Helen

Sitting through Helen, one gets the impression of a classroom assignment for a first-year playwriting course: Take a classical Greek character and tell the story from her point of view; the assignment would be called, say, “Perspective and Voice.” Alarmingly, the often-produced McLaughlin (herself a college instructor) hasn’t turned her homework into a piece of theater worthy of production. More alarmingly still, Next Theatre thinks she has.

Set inside a quasi-Egyptian hotel room—a truly (intentionally?) garish design by Keith Pitts—Helen picks up from Euripides’ version of Helen of Troy, in which she waits out the war in Egypt while her phantom image goes to Troy. McLaughlin’s clichéd, uninsightful reading of the myth is that the men project their desires onto the idealized, silent woman; it’s really about them and their fantasies, not her. But in giving Helen voice, McLaughlin hasn’t given her much to say; Helen swats flies or goes off on bad-poetry riffs. Four characters come and go, including Io (a woman who’d been turned into a cow, and has the cow ears to prove it) and Athena (Laura T. Fisher, the show’s one bright spot). As Helen, McCarthy just seems lost, and director Dymond doesn’t seem to know the way, either.—Novid Parsi