Kasia Maimone’s sketch for Andromache for The Trojan Women.

On one stage, a secret society of Elizabethan free thinkers. On the other, the lovers and wives of dead Trojan soldiers. The Drama Division's exciting season of productions featuring fourth-year students kicks off this month with two plays set more than 2,000 years apart—and historical rumination will abound as spears and laurel wreaths mix with quills and Tudor furnishings in the prop shop.

The School of Night, written by English playwright Peter Whelan, is making its U.S. debut at Juilliard, under the direction of David Warren. Also this month, Joanna Settle, a 1997 graduate of Juilliard's Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Directing Program, will return to direct Euripides' The Trojan Women. The production will be the first for the Drama Division featuring a graduate of the directing program at the helm.

With its title taken from a phrase in Love's Labour's Lost by William Shakespeare, The School of Night examines the 16th-century intellectual circle that counted Christopher Marlowe (played by Joaquín Pérez-Campbell), Thomas Kyd (played by Graham Hamilton), and Sir Walter Raleigh (played by Marco De La Cruz) as members. The play investigates the mystery surrounding Marlowe's death in 1593 against the backdrop of a politically and religiously divided England. Was he really killed in a barroom brawl, as the history books say? Or do the rumors of espionage, atheism, and homosexuality hint at something more complicated in his ultimate undoing?

A costume sketch of Talthybius by Kasia Maimone for The Trojan Women.

First staged in Stratford-upon-Avon and then in London at the Royal Shakespeare Company's Pit Theatre during the 1992-93 season, The School of Night attempts to illuminate the final days of one of the era's more enigmatic writers. Though he now often takes a back seat to Shakespeare, Marlowe was a brilliant writer, the most successful and influential poet-playwright of his day and the first to bring blank verse to the English theater. Young, charismatic, witty, and ironic, Marlowe had all the markings of greatness. His sudden death at the age of 29 is as much a mystery as is Shakespeare's genius.

Though the Juilliard community may know The School of Night director David Warren from his work on the Broadway revivals of Holiday, Summer and Smoke, and Misalliance, he is certainly no stranger to presenting new material to audiences. He is a regular collaborator of playwright Nicky Silver and has received critical accolades for premieres of two of Silver's works: an Obie Award for Pterodactyls and a DramaLogue Award for Raised in Captivity. Debut productions of works by Leslie Ayvazian, Tom Donaghy, Richard Greenberg, and Eric Bogosian have also been critical successes.

A costume sketch by Veronica Worts for Queen Dido in The School of Night.

"It's always interesting to connect the historical dots of someone's life, to take a look at what could have happened," Warren comments. "These Juilliard drama students are so well trained, working with them is not a traditional teacher-student situation. There is more give and take, more relying on their talent and input."

The largely male cast of The School of Night will be balanced by a staging of The Trojan Women, Euripides' tale of the aftermath of the Trojan War. With the still-smoldering ruins of Troy in the distance, Hecuba (played by Holly Troupe), Cassandra (played by Jasmine Jobity), Andromache (played by Sarah McMinn), and the infamous Helen (played by Jessica Chastain) grieve for the deaths of their sons, husbands, and brothers while contemplating their fates as battle trophies. The play is an "everywoman" story that asks the audience to assess the price paid by the survivors of war. In an arena dominated by men's egos and impulses, Euripides seems to say, it is the women who must deal with the aftermath and carry on.

A sketch of Harlequin by Veronica Worts for The School of Night.

The Trojan Women was not popular when it was first performed in 415 B.C. at the Theater of Dionysus in Athens. It was criticized for its impertinence to the gods, use of conversational language, and lack of dramatic action. The mostly male audience—fresh from pillaging the island of Melos, despite a peace treaty with Sparta—was not accustomed to having core beliefs challenged, especially by a theatrical production. The play's anti-war, proto-feminist undertones eventually cost Euripides his Athenian citizenship. Luckily, The Trojan Women was one of 20 of his plays (he wrote more than 90) that survived the fires of Alexandria.

As one of three students accepted into Juilliard's Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Directing Program for its inaugural year (1995), Joanna Settle is familiar with The Trojan Women. She studied at Juilliard under director JoAnne Akalaitis, whose own staging of the play at the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, D.C. was the debut of the new translation that is also being used by Settle. In 2000, Settle was chosen in a highly competitive, national search to receive

THE TROJAN WOMEN Studio 301 September 24-30 THE SCHOOL OF NIGHT Drama Theater September 25-29 For time and ticket information see calendar.

a stipend from the NEA/ TCG Career Development Programs for Directors. She currently serves as the artistic director of the newly transplanted Division 13 Productions, a non-profit theater group she joined in Chicago after graduation and relocated to her native Brooklyn in May of 2001.

"My first exposure to Greek plays was assisting on Euripides' Iphigenia at Aulis and Iphigenia in Tauris at Juilliard in 1995, so I suppose I'm coming full circle," Settle said. "The interesting thing about the Greek plays is that, once you work on one, all the references start to make sense. It helps my interpretation to understand just how contemporary these plays were, how topical, when they were presented. It's not classical as in 'preserved'—it's classical as in 'timeless.'"