What’s Next…

The Helen Project

Megan Cohen and I are delighted to announce that our Helen of Troy will finally take the stage in May 2013. DIVAfest is producing a workshop of our Build-Your-Own-Helen-of-Troy Play Kit, a modular text with rules for constructing your own version of the most beautiful woman in the world. Five different versions of Helen crowd her bedroom, packing to leave Sparta, reeling after her first glimpse of war, watching Troy burn as the final battle rages, and sifting through decades of memory to find the truth of who is really to blame and what really happened. The fifth Helen, The Face, is the iconic Helen, “Helen” in quotation marks, who speaks in found text handed down to her through the ages, from Homer and Marlowe, from modern poetry, and even ripped from the headlines of our contemporary tabloids.

This workshop is a test of the idea of the Kit; can Megan and I and our cast of five Helens create two different plays from the same modular text? What rules does the Kit need? How do we put it together? Does the Kit actually make a play?

For our DIVAfest workshop, we will rehearse two different “editions” of the text, to be performed over two weekends.

First Edition: May 10 @8PM, May 11 @5PM (part of DIVAfest’s Opening Day)
Second Edition: May 24 & 25 @8PM

featuring Misti Rae Boettiger, Sarah Moser, Ariane Owens, Roneet Aliza Rahamim, and Lily Yang.
dramaturg Maura Halloran. stage manager Julianne Fawsitt.

$10 tickets are on sale here

For more details, please visit the Helen page on the DIVAfest site. You can also check out the blog posts we’ve been writing throughout the process. In its final iteration, we hope to involve a global community of artists in an online interactive experience in which an audience can construct their own individual experiences of Helen (Megan explains this best). A beta-version of the interactive fiction experience is online here.

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