On Andrei Serban’s “The Trojan Women” I was 13 years old when my parents took me to the original production of “Trojan Women” at LaMama. My father, a photographer, was taking pictures of rehearsals; my mother loved avant-garde theater, though I got the impression she was maybe as smitten with Andrei Serban’s tall golden craggy looks as his directing! I got dragged to a lot of experimental theatre as a child, but this was one of the first plays (along with Peter Brooks’ “Midsummer Night’s Dream”) that genuinely thrilled me. I remember watching with envy the children (younger than me) who were part of this ragtag polyglot procession of refugee Trojans whose fierce pride suggested there was more glory to being a prisoner than a guard. I remember the play’s harsh ur-language, composed of shards of ancient Greek, Swahili, indigenous Native American tongues. Fast-forward forty-five years to a snowy night in December 2019. Andrei Serban, now a majestic old man in a tracksuit, has allowed me a sneak-peek at a rehearsal. The tin-walled space, criss-crossed in wooden scaffolding, brings me back the shock of standing in that audience as a thirteen-year-old. Tonight it’s like a three-ring-circus—in every corner, actors rehearse. A troupe of Mayan women in ankle-length skirts scrabble up a wooden ramp, goaded by spear-bearing soldiers. Serban halts the action, reminds the women that their arms are bound behind their backs—no hands free to stop themselves from stumbling--he mimics. “Again. As slowly as you need, but no hands.” An interpreter translates the order, and they repeat. An African-American Hecuba with white dreadlocks, newly enslaved, processes across the room, roaring out the destruction of her husband and fifty sons, her people, her city-state. On an overhead promontory, a gruesome pas de deux is being enacted. A young spear-carrier leads a woman by the rope around her neck. The young woman is lissome, with a dancer’s patient clever body. In a desperate tug-of-war, she races away from him, he is dragged along, then yanks her back by the neck--wild horse on a lasso. She’s shouting words that go, Hodi-ho, hodi-ho…This is the Trojan princess Cassandra, whose prophecies are doomed to go unheeded. Tonight she’s foretelling the end of the world. The soldier doesn’t listen, he has orders to follow, security measures to be enforced. 1974 felt like a soiled ugly time in both American and world history. But today, Euripides’ drama about war’s aftermath seems even more salient. Today we see that it is civilians--Afghan wedding parties, caged children at the US border, climate refugees--who increasingly suffer the consequences of regional conflict and imperial depredations. LaMama’s--and Andrei Serban’s--transnational, multigenerational cycle reminds us that theatre at its most transformative can be a form both of resistance and healing, a stab at maybe next time making the story turn out better.