Theater: How playwright Mary-Kay Gamel got to Helen of Troy via ‘Egypt’

She had a “face that launched a thousand ships.”

“That’s the story,” says Mary-Kay Gamel, referring to the mythically beautiful bombshell Helen of Troy. “And let me tell you,” says the current chair of Sonoma Arts Live’s Board of Directors, “that ‘face that launched a thousand ships’ description does make it pretty challenging to cast Helen of Troy in a play. It sets the bar rather high.”

In “Helen of Egypt,” Gamel’s updated original musical, with songs by frequent collaborator Philip Collins (not that Phil Collins), Helen is the misunderstood central figure, and the author-director says she’s found an actress who will more than suffice.

“She’s lovely,” says Gamel, “and she can sing.”

Opening July 1, following a June 30 preview, “Helen of Egypt” is being produced as part of Sonoma Arts Live’s current summer series of shows. It is only the second time the show has been fully staged, and Gamel says one need not be an expert of Greek theater to appreciate the show’s numerous plot twists and belly laughs.

“My approach is to make it possible for a contemporary audience, with no knowledge of the Greek plays, to enjoy it thoroughly,” she says. “In the script, I find ways to make clear what happened, so the audience can get it.”

There are, of course, few among us who have not heard at least something about Helen of Troy.

In what is one of the best, juiciest stories ever concocted by crafty mythmakers, Helen was the wife of the Greek King Menalaus. She had a badly-timed affair with Troy’s handsome warrior prince Paris, and thus set off in motion the Trojan War. Helen’s extramarital fling lead directly to the clash of two massive armies, a 10-year-long siege outside the walls of Troy, and the subsequent deaths of thousands of Greeks and Trojans. The infamous story gave birth to the legends of Achilles’ heel, the Golden Apple, and the Trojan Horse, further inspiring two classic epics – “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey” – along with numerous plays, songs, movies and “Saturday Night Live” routines.

But what, Gamel suggests, if the storytellers got it all wrong? What if that wasn’t actually Helen who accompanied Prince Paris to Troy? What if that was an impostor, a shill, a decoy, a distraction? What if Helen, one of history’s most famous cheaters, was actually a faithful wife whose name and reputation has been cruelly besmirched for centuries?

That’s the idea behind Gamel’s tuneful adaptation of Euripides’ 412 B.C. play “Helen,” itself a spirited variation of the original tale. In Euripides’ version, the Gods transport the real Helen to Egypt and replace her with an exact copy, yet do nothing to stop the Greeks and the Trojans, and Helen’s own husband, from blaming her for the ensuing decade-long war. “Helen of Egypt,” which Gamel says is Sonoma Arts Live’s first-ever attempt at Greek theater, moves the tale forward to the celebrity-worshiping present day.

“I love Euripides,” says Gamel, who recently retired as a professor of classics at UC Santa Cruz, where she staged numerous productions of classic plays, including several she adapted herself. “Euripides,” she says, “is the most theatrical, the most risk-taking, or all the classic Greek writers. One thing he does is to combine comedy and seriousness. That’s so interesting, and so productive when dealing with subjects like war, deception and all of that.”

Gamel wrote “Helen of Egypt” in 2008, inspired, in part, by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“We were learning that after going to war to find and destroy all of those weapons of mass destruction, that there were no weapons of mass destruction,” she says. “The reason for invading two countries was an illusion. There was a certain connection there to the Trojan War story, not that I’m conveying any political messages at all in the play. It was just interesting that, in Euripides’ version, the reason behind the war was also an illusion. I wanted to play around with that.”

Since relocating to Sonoma, Gamel has dreamed of the opportunity to restage “Helen of Egypt,” and says she’s found the perfect partners in Sonoma Arts Live.

“It makes me happy to do it here, because Greek theater was also community theater. It was the common people, with day jobs, who learned the lines, wore the costumes, rehearsed the play, and performed it for their community.”

Aware that some purists might quibble at the liberties she’s taken with the story, Gamel says she’s only following in the Greeks’ footsteps.

“I believe in adaptation, in update, in reinterpretation, because the Greeks themselves did that,” she says. “Euripides, Aristophanes – all of them changed things around, found new ways of telling the stories, or found new stories buried in the larger ones.”

So if Gamel has taken Euripides original and presented it for a new generation, an audience that will bring its own experiences of war, deception and love, she believes the great playwright would be on her side.

“I’ve made the original contemporary,” she says. “That, I believe, is being faithful to the original.”

Email David at david.templeton@sonomanews.com