Review: The Trojans, an ’80s High School Synth-Pop Musical Inspired by Homer

Has America, and the West in general, become that guy from your high school who peaked at 18 and now haunts a local bar, regaling all who will listen about his homecoming game glory? I wondered that as I watched The Trojans, playwright-composer Leegrid Stevens’s synth-pop musical adaptation of The Iliad, now playing at the cell.

Scenic designer Simon Cleveland has completely transformed that snug Chelsea performance space into an Amazon fulfillment center, with cardboard packages stacked from floor to ceiling and plastic flaps separating the upstage loading dock from the main floor. This is the stage on which a crew of Texas warehouse workers reenacts a significant chapter from their teenage years: when Heather Henderson (Deshja Driggs) left her boyfriend, Johnny (Roger Casey), for the androgynous cool cat Daris (Arya Grace Gaston), who attends Highland, an art school.

Heather is determined to transfer, and this lights a fire under the asses of the players of the North Texas Trojans football team, for which Johnny is the quarterback. The homecoming game is against Highland; but do they stand a chance without their star running back Keeley (Erin Treadway), currently off the team following a petty feud with Johnny?

By reframing Homer’s foundational epic as an adolescent rivalry that still animates a circle of exhausted wage slaves, Stevens pokes fun at the power of myth to inspire a population that, by all reason, should have given up on dreaming. But as wide receiver Doug (Sam Tilles) lustily sings in the jock jam “Not Any More,” “Everything changes but so what, whatever. / Cause a win is still a win and that shit lasts forever.”

In choosing synth-pop as the musical style, Stevens cleverly evokes the mythic America of John Hughes movies, a wind-in-your-hair, sunglasses-at-night Middle-Earth in which young suburbanites experience a Promethean awakening to sex and class, the two most powerful forces in our society. Formally, it’s perfect—but that doesn’t compensate for the dull pain it inflicts on our ears, with one fuzzy keyboard ostinato sounding much like the next.

Kernels of brilliance emerge from the electronic muck, like the second act song “Boys are Bad,” in which Keeley’s boyfriend, Lucas (Daphne Always), sings a tongue-in-cheek missive about male rage featuring the chorus, “Oh, here come all the apologies / Time to blame the economy.” The cabaret star performs the number with such bewitching sauciness that we completely overlook the near rhymes.

Other performances add frosting to this half-baked cake: Casey is a bundle of meritocratic nerves as the college-bound QB. Tilles perfectly embodies teenage gawkiness desperately posing as cool. Treadway radiates intensity as the demi-god jock. Set against this middle-American high school milieu, Gaston’s Daris emerges from a cloud of cigarette smoke like an alien from planet autotune. Jen Rondeau is hilarious as clairvoyant goth girl Sondra, wielding a cootie catcher and a tab of E like she’s Siouxsie Sioux at Delphi. But none of her prophecies hit as hard as the one implied in Heather’s question to Johnny as they speed down a Texas freeway: “Do you think we’ll still love to dance in 30 years?” Driggs’s wide-eyed delivery of that line as a teenager, and her sunken fatigue as an adult, give us the answer.

Director Eric Paul Vitale’s resourceful staging is the most impressive thing about The Trojans. He enlists the mundane items one might find in any warehouse to create his epic. He and choreographer Melinda Rebman use carts on castors to stage a car chase and manage to squeeze a football game onto the tiny floor space.

Costume designer Ashley Soliman fashions football pads and hoplite armor out of hi-vis jackets and packing tape. Will Watt’s sound design enhances the mythic feel, embellishing the performers’ voices with strategic echoes. And Christopher Annas-Lee’s lighting powerfully governs the play world, casting us into the music video deep end of shadows and colored LEDs, then yanking us back into late-capitalist reality when the work lights come up. It’s brilliantly inventive, the kind of work Alex Timbers was doing 20 years ago, before he became a usual suspect on Broadway.

Unfortunately, The Trojans sags in the second act under the weight of inert musical numbers and bloated monologues, making the show feel much longer than its two-and-a-half-hour runtime. It’s as if Stevens isn’t quite ready to walk away from his story, just like the characters who cannot stop telling it. But maybe that’s an affliction from which we all suffer as we settle into our seats in the darkness to hear stories we’ve already heard a thousand times.