Eric Shimelonis, the composer for Studio’s production of
An Iliad, was tasked with creating a score that would support a tour de force performance in a play that moves from simple storytelling to action movie, from comedy to the deep tragedy that erupts out of the seemingly endless Trojan War. He spoke with Assistant Director
Christopher Mirto about the play, Baroque music, and urban street drumming.
How would you summarize your design on An Iliad in one sentence?
I am composing a full score for the piece that will be performed live on-stage by a musician playing a bass viol (viola da gamba), which is a Renaissance/Baroque era instrument that resembles a cello, but is actually more a descendant of the lute or baroque guitar.
What are some of the bigger influences on your design?
The choice of this early music instrument makes for a Baroque influenced sound, but I am integrating ideas from throughout music history—including rock and metal—for the composition itself.
Three words to describe your reaction the first time you read An Iliad.
Holy epic shit!
Which moment in the show resonates with you the most?
It is not the good kind of resonance, but the list of wars gets me every time. There is a clear and unvarnished lesson in that.
What is your favorite part about working as a designer, on any show?
In one word: variety. Aesthetically, stylistically, structurally; every show has its own set of challenges and demands, and the process of solving these varying puzzles and creating music and sound to support all of these different kinds of storytelling is really compelling.
What is the last show you worked on?
Our Class at Theatre J, which involved writing and arranging 17 beautiful and devastating songs that the cast of 10 performed a cappella throughout the show.
What is next for you after An Iliad?
The Motherfucker With The Hat, also here at Studio. We are going to make music for this one based on urban street (bucket) drumming. See? Variety!
Artistic Team
David Muse (Director) is in his third
season as Artistic Director of The Studio Theatre. For Studio and
2ndStage, he has directed
Dirt, Bachelorette,
The Habit of
Art, Venus in Fur,
Circle Mirror Transformation,
reasons to be
pretty, Blackbird, Frozen, and
The Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow.
Previously, he was Associate Artistic Director of Shakespeare Theatre
Company, where he directed six productions, including
Henry V, Romeo and
Juliet, and
Julius Caesar. Other recent directing projects
include
Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune at Arena Stage,
The
Bluest Eye at Theatre Alliance, and
Swansong for New York Summer
Play Festival. He has helped to develop new work at numerous theaters,
including New York Theatre Workshop, Geva Theatre Center, Arena Stage, Ford’s
Theatre, and The Kennedy Center. Mr. Muse has taught acting and directing
at Georgetown, Yale, and the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Academy of Classical
Acting. A five-time Helen Hayes Award nominee for Outstanding Direction, he is
a recent recipient of the DC Mayor’s Arts Award for Outstanding Emerging Artist
and the National Theatre Conference Emerging Artist Award. Mr. Muse is a
graduate of Yale University and the Yale School of Drama.
Luciana Stecconi’s (Scenic Design) previous designs for
The Studio Theatre include
Lungs, The History of Kisses, Tynan, In the Red and
Brown Water, The Year of Magical Thinking, Stoop Stories, Amnesia Curiosa (created and performed by rainpan43),
Souvenir:
A Fantasia on the Life of Florence Foster Jenkins, and
Lypsinka:
The Passion of the Crawford. For Studio 2ndStage, she has designed
Astro Boy and the God of Comics, Mojo, Songs
of the Dragons Flying to Heaven,
60
Miles to Silver Lake,
That Face, A
Beautiful View, All That I Will Ever Be, and
Crestfall. Regionally, she has designed
Barcelona and
The
Exceptionals at the Contemporary American Theater Festival,
Something You Did and
Zero Hour at
Theater J,
Hedda Gabler
at Catholic University, and
Guys and
Dolls at American University, among others.
Ms. Stecconi received the 2010
Mayor’s Art Award for Outstanding Emerging Artist and the 2006 Ira
Gershwin Prize. She holds an MFA from Brandeis University.
Colin K. Bills (Lighting Design) returns to The Studio
Theatre, where he designed lighting for
Lungs,
Circle Mirror Transformation, The Year of Magical Thinking,
Stoop Stories, and
Radio Golf. For Studio
2ndStage, he designed
POP!, That Face,
Autobahn,
The Death of Meyerhold,
Tommy,
Terrorism,
Four, and
Bat Boy. Mr. Bills is a Company Member at Woolly
Mammoth Theatre Company, where he has designed thirty productions including
The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity, A
Bright New Boise, Oedipus el Rey,
Clybourne
Park, Fever Dream, Stunning, The Unmentionables,
Dead Man’s Cell Phone, and
The
Clean House. He is a Conspirator for
the devising ensemble dog & pony dc, where he has directed
A Killing Game and designed
Beertown, Courage, Punch, and
Cymbeline.
Locally, Mr. Bills has designed at Centerstage, Contemporary
American Theatre Festival, The Kennedy Center, Round House Theatre, Signature
Theatre, The Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Free-For-All, Theatre J, Synetic
Theatre, Didactic Theatre, Everyman Theatre, Forum Theatre, Imagination Stage,
Maryland Stage, Metro Stage, Olney Theatre Center, The Smithsonian’s Discovery
Theatre, Theatre for the First Amendment, Tsunami Theatre, and the Washington
Revels. His designs have been seen regionally at The Berkshire Theater
Festival, Intiman Theatre, Portland Center Stage, Vermont’s Northern Stage, and
The Williamstown Theatre Festival. Mr. Bills has been awarded three Helen Hayes
Awards and is a 2009 recipient of the Princess Grace Award. He is a graduate of
Dartmouth College.
Laree Lentz (Costume Design)
returns to The Studio Theatre, where she designed Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven for Studio 2ndStage. Her
local credits include Home of the Soldier at Synetic Theater; A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Bluest Eye, Minotaur, and Am I Black
Enough Yet? at the University of Maryland, College Park; and A Child Shall Lead Them: Making the Night of
the Hunter in a co-production between Georgetown University and University
of Maryland. Her other credits include Legally Blonde, Will Roger’s Follies,
and Hairspray at Central Piedmont
Community College. Ms. Lentz holds an
MFA from The University of Maryland, College Park.
Eric
Shimelonis (Sound Design & Composition) has previously worked at The
Studio Theatre on
Time Stands Still,
In the Red and Brown Water,
Stoop
Stories,
and
The Year of Magical Thinking.
His other recent projects include
Our Class at Theatre J,
Bengal
Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo at Round House Theatre, and Sam Shepard's latest
play
Heartless at Signature Theatre in New York City. Mr.
Shimelonis was recently nominated for a Drama Desk Award for his work on Adam
Rapp’s
Hallway Trilogy at the Rattlestick Playwrights Theater,
and a Big Easy Award for Best Musical Direction for the New Orleans production
of
Grey Gardens. Mr. Shimelonis is the resident composer of
Voice Of The City Ensemble and had his Carnegie Hall debut in 2010, with F.
Murray Abraham performing his song cycle
Elusive Things.
Adrien-Alice Hansel (Dramaturg) is The Studio Theatre’s Literary Director. At Studio, she
has dramaturged
Dirt,
Invisible Man,
Sucker Punch,
The
Golden Dragon,
Lungs,
The History of Kisses,
and
The New Electric Ballroom, among others. Prior to joining Studio, she spent
eight seasons at the Actors Theatre of Louisville, where she headed the
literary department and coordinated project scouting, selection, and
development for the Humana Festival of New American Plays. She also served as
production dramaturg on roughly 50 new, contemporary, and classic plays there,
including premieres by Naomi Wallace, Gina Gionfriddo, Kirk Lynn and Rude
Mechs, Rinne Groff, The Civilians, Charles Mee, Anne Bogart and SITI Company,
Jordan Harrison, and John Belluso. She is the co-editor of eight anthologies of
plays from Actors Theatre and editor of three editions of plays through Studio.
Ms. Hansel holds an MFA from the Yale School of Drama.
Bekah Wachenfeld (Production
Stage Manager) is thrilled to join the Studio Theatre team for the first time.
Locally, she has worked at Theatre J, Adventure Theatre, and Forum Theatre.
Regionally, Ms. Wachenfeld has worked at Walnut Street Theatre, Weston
Playhouse, Second Stage, New World Stages, Primary Stages, Lark Play
Development Center, and others. Internationally, she worked at Finborough
Theatre in London, UK. Ms. Wachenfeld has won national stage management awards
through The Kennedy Center and United States Institute for Theatre Technology.
She is a graduate of James Madison University.
Cast
Scott Parkinson (Poet) makes his Studio Theatre debut. Mr. Parkinson
has appeared on Broadway in The Coast of Utopia at Lincoln
Center Theater, and in the national tour of The 39 Steps. His Off
Broadway appearances include the Stage Manager in David Cromer’s Our Town and Tynan
in Orson’s Shadow; Charles Busch’s The Third Story at MCC;
Edward Hall’s production of Rose Rage: Henry VI Parts 1, 2, & 3;
and Crime & Punishment. His regional credits include Caesar
in Antony & Cleopatra and Divine Rivalry (world premiere) at Hartford
Stage; The Third Story (world
premiere) at La Jolla Playhouse; Treplev in The Seagull and
Mercutio in Romeo & Juliet at The Old Globe Theatre; The
School for Scandal at the Mark Taper Forum; and Cassius in Julius
Caesar, Antony & Cleopatra,
and The Persians at Shakespeare Theatre Company. In
Chicago he recently appeared in the title role in Hamlet at the
Writers’ Theatre, and his other appearances include The Doctor’s
Dilemma, Booth, The Glass Menagerie, Candida, and a world
premiere adaptation of Crime & Punishment. Other Chicago appearances
include sixteen productions at Chicago Shakespeare Theatre,
including Rose Rage (Jeff Award), the title role in Richard
II, and the Fool in King Lear; productions at the Goodman
Theatre, the Court Theatre, and Northlight Theatre; the title roles in Hamlet
and Richard III, and Iago in Othello at Shakespeare on the
Green; and Prior in Angels in America. He is a four-time nominee for
Chicago’s Joseph Jefferson Award and is a featured interview in the book North
American Players of Shakespeare.
Rebecca
Landell (Musician) has performed as a professional
cellist and gambist for the past decade, and is making her theatrical
debut. Initially focused on cello
performance, Ms. Landell developed curiosity for early music in her first year
at the Oberlin College Conservatory of Music. Over the course of her undergraduate
education, she studied viola da gamba with Catharina Meints and baroque cello
with Kenneth Slowik. This past summer, she continued to develop her skills with
Ms. Meints at the Baroque Performance Institute at Oberlin and with Michael and
Maria Brüssing in the Czech Republic. In
March 2013, she will perform St.
Matthew’s Passion in Dresden with the Batzdorfer Hofkapelle led by Daniel Deuter. Ms. Landell is currently finishing her
masters in cello performance at the Shepherd School of Music at Rice
University.
An Iliad is presented in partnership with the Onassis Foundation (USA).
Synopsis
First sung around a campfire 2,800 years ago, The Iliad remains a soaring ode about humanity’s seemingly timeless attraction to violence and destruction. In this theatrical telling, a storyteller grapples with the mythology, brutality, and humanity of Homer’s epic poem. An intimate and immediate look at rage, grief, and the heroism and horror of a seemingly endless war.
“As long as there has been war,” says journalist Joe Woodward, “there have been writers trying to understand it, turning battlefield horrors into narrative, trying to make something useful out of its debris.” The literature of war is written by soldiers and civilians, journalists and nurses, authors who are eyewitnesses to battles and those who know it only through veterans and historians. From Homer to Hemmingway, soldiers from the American Civil War to the fields of World War I, Henry V to Jarhead, writers have struggled to articulate the complex experience of combat to civilians who have never seen it and their comrades who have.
With its seemingly first-hand knowledge of the anticipation of battle, the bonds between soldiers, the brutality of combat, and the uncanny juxtapositions of combat and civil life, Homer’s Iliad is the first example of war literature that has made its way into recorded history. Here are excerpts from Robert Fagles’s translation of Homer, and other examples of war literature:
Hungry as wolves that rend and bolt raw flesh,
hearts filled with battle-frenzy that never dies—
they gorge on the kill till all their jaws drip red with blood,
belching bloody meat, but the fury, never shaken,
builds inside their chests though their glutted bellies burst.
—Homer, the Iliad, Trojan War
“War is hell, but that’s not the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead.”
—Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried , Vietnam War
“And while my imagination is like the weaver's shuttle, playing backward and forward through these two decades of time, I ask myself, Are these things real? did they happen? are they being enacted today? …Surely these are just the vagaries of my own imagination. Surely my fancies are running wild tonight. But, hush! I now hear the approach of battle. That low, rumbling sound in the west is the roar of cannon in the distance. That rushing sound is the tread of soldiers. That quick, lurid glare is the flash that precedes the cannon's roar. And, listen! that loud report that makes the earth tremble and jar and sway, is but the bursting of a shell, as it screams through the dark, tempestuous night. That black, ebon cloud, where the lurid lightning flickers and flares, that is rolling through the heavens, is the smoke of battle; beneath is being enacted a carnage of blood and death. Listen! the soldiers are charging now. The flashes and roaring now are blended with the shouts of soldiers and the confusion of battle. . .”
—Sam Watkins, Company Aytch: Or, a Side Show of the Big Show, American Civil War
Three deliberate shots
fire this quiet town,
scatter sparrows from
the willow-oak, touch
the scar where over thirty
years ago the mortar
fragment hit: I know
once more how good it is
to live. Thinking of the
boy struck down beside
me by that shell, I see
him sink into slow jungle
green, shock burned forever
in his eyes. Again I
crawl to comfort his last
breath. Even now there's
nothing I can do but,
as the bugle fades, remember
—Lucien Stryk, “Memorial Day”, World War II
No
doubt they'll soon get well; the shock and strain
Have caused their stammering, disconnected talk.
Of course they're 'longing to go out again,'--
These boys with old, scared faces, learning to walk.
They'll soon forget their haunted nights; their cowed
Subjection to the ghosts of friends who died,--
Their dreams that drip with murder; and they'll be proud
Of glorious war that shatter'd all their pride...
Men who went out to battle, grim and glad;
Children, with eyes that hate you, broken and mad.
—Siegfried Sassoon, “The Survivors”, World War I
“On the banks of the Ya Crong Poco River, on the northern flank of the B3 battlefield in the Central Highlands, the Missing In Action body-collecting team awaits the dry season of 1976.”
—Bao Ninh, The Sorrow of War, Vietnam War
In Their Own Words: Denis O’Hare and Lisa Peterson on An Iliad
We started this back in 2005 when Lisa was looking for a way to reflect
on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and she felt contemporary
playwrights weren’t responding. Somebody had once told her that the
first play was
The Iliad, even though it’s not really a
play. She asked me if I wanted to read it with her and turn it into a
one-man show. I said absolutely. We read and reflected and improvised.
Lisa’s not a political person, she doesn’t look for a platform to
promote her ideas. My motivation is more clear-cut. I’m completely
anti-war, and I find it horrifying that in this culture I’m now a
minority voice.
The Iliad is about a war 1,200 years ago
that solved nothing and achieved nothing. Most of our wars achieve very
little. But whatever agenda I have gets buried in a work this great. If
you’re being honest, you realize that as an artist, you’re not a policy
maker.
This is a work of art that’s been around. Long before Homer wrote it
down—if there was a Homer—it had been in existence for a while, told and
re-told. For all the import and message of
The Iliad, it’s ultimately a story that’s meant to be heard, and the person hearing
The Iliad
determines what it means. Our original impulse was to write our version
and then walk into a bar and see if we could get anyone to listen to
us. Or stand under a bridge or in a coffee shop....Think back to bardic
tradition and storytelling tradition, and that’s all it ever was.
One-on-one entertainment.
When we came at it, we thought, 'Oh, yes, this is clearly anti-war.’ But
the more we mucked around, the more we realized that there is nothing
clear about it. There is no definitive moral. There is no easy,
reducible point....All we can do is ask the question and every audience
member will come away with a different answer. Maybe they will conclude
that war is an evil which must be stopped, or maybe war is inherent to
human nature and it will never go away.
—excerpted from an interview with
The Daily Beast; March 25, 2012.
Lisa Peterson decided to adapt the Iliad for the stage when a friend
pointed out that it was essentially composed as a one-person show. “It
was a remnant of the oral tradition, it was an out-loud story; it was
never intended to be something that you just read on paper,” says
Peterson. “I was interested in the idea of Homer as a traveling
storyteller, as opposed to someone who sits and writes, and so it made
more sense to go to an actor friend.” She joined forces with actor Denis
O’Hare and the two adapted Homer’s poem into a 90-minute performance
that merges classical and contemporary sensibilities—or actually
unearths the contemporary impulses in this classical work.
“This is a work of art that’s been around,” says O’Hare, who played the
Poet in the production at New York Theatre Workshop. “Long before Homer
wrote it down—if there was a Homer—it had been in existence for a while,
told and re-told. Our original impulse was to write our version and
then walk into a bar and see if we could get anyone to listen to us. Or
stand under a bridge or in a coffee shop. Think back to bardic tradition
and storytelling tradition, and that’s all it ever was. One-on-one
entertainment.”
“We are imagining that our poet has been around for millennia,” says
Peterson. “He was there during the Trojan War, and is doomed to walk the
earth and tell his story. And over the years, he has adapted, always,
to be wherever he happens to be.” In Peterson and O’Hare’s reinvention
of this ancient story, roughly one third of the text is from Robert
Fagels’s eloquent and rapid-fire translation of the
Iliad. The
rest is in the voice of the storyteller wrestling with how best to bring
his story to life for his contemporary audience.
The effect is stirring, disarming, and altogether accessible. Here what some critics have said about the play:
“Gathering his memory and fuelling his inner resources with slugs of
rotgut, the poet begins an oral epic recounting the final battles of the
nine-year war between the invading Greeks and the besieged Trojans.
Smartly conceived and impressively executed,
An Iliad relates an age-old story that resonates with tragic meaning today.”
—
The New York Times
“Mr. O’Hare and Ms. Peterson have telescoped the mighty expanses of
Homer’s great poem into an evening that scales the conflict of the
Trojan War down to an intimate solo show illuminating both the heroism
and the horror of warfare. The [play’s] overriding tone is chatty,
informal, occasionally spiced by digressions that, echoing Homer’s
brilliant use of simile, seek humble parallels in contemporary life to
the passions that inflamed the Greeks and Trojans. Trying to explain why
the exhausted Greeks didn’t abandon the battle, weary after nine years
of fruitless fighting, our narrator compares their attitude to the
frustration you feel in a supermarket line: ‘You’ve been there 20
minutes, and the other line is moving faster,’ he says. ‘Do you switch
lines now? No, goddamn it, I’ve been here for 20 minutes, I’m gonna wait
in this line. Look — I’m not leaving ’cause otherwise I’ve wasted my
time.’”
—
The New York Times
“This Homeric account of the Trojan War unfolds passionately, urgently,
humorously, sorrowfully — to a modern world that has still not learned
to lay down its own swords and shields. Intimate, unstuffy, timely,
accessible.” —
The Seattle Times
“An Iliad is pure theater: shocking, glorious, primal, and deeply satisfying.”—
Time Out NY
“A brilliant and thrilling adaptation.” —
Philadelphia Inquirer
“Explosive, altogether breathtaking…uncannily brilliant”—
Chicago Sun-Times
“A radical new dramatization...formidably powerful”—
Chicago Tribune
“Denis O’Hare and Lisa Peterson connect classical and contemporary
images of war in their smart, powerful, and surprisingly funny play.”—
Time Out Chicago