“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
First sung 2,800 years ago, Homer’s Iliad remains a soaring ode about humanity’s seemingly timeless attraction to war, in all its terror and adventure. The poem begins nine years into the Trojan War and follows two warriors: rage-mad Achilles, the Greek’s greatest fighter, who has stopped fighting to protest an insult to his honor from his own general, and his counterpart Hector, leader of the Trojan army, a brave man and good soldier who would far prefer to spend his energy and expertise on the tasks of peacetime life.
An Iliad brings this ancient story into the twenty-first century. Or rather, it tasks an itinerant poet with making this story resonate with a contemporary audience. He brings form to the mythology, brutality, and humanity of Homer’s epic poem, playing eleven parts—male and female, human and god. Ageless (was he on the battlefields of Troy?), he has refashioned the story over the years, using these ancient figures and events to create a tale that will lodge in the imaginations of its hearers.
The version the poet spins for this audience is part action movie, part morality tale, and part meditation on human nature and its twinned capacity for bloodlust and a kind of radical empathy. “I think the Iliad is about rage as a drug,” says co-writer Lisa Peterson. “It’s an examination of the warrior’s heart, spirit, and mind, and about what rage can do to us. But it also has a realization that there’s something stronger than rage—and that’s empathy.”
An Iliad, like Homer’s poem before it, stops short of the war’s end, as the storyteller grapples with how much coherence he can bring to the story of so much destruction. And while the play starts as a piece about an ancient war, it becomes a poignant rendering of the storyteller’s task, his struggle to communicate something of what war is and what it can mean: the ways war can recontextualize death, camaraderie, and ideas of home and of peace, its ability to bring us face to face with our most savage and most civilized selves.