All dolled up

‘Barbie’ playwrights say what ends badly ends well

ENTERTAINMENT. At a recent rehearsal for A.R.T.’s “Trojan Barbie,” actors Karen MacDonald and Paula Langton finessed their respective roles for the world premiere this Saturday.

MacDonald’s character, an English doll repair expert named Lotte Jones, made a list of parts she needs to order. Langton is Hecuba, a woman who is tormented by visions of mutilation while living in modern-day Troy. “Hair. Heads. Legs. Fingers,” they each check off. 

But these words could be the gory contents TV delivers over and over in footage of death camps, killing fields, Sabra-Shatila, My Lai, and on and on through Darfur, Sudan and the Congo.
“We really are tourists in other people’s tragedy,” sighs playwright Christine Evans. “It’s an uncomfortable position to be in and we have more input than we can deal with.” 

Evans’ play was inspired both by her earlier play, “The Doll Hospital,” as well as Greek tragedian Euripides’ classic, “The Trojan Women.” Evans juxtaposes and unites the past with the present, echoing what we see everyday in the news: people in foreign lands wear-ing what is to Western eyes biblical clothing; people out of history books, framed in the surrealism of war. 

“It is a dialog with our times,” says the English-born, Australian-raised Evans. “I wanted that car-crashing quality, a collision of the past and the present. We seem to be living in more than one time.”  

The play has several strong female characters like the tragic Polly X (Euripides’ Polyxena), who creates a statue from broken Barbie parts, echoing her inner strength despite physical frailty. Though Evans hesitates to call “Trojan Barbie” feminist, she says, “their experience is at the center.” 

Don’t expect a neat ending, though. Evans offers no messages and gives no conclusion.

“It ends badly and it ends well,” she says, eyes bright and wide. “Just like life.”