SF Olympians

Many suitors besides Menelaus—including Odysseus, Agamemnon, and Ajax the Great—want to marry Helen, but her stepfather Tyndareus is reluctant to choose one over the others and spark a feud. Odysseus offers the following suggestion (in exchange for Penelope): Why not have all the suitors swear to defend the one who wins Helen’s hand? Menelaus draws the winning straw, and after Helen’s stepfather dies, ascends the throne of Sparta. The couple have a daughter, Hermione. All seems well until the infamous incident with the Golden Apple… In return for judging her the most beautiful goddess of them all, Aphrodite promises Paris the most beautiful woman in the world, i.e. Helen. Paris takes Helen back with him to Troy. Menelaus responds by rallying Helen’s powerful former suitors to make good on their vow, and thus commences the brutal ten-year Trojan War. The night that Troy is sacked, Menelaus is reunited with his wife. There are several versions of what happens next: Two involve Helen baring her breasts to either Menelaus or a group of his soldiers to convince them to spare her life. In a less titillating version (sorry), Menelaus tells Helen he will punish her after they get home…

Of her play about Menelaus, Annette Roman writes, “I find it amusing that Helen makes up for dumping her husband, running off with another man, and causing a ten-year war by simply flashing her boobs. What if all your problems could be solved that way? This was my original farcical conceit. But as I delved deeper into the story of this little family of characters, more troubling themes emerged. How does Helen feel about being an object men fight over? Helen didn’t choose her husband; did she choose her lover? Conversely, how satisfied is Menelaus with a wife—no matter how beautiful—who doesn’t appear to love him? Whatever the problems between these two, like any parents they have dreams for their daughter. What life wisdom do they long to pass on to Hermione? What are their hopes for her to live a better life? And what of Hermione’s dreams, the dreams of a new generation for itself? I envision Helen as a pre-Feminist taking power where she can within the system and Hermione as a post-Feminist who wants to take her freedoms for granted. My treatment seems to be getting rather serious, but I look forward to writing anachronistic scenes about Helen and Hermione going bra shopping at Aphrodite’s lingerie boutique; Hermione’s classes at the Lycieum with her women’s studies professor Athena; and Menelaus’s workouts at the gym with his old war buddies, his wife’s former suitors.”

MENELAUS by Annette Roman
Directed by Elizabeth Vega
staged reading on Thursday, November 7, 2013

Vince Faso (Diomedes)

Catz Forsman (Menelaus)

Katrina Kroetch (Hermione)

Mia Nadolski (Helen)

Allison Page (Aphrodite)

Louel Senores (Telemachus)

Karl Schackne (Agapenor)

Ramya Vijayan (Athena)

Annette Roman is the writer/performer of the one-woman show Hitler’s Li’l Abomination, performed in 2011 at the Boulder and San Francisco Fringe Festivals, in 2012 at the Fresno and Edinburgh Fringe Festivals, and to be performed in 2013 at the Orlando and Vancouver Fringe Festivals. She is currently working on a new solo show that is sure to be a crowd pleaser about dying pets and domestic violence. She has written English adaptations of numerous Japanese manga translated into English (no, she doesn’t speak Japanese) as well as Disney comics translated from various European languages. She is the author of 1 World Manga: Passages, a graphic novel series created in cooperation with the World Bank, about the developing world, which has in its turn been translated into French, Spanish, Vietnamese, Chinese, Arabic, and Bahasa Indonesian. Among her odder honors: the Egyptian Ministry of Education selected the 1 World Manga installments on global warming and child soldiers for distribution in Egyptian schools. She has studied solo performance at The Marsh Theater; acting at the Berkeley Rep; improvising at Bay Area Theater Sports; playwriting at the University of California, Berkeley; and fiction writing as an undergraduate at Cornell University. In high school, she played the role of the Narrator in Franz Kafka’s Josephine the Mouse Singer on a giant thimble while wearing mouse ears and a tail. This might explain a lot. More random info and bloggish musings available at annetteroman.wordpress.com.

The piece of art for Menelaus was created by Caitlin VanArsdale!