Defending ‘Trojan’

It is certainly Don Braunagel’s prerogative to think that the Old Globe’s “Trojan Women” now playing in San Diego is not “Trojan Women” “at its best” (“Uneven ‘Trojan Women’ Retains a Valid Message,” Sept. 16.) As its adapter, I would be curious to hear what he thinks would have made it “at its best.”

Braunagel claimed the “amalgam of old and new . . . adds to the overall dissonance.” I suppose we shouldn’t have adaptations like Jean Anouilh’s “Antigone” (1944), Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Trojan Women” (1965) or Nobel Prize winner Seamus Heaney’s “The Cure at Troy” (from “Philoctetes”) (1990), since they have comparable “amalgams” and “dissonances.”

The reviewer admits that “The Trojan Women’s” message remains “all too applicable,” but questions whether television and the Internet “with their immediacy, intimacy and real-life imagery, have permanently limited the ability of ‘Trojan Women’ to involve audiences.” I suppose we’ll just have to eliminate theater, and the genius of playwrights past and present, and sit glued to our TV screens. Will Braunagel review the next war and comment on the originality of the reporters’ reportage?

What a poor prognosis for humanity, creativity and culture. Or should we just say “poor commentary” and go to see “The Trojan Women” and be grateful that art that investigates the meaning of life and tries to increase the value of that life is still available?

MARIANNE McDONALD

La Jolla

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