Through April 25, Athenaeum Theatre, 2936 N. Review: “Tiger at the Gates” by Promethean Theatre Ensemble But this is a rare opportunity to see a play that tackles the complexities and contradictions of why human destiny seems so hard-wired for warfare, and why the tiger at the gates is always sleeping with one eye open. Lewis’ staging sometimes falters under the weightiness of the arguments the mordant wit of Fry’s translation could use some sharpening here to make it feel less pedantic. … Scarlet, scaley, glazed, framed in a clotted, filthy wig”) and Heather Smith’s anguished Andromache carry the emotional weight. Jamie Bragg’s cryptic-but-sardonic Cassandra, Elaine Carlson’s ribald Hecuba (who describes war as “the bottom of a baboon. And it’s the women who register the clearest protests against that mindset. In Giradoux’s telling, it’s the old men past the point of martial danger and the pundits - er, poets - who’ve never crawled onto a battlefield who crave war as a force to give their lives meaning. Even Rachel Sypniewski’s colorful but slightly tatty costumes look like the leftovers at a consignment shop’s going-out-of-business sale. If you don’t learn your dog’s growls, miscommunication is bound to happen. Learning what your dog is trying to tell you will help you live in harmony with one another. Growling doesn’t always mean your dog feels threatened. The gray battlements of Troy and the rusty, rickety gates of war in Jeremiah Barr and Kaitlyn Grissom’s set suggest a subdivision in its last gasps more than a prosperous kingdom painted in glorious and noble words by poets across the millennia. Growls are a form of communication for dogs, so you must understand growling behavior. Promethean Theatre Ensemble’s revival of “Tiger at the Gates,” directed by John Arthur Lewis, takes a stark approach to the material. (Though, in retrospect, it’s easy to argue that taking up arms against the Nazis was a bloody necessity.) Sadly, in Giradoux’s vision, that’s pretty much all the ages in the history of humanity. But Giradoux’s 1935 elegant tragicomedy, “The Trojan War Will Not Take Place” (translated and retitled in 1955 as “Tiger at the Gates” by British dramatist Christopher Fry) deserves fresh attention, particularly in an age when the cries for war ring loudly, no matter the casus belli. In a theater landscape littered with productions of Charles Mee’s pop culture mashups of Greek tragedies, Jean Giradoux can’t get any respect.
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