Songs of Joy and Destitution

Set in an Iraq hollowed by our upcoming bombing campaign, and back home in the US (as seen in the walkaround style of a Halloween funhouse), Songs of Joy and Destitution collages together a twenty-first century remix of Euripides’ fourth-century B.C. masterpieces: The Trojan Women, the greatest of all anti-war plays and Orestes, Western drama’s first-generation horror comedy. The show uses high oratory, tawdry phone sex, the pop songs you hear in the bathroom of the gas station, Jerome Robbins dance numbers and a great deal of unapologetic pathos to scorch a psychic x-ray of the post 9/11 planet.