A Greek tragedy for the 21st century

 

Allen McCullough and Randolyn Zinn act out a scene from “Her Name Means Memory,” which Living Room Theatre will present in performances July 26-Aug. 6 at Park-McCullough Historic Governor’s Mansion in North Bennington. Joan K. Lentini photo

 

By STACEY MORRIS
Contributing writer

NORTH BENNINGTON, Vt.

The Aegean-blue posters for “Her Name Means Memory,” etched in Greek-style letters, offer the first clue.

Randolyn Zinn wrote her one-act play as a reimagining of “The Trojan Women,” Euripides’ classic meditation on the human costs of war. But she has made the story her own.
Inspired in part by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year, Zinn wrote the play as a way of conveying how little things actually change, despite the passage of centuries.

The plot centers on a group of royal women held captive by the Greeks after a decade-long war. They await deportation from their demolished homeland to Greece, where they’ll be used as slaves.

But in contrast to the original version by Euripides, Zinn has Queen Hecuba and her court doing more than simply lamenting their fate.

“In Euripides’ time, women didn’t have much agency within their culture; their role in drama was limited to lamenting at funerals,” Zinn explained. “What I’ve done is make the action more active for Hecuba. She’s not just lamenting; she’s fighting. Hecuba is trying to save herself, her daughter and grandson, and the women of her court. It’s still the story of ‘Trojan Women,’ with subtle references to modern day.”

Unlike members of a typical Greek chorus, the four female members of the chorus in “Her Name Means Memory” each have a name and a backstory.

“The language used is a modern expression of classical language, and the costumes reflect a modern approach with classical draping,” Zinn said.

The sartorial nods to Ukranian and Indian fashion signal that many epochs are being represented and that “women are still used as weapons of war,” she said. “Nothing much has changed since 415 B.C.”

And yet, playwrights throughout the ages continue to send distress signals to the people of their era.

Euripides, the famed tragedian of classical Athens, wrote “The Trojan Women” in 415 B.C. amid the Peloponnesian War and used it as metaphor for what were then contemporary battles, particularly the Athenians’ capture and destruction that year of the Aegean island of Melos, whose people were either slaughtered or enslaved.

The use of mythical or historical events to send a message about contemporary ones is a technique that has endured.

“Arthur Miller did something similar with ‘The Crucible,’” his famous dramatization and partially fictionalized take on the Salem witch trials, “as a metaphor for the House Un-American Activities Committee and blacklisting during McCarthyism,” Zinn explained. “And I’m doing the same thing with my play.”

In her re-imagining of “The Trojan Women” through “Her Name Means Memory,” Zinn has kept the major events and characters in place while constructing modern equivalencies to the social mores of Euripides’ era, all while maintaining the power of myth as storytelling.

“Myths are stories that tell the truth: They’re a way of explaining human nature,” she said. “We need this connection to history in order to understand our time.”

 

Swimming pool as stage
The play, with Zinn as director and a cast of 10 actors, opens July 26 and runs through Aug. 6. It was workshopped at Bennington College in January and given a springtime reading in Manhattan in March. There will be a weeklong New York City rehearsal in early July before the cast heads to North Bennington for the final polishing.

Zinn and her husband, Allen McCullough, who was born and raised in North Bennington, founded Living Room Theatre in 2012. Both serve as co-artistic directors of the theater company, and both have extensive acting credits. Zinn also has a long experience as a director and choreographer and is the author of a series of original plays. Her play “Lucy’s Wedding” was nominated for Outstanding Original Play 2019 by the Berkshire Theatre Critics Association.
Eleven years ago, the couple launched Living Room Theatre with a production of Anton Chekov’s “The Seagull” as a mutual anniversary gift. The play was presented in both outdoors and indoors, with the audience changing locations with the actors. The response was more than favorable, a tradition was born, and audiences for the company’s summer shows have grown over the years.

This year’s production will be staged in an empty, long dormant in-ground swimming pool on the property of the Park-McCullough Historic Governor’s Mansion, a 35-room Victorian home set on 200 acres of land in North Bennington. Once the home of McCullough’s ancestors, the house is now open to the public and serves as a venue for art exhibitions, theatrical performances and private events.

The mansion is named after Trenor W. Park, McCullough’s great-great grandfather, an adventuresome lawyer who bought the land and built the elaborate home in 1865 after earning a fortune in the California gold rush. Prior to that, the property’s first resident was Hiland Hall (Trenor W. Park’s father-in-law), a lawyer who farmed the land and also served as the 25th governor of Vermont.

Though the house has been run as a nonprofit institution for the past 50 years, McCullough has fond memories of spending childhood summers on the property, including many an afternoon splashing around the in-ground swimming pool.

The pool, built in the 1930s, was given a new lease on life two years ago, thanks to Living Room Theatre and the imagination of its co-founders.

“The last two productions in the pool proved so exhilarating for both the actors and the audience,” Zinn said. “But it requires a certain type of production: a play that has an imaginative bent, and one that’s not tied to a particular period.”

For Zinn, seeing the historic pool for the first time more than a dozen years ago proved to be love at first sight.

“The funny thing is, I was born and raised there,” McCullough said. “When I brought Randolyn for the first time, she looked at the empty pool and said, ‘We have to do something in this pool.’ The year after Covid, it made sense to do an outdoor production, so it began then.”

The pool project proved to be a family affair as their son, Angus, helped to build a wooden stage for the pool’s floor to reconcile the deep and shallow ends.

“The walls are a pentimento of various colors of blue, which are so gorgeous, and the flooring is painted to replicate that feel,” McCullough said.

Because of the unconventional staging, productions taking place at the pool have a singular row of 60 seats that ring the pool’s edges.

“It’s an interesting structural set-up,” McCullough said. “The audience is like God watching from above. It’s similar to theater in the round, except that the actors can sometimes forget the audience is there because they’re surrounded by walls, which makes for a more private space for acting partners. And the acoustics are fantastic.”

 

Well-fed actors
For the actors coming up from New York City, the production will offer more than an intimate performance space. Zinn and McCullough, who divide their time between the city and Vermont, have always loved sharing their country home with guests. And from year one, they’ve transformed their house, which is adjacent to the Park-McCullough mansion, into a veritable gastronomic paradise during the three weeks of rehearsals and performances.

“We house and feed everyone,” Zinn said. “It creates a great collaborative environment and safe atmosphere. Work continues outside of rehearsal. When we’re having dinner, sitting on the porch, getting to know one another, … that work keeps going.”

Their culinary spreads are sourced from their organic vegetable garden and from local farms. Past favorites include shakshuka made with farm fresh eggs, Spanish torta with local potatoes, and spice-rubbed lime chicken with garden greens.

“We cook for everyone, because we find it’s hard to act badly if people are fed well,” McCullough said with a chuckle.

But at crunch time, a few days before opening night, when Zinn and McCullough find themselves consumed with last-minute details, they enlist outside cooking help.

They know the approaching of opening night at month’s end will be a flurry of adrenaline surges, but they wouldn’t want so spend their July any other way

“Allen and I both have had long careers in film and on Broadway, but we love producing plays here, and we want to do them with enough in-depth scene work that honors both the actors’ and director’s process,” Zinn said. “Combined with our site-specific nature, it’s been a wonderful experience.”

 

Living Room Theatre opens its 12th season on July 26, with performances of “Her Name Means Memory” running through Aug. 6 on the grounds of the Park-McCullough Historic Governor’s Mansion in North Bennington. Seating is limited and reservations are suggested. To buy tickets, visit www.lrtvt.org/contact or call (802) 442-5322.