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“I heard this play before I saw it,” says director Bekka Eaton of “The Trojan Women.”

“It’s a very noisy play — there’s war, trumpets sounding, women crying,” she said.

To that end, she has created a “soundscape” that runs through the production, and boosted the capabilities of the Gates-Abegglen Theatre at Miami University with the installation of subwoofers to get a deeper, more resonant sound.

“The Trojen Women” takes place after the fall of Troy and concerns the survivors, the women, who are in captivity waiting to be shipped off as slaves, sometimes to the men responsible for the deaths of their husbands and children.

Eaton said that when Euripides wrote the play, he was bucking the conventions of his day by focusing on victims and not writing about acts of heroism.

“Even when he wrote it, the war was in their deep past, so he was using it not as history, but to address some of the issues about the Peloponnesian War that was going on in his day,” she said.

But even though the anti-war sentiments are there for the taking, Eaton said she did not set out to proselytize with this production.

“It’s an absolutely brilliant play and that’s reason enough to do it,” she said. “There is always going to be wars and rumors of wars, but I believe that plays work better when you ask a question rather than make a statement. I don’t need to do anything to it. The play tells us, ‘This is what war does. Do we really want to keep doing it?’”

how to go
WHAT: “The Trojan Women” by Euripides, translated by Edith Williams
WHERE: Gates-Abegglen Theatre, Miami University, Oxford
WHEN: Oct. 4-14
COST: $9 adults, $8 seniors, $6 for Miami students and youth under 18
MORE INFO: (513) 529-3200; www.tickets.muohio.edu.

Photo: Jenna Watson as Hecuba and Catherine Turco as Andromache