Helen Reviews

Chicago Reader - Highly Recommended

"...Kelley Ristow's impressive, quicksilver staging for Vintage Theatre Collection moves with impeccable timing toward this and other uncomfortable truths. Languishing in an Egyptian hotel room with the ghostly comforts of faded celebrity, Katy Carolina Collins wears the role of the imperious, self-deluded Helen like a snug fur stole. The rest of the excellent cast orbit her in tight counterpoint, building taut drama in their encounters with the crumbling first lady of western culture."

Time Out Chicago - Recommended

"...Ristow’s cast is young—anachronisms be damned, there’s no way Collins’s fresh-faced Helen has been cooped up, as she says, for 17 years—but the actors have a firm grasp on McLaughlin’s poetic revisionism. In visits with Io (Mintz in jocular cow ears), Athena (Shain in sleek warrior-goddess black) and a storytelling servant (an imposing Anderson), Helen works through her own story’s relation to modern gender dynamics and the ways we hamper ourselves by our need for narrative. One wishes McLaughlin would delve more deeply into the ideas she raises; Ristow’s solid production is nonetheless thoroughly engaging."

Chicago Theater Beat - Highly Recommended

"...If there is one snag in the fabric of McLaughlin’s script, it seems to be its over-reliance on the Servant’s storytelling to provide context for Helen’s next set of choices or emotional journey. Also, Jeff Trainor makes a terribly sympathetic war-torn Menelaus, yet his arrival in Helen’s room seems almost anti-climatic. McLaughlin has brought up and fleshed the conundrums involved over women being adored for their physical appearance–yet still having very little control or agency in their lives. She doesn’t seem to know how to wrap up what she’s plunged into. A certain form of immortality is held out to Helen but that hardly seems to compensate for the life the gods have taken from her. Perhaps we will have to wait for the next great beauty of Western culture to have independence, resourcefulness and self-possession. That would certainly be a refreshing change from her literary predecessors."