Theatre in Review: Cry, Trojans! (Troilus and Cressida) (The Wooster Group/St. Ann's Warehouse)In Cry, Trojans!, the artists at The Wooster Group have achieved something remarkable: They have managed to make Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida even more alienating and hard to follow than it already is. Troilus and Cressida, you know -- or maybe you don't. Possibly never produced in Shakespeare's own time, it has not had an especially happy history. John Dryden rewrote it heavily. The Victorians branded it as salacious. Even today, it remains something of a rarity. It has been produced exactly twice on Broadway, for total of 22 performances; I can find only three Off Broadway productions in the last 50 years. I saw two of them and neither was memorable. Even among Shakespeare's so-called "problem plays," Troilus and Cressida -- his Trojan War epic -- is a real puzzler. The playwright keeps forgetting about his title characters, which isn't surprising since they constitute one of the least compelling romances in all of dramatic literature; indeed, their love affair unravels practically before it has begun. Then again, Shakespeare has trouble focusing on any of the play's multiple plot threads. Characters and conflicts come and go, none of them ever amounting to much. Scene after scene of internecine squabbling among bands of warriors unfold without advancing a central plot. Finally, the action more or less grinds to a halt with nothing resolved; in fact, a new development, involving pestilence, is introduced in the very last scene, adding to the already long list of dangling plot threads. In appropriating the text of Troilus and Cressida for their own purposes, The Wooster Group can hardly be accused of laying waste to a classic, but neither have they done anything to illuminate it. For all its high-concept gewgaws, Elizabeth LeCompte's staging is surprisingly straightforward. But in tangling with this remarkably unforgiving script, something has gone awry; I didn't love what this troupe did with Hamlet a few years ago, but that production was marked by a tremendous precision that was admirable in its own way. In contrast, Cry, Trojans! is a notably helter-skelter affair. Surprisingly, Cry, Trojans! was developed with The Royal Shakespeare Company. According to the press materials, "The companies chose Troilus and Cressida because of its two-sided nature. Scenes alternate between the Trojan and the Greek camps until the battles begin in Act V. The Wooster Group and the RSC each developed their own styles by rehearsing separately, in different countries at first, and then came together to overlay their efforts. The resulting collaboration was performed at the Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon and at Riverside Studios in London." Whatever that production was like -- the contrast between the troupes must have been fascinating -- the show at St. Ann's has a hellzapoppin' quality that quickly becomes tedious. The big-ticket idea is that both the Trojans and the Greek invaders are Native American tribes, an interesting idea undermined by the bizarre costumes and fright wigs created by Folkert de Jong and Delphine Courtillot, all of which seem designed to make the company look ridiculous. This impression is strengthened by the decision to have the Trojans speak in thick Midwestern accents -- I kept waiting for someone to say, "This is a dickens of a war" -- while when playing the Greeks, the actors wear masks and speak in stagey British accents borrowed from the RSC production, a recording of which is sometimes overlaid on the live performance. The overall performance style relies on flat-affect line readings; the actors appear to disown the words even as they say them. Many of them speak the verse fluently, but Greg Mehrten, as Pandarus, Troilus and Cressida's go-between, uses the same bored monotone throughout, and Andrew Schneider's Aeneas races through his speeches, putting extra stress on the last word of each line. Kate Valk, who plays Cressida, appears to be mentally counting the steps from one piece of blocking to the next, even as she recites her lines in word-perfect, but unemotional, fashion. The head-scratchers multiply as the evening wears on. All of the actors are miked -- this is typical of The Wooster Group -- but was it necessary to have Mehrten perform with his shirt open, exposing his enormous belly and the receiver and transmitter arranged on his chest like a bra? When the characters fight with each other, they make simple hand gestures that are supported by enormous thumping noises provided by the show's live sound mixers, Bobby McElver and Max Bernstein. When Hector and Aeneas actually take part in stage combat, it is so awkwardly done that I worried that their mic packs might fall off. There are more oddities. Helen, the cause of the war, lip synchs some of her lines, which are spoken by a male actor sitting upstage, using an exaggeratedly "female" voice. At one point, Hector and Troilus carry lacrosse sticks and toss a ball back and forth. Every so often the singer Suzzy Roche, the evening's Cassandra, is brought out, in a blue miniskirt and frizzy wig, to wail into a microphone. Above each corner of the stage is a video screen and on stage are three smartphones; all of them show scenes from a subtitled film about Eskimos -- I'm guessing it's the Nicholas Ray film The Savage Innocents -- interspersed with excerpts from the Natalie Wood-Warren Beatty melodrama Splendor in the Grass. (The latter was directed by Elia Kazan, and I amused myself wondering what he would have made of all these extratextual shenanigans.) The video isn't really distracting -- seated in the fourth row, I could barely make it out -- but you have to wonder why it is there in the first place. (The video is by the aforementioned Andrew Schneider.) Does all of this add up to a coherent commentary on Shakespeare, the Troilus-Cressida narrative, or the futile nature of war, the original play's putative theme? If so, I was unable to find it. Cry, Trojans! isn't satire, and no particular point of view is discernible, except for the possibility that everyone involved thinks Troilus and Cressida is a pretty stupid play. None of the performances compel; neither Valk nor her Troilus, the excellent actor Scott Shepherd, evince the slightest bit of chemistry. (This, too, I suspect is intentional.) One can admire the beautifully shaped lighting by Jennifer Tipton and the remarkably adept -- if often painfully loud -- sound by Bruce Odland, which blends a barrage of effects -- drums, cymbals, breathing, heartbeats, wind, ocean waves, burping, and bits of music -- into an enveloping soundscape. This is not the first time that I felt a Wooster Group performance constituted a challenge to the audience, forcing it to detach from the normal emotional and intellectual engagement of narrative drama to consider a text in another way. But this is the first time that I was left generally baffled by the goings-on. Instead of providing a clarifying vision of Troilus and Cressida, Cry, Trojans! doubles down on an already exasperating text. This one is for the troupe's hard-core fans only. -- David Barbour 
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