Interview with the Director: Margaret Thomas Kelso

Though she’s been on the HSU faculty since 1996 and has directed elsewhere, HELEN is the first play Margaret Thomas Kelso has directed at HSU.

Why this one?

“I was looking at plays that dealt with war,” she said, “and I was also looking at plays that dealt with women’s issues. When I found Helen, it dealt with both. And as a bonus, it’s a comedy.”

“The dominant themes of this play are beauty and celebrity. Helen is the archetypal beauty queen—the most beautiful woman in the world, so beautiful a war was fought over her.”

“But celebrities must respond so much to what people fantasize about them. People project their hopes and fears onto them, until they aren’t really who they are anymore. They lose their personhood to become this celebrity.”

In this play, Helen loses her personhood in a uniquely complete way.

“There are many versions of the Helen story,” Kelso explains. “The version that Euripides told in his play was that the gods made copies of Helen, and one of the copies went to Troy. The real Helen was sent to Egypt, to wait out the war until her husband—Menelaus, the king of Sparta—could come by and pick her up. That’s the version that Ellen McLaughlin uses when she writes this play.”

The Trojan War was fought when the Greeks banded together to rescue Helen from Troy, where she had been taken (willingly or unwillingly, depending on which version of the story) by Paris, a Trojan prince.

“But in this version, the real Helen has nothing to do with any of that. She doesn’t go off to Troy. Her perfect replica does. So the whole Trojan War is based on a lie.”

“Euripides’ play deals with issues of fighting a war because of a lie, and he does it using absurd humor. McLaughlin keeps the comic approach, but I think she deals more seriously with the horrors of war.”
[interview continues after photo]