SF Olympians

There is so much romance around the character of Cassandra. She is a beautiful princess of Troy with bright red fiery hair that refuses the love of a god. She is cursed with seeing the future but not being believed. Cassandra watches and retreats into madness as everyone she loves dies around her, heedless of her warnings. At the end of Troy there is nothing left but ruins and plunder, and the coward Agamemnon takes Cassandra as his prize. Inflamed with rage over the deaths of her own children and racked with jealousy, Agamemnon’s wife slays Cassandra along with Agamemnon and brings the long terrible war to a bloody end. But for all the romance, Cassandra is not much more than a pawn. The daughter of a besieged kingdom, sister of a prodigal, desired for her body, untrusted for her mind, traded as a war prize, and then finally murdered for another man’s sins. In any account of the fall of Troy and its aftermath, Cassandra takes up very little space. She is the victim that stands in for all victims and she foreshadows events to keep the reader interested. She was born to be the end of Agamemnon and the end of the war. She was born to bear witness to plot twists but have no hand in the twisting.

Of her play about Cassandra, author Claire Rice says, “I think her story is epic. Taken just from her viewpoint, Cassandra watches the whole of the Trojan war. She sees it through her powers of vision, she is a victim of it, and she is herself carried off to Greece with the man who literally launched a thousand ships. I think the story is worth being told with her as the main character. She reminds me of Hamlet in some ways, constantly questioning her own existence, philosophizing about action and inaction, she makes mistakes that change the course of the story, and she watches as other mistakes are made for her. I think she has a place as a symbol of political and social injustice, but I wanted to tell an epic story that was a romantically tragic adventure with a woman leading character who was a willing participant.”

CASSANDRA by Claire Rice
Directed by Claire Rice
Staged Reading on Friday, November 15, 2013

Juliana Egley (Cassandra)

James Grady (Helenus)

Ryan Hayes (Apollo/Paris/Ajax/Guard)

Heather Kellogg (Messengers/Stage Directions)

Richard Steel (Priam/Agamemnon/Zeus)

Aaron Tworek (Agathon/Meges/Thanatos/Man)

Teri Whipple (Hecuba/Hera/Clytemnestra)

Shay Wisniewski (Polyxena/Helen/Algea/Woman)

Claire is a playwright and director who has lived in San Francisco for just about ten years. In that time she’s earned a Master’s Degree in Playwrighting, helped start and put to bed a production company called Ann Marie Productions that produced five shows, including a show she helped take to NYCFringe in 2011. She’s directed for Thunderbird Theatre Company, No Nude Men, Piano Fight, Wiley West, SF Theater Pub, Custom Made, and DIVAFest. Her plays include The Carmine Lie, Pride and Succubus, It Ain’t Me, Waterline, Woman Come Down and Demeter’s Daughter. She lives with her talented husband Matt Gunnison. This is her fourth year in the Olympians festival.

The piece of art for Cassandra by Kelly Lawrence!