Trojan Barbie by Christine Evans
Drama Characters: 4 male, 7 female A Car-Crash Encounter with Euripides' Trojan Women. Trojan Barbie is the winner of the 2007 Jane Chambers Award, the Playwrights First "Plays for the 21st Century" Award, and the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts Playwriting Fellowship, 2009. Past and present violently collide when Lotte, an English tourist who repairs dolls, is captured while on a tour of current-day Troy and flung back into the ancient camp of Euripides' Trojan Women. Lotte Jones, a doll repair expert, needs a vacation. She books herself on a cultural tour for singles and travels with them to modern-day Troy, where she finds more of a change of scene than she'd bargained for- she's in the midst of an attack by the Greek army threatening to destroy the last fragments of a mighty civilization. When the camp is torched, the women are enslaved and Lotte is rescued by the British Embassy. Her life returns to normal - until a revenge-obsessed Hecuba claws her way up through the centuries into Lotte's doll shop, in search of her murdered children's bodies. Part contemporary drama, part homage to Euripides' Trojan Women, Trojan Barbie recasts the legendary fall of the city of Troy against the vivid reality of modern warfare. Poetic, compassionate, and tinged with great warmth and humor, Trojan Barbie is an epic war story with a most unlikely heroine, who always looks on the bright side even as past and present collide about her. "Playwright Christine Evans melds contemporary art and culture with an ancient, mythical war in her explosive new work, Trojan Barbie...an imaginative, time-warped view of the ongoing challenges women have faced since foreign conflict first raged thousands of years ago." -Talkin' Broadway