"My plays are broken, jagged, filled with sharp edges, filled with things that take sudden turns, careen into each other, smash up, veer off in sickening turns. That feels good to me. It feels like my life. It feels like the world." This is how Charles L. Mee, the playwright who created Trojan Women: A Love Story, describes his plays. Mee's plays are grandiose collages of texts from many sources with no concern for "originality," including but not limited to interviews from Hiroshima survivors, poetry from Sei Shonagon, and passages from the Kama Sutra. His style alone is unlike any other American playwright, but to add yet another layer of complexity, Mee also urges the artists who take on his work to cut, change, and add to his scripts as much as they choose. As a performer, his plays create endless opportunities for the actor to showcase a diversity of acting styles and stage skills. This project entailed four months of extensive research on Mee's original sources, in addition to over 200 hours of group rehearsals, physical work, and one-on-one meetings with my director and acting partners. Also, research included examining countless other related sources in order to obtain an informed perspective as an actor to then play actions and make choices on stage that did justice to the complexity of Mee's script and all of the history and themes within it.
