By GEOFFREY MURPHY

Costume sketch by Olivera Gajic for Cassandra.

A man is hitting a dumpster with a baseball bat, a girl is coloring the floor with chalk, and a bunch of people are dancing to the hip-hop music which is blaring from the speakers. What kind of chaos is this? Just another day in rehearsal for the last production of Group 36's fourth-year performance season—The Greeks, Part One: The War, directed by Brian Mertes, which will be offered in the Drama Theater this month and will feature the entire fourth-year class.

Given the opportunity to sit in on rehearsals for this production, I was more than a little surprised by what I saw. The stage of the Drama Theater was covered with assorted flotsam and jetsam and clear tarps were hanging up-stage. I turned to Mertes and asked if this was what the set would look like. "Oh, no," he said. When I asked what it would look like, he replied, "I don't know."

The Greeks, Part One: The War is part of a trilogy of compilations of major Greek plays, adapted by John Barton and Kenneth Cavander for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1979. This first part of the trilogy includes three separate plays, Iphigenia in Aulis, Achilles, and The Trojan Women, which cover the events surrounding the Trojan War (yes, the one with the gigantic wooden horse). The reason for this war is that Paris, the son of the king of Troy, had stolen Helen ("the face that launch'd a thousand ships") from her husband, Menelaus of Greece. The Greeks go to war with Troy to try to secure Helen's release.

The evening begins with a brief prologue to get the audience up to speed on the mythology needed to understand the plays. The first play represented in the evening is Euripides' Iphigenia in Aulis, which opens with the Greek army preparing to set sail under the command of Agamemnon, Menelaus's brother, to wage war with Troy. There is only one problem: there is no wind to fill their sails. The winds have been calmed by the jealous goddess Artemis, who demands that Agamemnon sacrifice his daughter, Iphigenia, to her. Agamemnon is torn between his 1,000-ship fleet and his daughter's life. He brings Iphigenia to the place where she is to be sacrificed by telling her that she is going to be married to Achilles, the greatest warrior of the day. Eventually he decides that he has no choice but to comply with Artemis's demand. But doing so, he takes the first step in the decline of his family dynasty.

The second play in this part of the trilogy is called Achilles, and is a dramatic presentation by Aeschylus of a part of Homer's The Iliad. It opens with the warring armies still battling after five years. Once again, the gods intervene to cause a problem for the Greeks—this time, a rift between Agamemnon and Achilles over a woman. Achilles leaves the army and prays to the gods that the Greeks lose the war. Only after a dear friend of his is killed in battle by Hector of Troy does Achilles return to fight. He kills Hector, despite knowing of the prophecy that killing Hector would soon bring his own death. At the close of the play, Achilles awaits his fate.

Costume sketches by Olivera Gajic for Agamemnon (above) and Polyxena (below).

The third play, The Trojan Women, is based on another play by Euripides and takes place five years after Achilles. It opens after the fall of Troy, brought about when the Trojans let a giant wooden horse filled with Greek soldiers into the city's walls. After nightfall, the Greek soldiers emerged from the horse and opened the gates to their brethren. Troy was sacked and burned, and all the Trojan men were killed by the Greek army. The women of Troy now await their fate as they are about to be sent off to the various corners of Greece as spoils of war for their conquerors. Families are separated, and it is a time of great fear and intense mourning. Meanwhile, the priestess and prophet Cassandra, daughter of the queen of Troy, prophesies, among other things, that Agamemnon would be killed by his wife, Clytemnestra, and his son would kill Clytemnestra in revenge. (This lays the groundwork for the plot of the most famous of all Greek plays, the trilogy of The Oresteia by Aeschylus, comprising the plays Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and The Furies.)

But if you go to this performance expecting to see a classical Greek play, you will be surprised. This production is vastly different from its classical forebears in that it uses contemporary sound, video, and innovative staging. The director allows great fluidity in the rehearsal process, and a huge amount of freedom for the actors. Every actor takes a part in creating the experience of the play. "I like chaos," says Mertes of his direction.

Mertes, who also directed One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest at Juilliard in 2004, says he changes his process with each new project. The Greeks, Part One: The War is, according to Mertes, a very different way of telling a story. The original Greek plays told stories from ancient history and myth. This adaptation uses the classical tales as a means of revealing truths that go beyond just the Greeks themselves. It has a wider relevance—and in some ways, Mertes says, "it looks like Iraq up there."

Geoffrey Murphy is a second-year drama student.