and themes on the table.
One of the most wonderful notions of the play is how it imagines an "old" Helen, one who is still beautiful, but whose beauty has waned. This production depicts Helen as a Hollywood starlet, and there was so much potential with that: if your looks are all you have going for you, what happens when you lose them? How does that shape your identity?
This production, however, merely scratches the surface by having many characters make quips about how old she looks and having her do a ridiculous pose whenever someone realizes who she is. Very few of the quips are clever, namely the one where Menelaus mistakes her for Clytemnestra - a comical "blow" exploiting the tension between Helen and her sister, as Clytemnestra was not Zeus' daughter, according to the myth, and therefore "inferior" to Helen and her beauty. Then the joke gets old as the play continues.
There were moments for great political tension - and political tension is, after all, why Euripides was writing in the first place, sick of the Peloponnesian War. But instead of milking these moments for all their worth, the production seems to me more concerned with shoehorning in references to Hollywood moments and personas.
Harsh, I know, but true.
It's hard to leave expectations at the door, especially after seeing wonderful plays at the Getty Villa. Not only is the Villa my favorite place in Los Angeles, but I have also seen wonderful performances there: Agammemnon, Peace, Elektra, and The Trojan Women.
But Helen is an adaptation of Euripides' original that tries to do too much. In its overly ambitious effort to try to do too many things, it leaves excellent critiques and themes on the table.
One of the most wonderful notions of the play is how it imagines an "old" Helen, one who is still beautiful, but whose beauty has waned. This production depicts Helen as a Hollywood starlet, and there was so much potential with that: if your looks are all you have going for you, what happens when you lose them? How does that shape your identity?
This production, however, merely scratches the surface by having many characters make quips about how old she looks and having her do a ridiculous pose whenever someone realizes who she is. Very few of the quips are clever, namely the one where Menelaus mistakes her for Clytemnestra - a comical "blow" exploiting the tension between Helen and her sister, as Clytemnestra was not Zeus' daughter, according to the myth, and therefore "inferior" to Helen and her beauty. Then the joke gets old as the play continues.
There were moments for great political tension - and political tension is, after all, why Euripides was writing in the first place, sick of the Peloponnesian War. But instead of milking these moments for all their worth, the production seems to me more concerned with shoehorning in references to Hollywood moments and personas.
