“Our original impulse was to walk into a bar and see if we could get anyone to listen to us,” says co-adaptor Denis O’Hare of the impetus behind his and Lisa Peterson’s gripping adaptation of Homer’s ancient poem. Read about the remix of this ancient text into a one-person show that is epic, colloquial, stirring, and anything but stuffy.
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