The Trojans – 20 March 2025

The Trojan horse of The Trojans by Leegrid Stevens as produced by Loading Dock Theatre was hiding a very dark and depressing reality inside a fun, enjoyable experience. The primary plot was a story within a story—the outer layer was about warehouse workers who have lost the joy in their lives reenacting a wild story from their high school days as the most exciting time of their lives, a time, if the actors’ ages are to be inferred as accurate, that has long since passed them by. The inner shell, though told in inventive ways, showed a desire to revisit the shallow simplicity of high school because even when times were bad—and I mean really bad—they at least held an excitement about the future. Many of the high school characters end up dead, suggesting that even in the most exciting moments, nobody really had a future. This portrayal comes from the survivors who live dead end lives, which begs the question: is the meta reality of The Trojans a question about whether or not these warehouse workers think they might be better off dead?

As an experience, The Trojans flirted with gender as a spectrum in a deeply beautiful way. The costumes (Ashley Soliman) reflected an explicit truth of the younger generation: the artistic guy covered in makeup can be a heterosexual ladies man who is a total player. The star player of the football team can be openly gay and strong about it. Most of the actors at some point played a character aligned with their gender identity and in  another moment one that wasn’t. Everybody was a person first. And that was beautiful. The lighting (Christopher Annas-Lee) and sound (Will Watt) design where also both quite mesmerizing.

Critique time! The experience also included a lot of moving parts and choreography that got too close to the audience for comfort. It hindered my enjoyment of the play to feel like at any moment an actor could fall on me.  The number of actors in the show was too ambitious for a space of this size. The structure of how music worked within the show could use work, especially during act one when the music came on for very brief moments and cut out abruptly. It might have been nice to hear more singing and less shouting. A lot of the mic’d moments had so much reverb and echo that I could not discern the words.

Lastly—the idea and content of this show are powerful. The Trojan War metaphor and recalling of The Iliad was completely unnecessary, and it hindered moments that could have connected emotionally to a broader audience. The talk of medusas and werewolves was unnecessary and felt weird contextually when juxtaposed with the War of 1812 and the Louisiana Purchase. There’s no estate to accuse the production of intellectual property theft, so it’s fine that this story was similar to an ancient historical war, and it could have just been told. The demigod concept was irrelevant. He could have just had an ego. There’s always a witchy goth girl in high school—she could act like a fate either way. Wars not being named for the victors could have been brought up without attempting to draw this parallel. To playwright Leegrid Stevens: tell your story and trust yourself to tell it. You don’t need to lean on tales of antiquity; they’re actually holding you back.

Overall, The Trojans is too big for this space. It attempts to take on too many dimensions and does so with far too many people onstage. Though interesting conceptually, particularly in terms of the story within the story, the attempt to exist in every time at every moment is confusing and tough for an audience to process. Despite needing work, it also holds space for some beautiful moments and concepts and is certainly one of the most creative uses of The Cell humanly possible. It is clear that many people poured a lot into this production, and I hope that in its next iteration, the confidence of this moment can have enough space to fully breathe, take shape, and fly.

I attended this performance on a press pass from Emily Owens PR.