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HELEN. By Ellen McLaughlin. The Public Theater, New York City. 30 March 2002.
Helen never went to Troy. Rather, Menelaus' beautiful wife has been ensconced for the last seventeen years in the opulent top-floor suite of an Egyptian hotel, which features a heart-shaped bed covered in wine-dark sheets, a spectacular view overlooking the pyramids, a stoically obsequious servant, and a few irritating flies. This is how the situation of the woman renowned as Paris' lover was envisioned at the Public Theater's premiere of Ellen McLaughlin's Helen. McLaughlin's heroine (Donna Murphy) admits to having flirted with her dull-witted husband's handsome Trojan guest, and she even concedes that she contemplated the adulterous betrayal that has made her notorious. But contemplation is as far as she got. As Helen herself tells us, the gods gave Paris a "copy" of his wouldbe mistress to take home, while they put her-the real Helen-in a kind of suspended animation in faraway Egypt. And here she has waited all these years for the war fought in her name to end and for Menelaus to bring her and her sullied reputation back to life.
Like McLaughlin's Iphigenia and Other Daughters, Helen is inspired by ancient Athenian tragedies. Its primary source is Euripides' Helen, which similarly imagines a loyal Helen waiting in Egypt for Menelaus to discover her and the truth about the phantom wife he has recovered from Troy. The setting of McLaughlin's play is overtly modern, however, with the Weather Channel on TV and talk of Afghan refugees. Gone are the supportive...