Huddled in the Friends of the USC Libraries Lecture Hall Thursday night sat award-winning playwright Christine Evans, associate professor of classics Afroditi Angelopoulou, associate professor of theater practice in critical studies Rena Heinrich, Warrior Bards Project actor Diana Shield and USC theater students.

Visions and Voices’ “About Face: Women, War, and Re-envisioning Troy” event was half performance and half panel, showcasing Trojans’ acting chops and writing as well as the perspectives of experts in the field of Greek women archetypes originated and translated into the contemporary realm of literature.

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The night began with short student-written plays using Trojan iconography such as the Hecuba statue as a jumping-off point for theater performances reimagining Greek women including Hecuba, Cassandra and Iphigeneia in a modern lens.

Around 10 four-minute plays were written and performed by School of Dramatic Arts students. These plays were riddled with satire, passion and comedy but also embedded with this marrow of tragedy as the audience realized each of these women figures are doomed by the men around them.

Student actor Tess Patton, a senior majoring in theatre as well as journalism, had a positive and illuminating experience being part of the event.

“I just love the chance to be on the ground meeting with playwrights and new directors and getting to originate roles and be a part of the collaborative experience,” Patton said.

Patton found it interesting that Hecuba was the only woman of Troy on campus.

“She’s not even on our campus; she’s at [USC] Village,” Patton said. “Doing this really brought to light a lot of iconography that I just don’t even notice half the time.”

The production provided a platform for the panel of professors and dramatic artists to discuss how their work aligned with such Greek figures of femininity during war and violence.

One such artist was Evans, who describes the student’s acting as “fantastic” and “very much talking back to power, inhabiting the perspectives of women and the perspectives that go unheard of at the time.” Her play “Trojan Barbie” — a derivation of “The Trojan Women” by Euripides — was also inspired by women in war.

Evans talked about the play’s creation amid the aftermath of 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq.

“There was this entire shift in the culture,” Evans said. “It’s really important to me that I can bring that sense of collision and shock from our contemporary moment into this past. I didn’t just want to try to mobilize tragedy.”

Evans landed on the image of a doll hospital on to bring out her intentions.

“As a writer, often, it’s an image that crystallizes a story for me,” Evans said. “I thought, ‘What can I do to create a dialogue, a modernity with this play that can somehow hear the stock of what is happening to me in this war?’”

Evans also performed two monologues from her play, one by the character Cassandra and one by Hecuba, inspired by their eponymous legendary Greek characters. In creating these characters whose archetypes center around their endurance of violence, Evans said her “goal was to make the violence visible and do it in an entertaining way where all of the women in this had to be equally human.”

Angelopoulou discussed Hecuba’s representation as a symbol of humanity as a character that persists from the ancient city of Troy to Trojan Barbie, to a statue at USC Village.

“She’s a very complex figure. In ‘Trojan Women,’ she’s the embodiment of endurance,” Angelopoulou said. “In ancient Greek thought, from Homer onwards, what makes you human is to be able to endure suffering.”

Shield, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran and actor for the Warrior Bards program, brought the discussion into the contemporary world.

Warrior Bards is an acting project supported by USC’s Arts in Action and Community Partnership programs where veterans study Greek tragedy plays as a method of talking about their own traumas in wartime. The program opened Shield’s eyes to how many stories about women still need to be told, especially about being a woman in the military.

“I think being female is complicated,” Shields said. “I know what it’s like sacrificing for war. It’s not something beautiful, but we still want to destroy ourselves. I don’t understand that.”

“About Face” challenged and debated the Greek feminine presence in literature — on stage and even at USC, a school that prides itself on its Trojan roots — with theatrical vigor.

“The only way to change the narrative is to become the writers,” Shield said.