An Iliad Read online

  PRAISE FOR An Iliad

  Winner of the Obie Award, the Lucille Lortel Award, five Craig Noel

  Awards (San Diego), the Joseph Jefferson Award (Chicago),

  the Gregory Award (Seattle), the Elliot Norton Award (Boston) and

  Drama Desk nominations for Music and Solo Performance

  “Smartly conceived and impressively executed, An Iliad relates an age-old story that resonates with tragic meaning today.”

  —MICHAEL SOMMERS, The New York Times

  “Absolutely riveting.”

  —ROBERT HURWITT, San Francisco Chronicle

  “Drawing on the muscular translation by Robert Fagles, 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.”

  —CHARLES ISHERWOOD, The New York Times

  “An Iliad is pure theater: shocking, glorious, primal and deeply satisfying.”

  —DAVID COTE, Time Out New York

  “In a mesmerizing play … Lisa Peterson and Denis O’Hare have condensed the 24-book poem into 100 intelligent, emotional minutes … a wrenching theatrical experience.”

  —JENNIFER FARRAR, Associated Press

  “Listening to An Iliad in a manner that could be breathtakingly close to the way its first audiences heard and saw it is a treat too good to miss.”

  —DAVID FINKLE, The Huffington Post

  “The show is a sweeping, visceral theatrical event … commands attention from start to finish.”

  —ANDY PROPST, TheaterMania

  “A transformative act of theatrical magic.”

  —BOB VERINI, Variety

  “A starkly powerful experience … The vernacular language mixed in with the soaring poetry of An Iliad collapses any sense of comfortable distance we may feel.”

  —DON AUCOIN, The Boston Globe

  “An Iliad is unquestionably a victory of the theatrical imagination … The rhetoric soars for moments with battlefield exploits but then is brought back down to our contemporary idiom to close the gap between this ancient mythological world and our own.”

  —CHARLES MCNULTY, Los Angeles Times

  “This is poetry as it was meant to be experienced, primal and raw, thrilling and transcendent.”

  —JENNY LOWER, LA Weekly

  “The act of combat has never been more piercingly described (not even by Tolstoy or Mailer …), nor its qualities of rage, savagery, and comradeship more intensely conveyed.”

  —MYRON MEISEL, The Hollywood Reporter

  “This is a formidably powerful piece of solo theater that evokes the rubble of history and of lessons mankind consistently fails to learn.”

  —CHRIS JONES, Chicago Tribune

  “Explosive, altogether breathtaking … Brilliantly meshes past and present calamity, with touches of the most caustic dark humor suddenly shifting into unimaginable pathos.”

  —HEDY WEISS, Chicago Sun-Times

  “Humor is an invaluable tool in this riveting one-actor adaptation of Homer’s epic poem, easing the audience into the Poet’s tale before he takes them on a devastating tour of the Trojan battlefield.”

  —OLIVER SAVA, Time Out Chicago

  “An Iliad demands a thinking audience.”

  —CATEY SULLIVAN, Chicago Theater Beat

  “An Iliad tells the whole story in an artfully edited form that not only hits all the important plot points and set pieces but renders them with a deep consciousness of their ironies, agonies, subtleties, and implications.”

  —TONY ADLER, Chicago Reader

  “A triumph of theater.”

  —LAWRENCE BOMMER, Chicago Stage Style

  “O’Hare and Peterson mingle written and spoken ancient language with modern day grocery line descriptions. The that-was-then and this-is-still-how-it-is revelation is gut-punching.”

  —KATY WALSH, Chicago Now

  “Peterson and O’Hare illuminate, far better than any mere film, the guts and passion—the almost hallucinatory high of battle and that camaraderie between soldiers that noncombatants cannot comprehend.”

  —GRAYDON ROYCE, Minneapolis Star Tribune

  “An Iliad strips the varnish and the romance from war, offering a crystalline account of the horrors, the follies and the costs of armed conflict.”

  —DOMINIC P. PAPATOLA, St. Paul Pioneer Press

  “How incredibly powerful this work of theatre is …”

  —VAN BADHAM, The Guardian

  “A breathtaking tour-de-force that begs the question: Has anything really changed since the Trojan War?”

  —STEPHEN HOUSE, AussieTheatre.com

  “In the inspired hands of Denis O’Hare and Lisa Peterson, who have adapted Homer’s masterpiece to encompass the war-glutted centuries that followed the Trojan campaign, we have a chance to hear the story told in such a way it feels as though we have never heard it before.”

  —ELSPETH SANDYS, New Zealand Listener

  LISA PETERSON is an Obie-award winning director whose other compositions include a musical adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, with music by David Bucknam (New York Theater Workshop). In addition to many classic plays, Lisa has directed the premieres of new works by Donald Margulies, Tony Kushner, Beth Henley, Naomi Wallace, Jose Rivera, and others at theaters including NYTW (OBIE for directing Caryl Churchill’s Light Shining in Buckinghamshire), Public, Vineyard, MTC, Primary Stages, Guthrie, ATL, Berkeley Rep, McCarter, Arena Stage, Geffen, Hartford Stage, Seattle Rep, and many more. Lisa was Associate Director at La Jolla Playhouse for three years and Resident Director at the Mark Taper Forum for ten years.

  DENIS O’HARE is a Tony-award winning stage performer who has also appeared in television and film, including Law & Order, True Blood, and American Horror Story, for which he was nominated for an Emmy, Michael Clayton, Dallas Buyers Club, and The Normal Heart. His stage work includes Take Me Out (Tony Award, Best Performance by a Featured Actor), title role in Uncle Vanya Off-Broadway, Elling, and the musicals Assassins, Cabaret, Sweet Charity (Drama Desk Award), and the Shakespeare in the Park production of Into the Woods, with Amy Adams. Denis and Lisa are currently writing a new piece entitled The Good Book, an exploration of the evolution of the Bible. An avid artist, fierce progressive, and activist, his happiest role is as a father to his son.

  ROBERT FAGLES (1933-2008) was Professor of Comparative Literature Emeritus at Princeton University. He was the recipient of the 1997 PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation. His acclaimed translations include Aeschylus’ Oresteia (nominated for a National Book Award), Virgil’s Aeneid, and Homer’s Iliad.

  Copyright

  CAUTION: Professionals and amateurs are hereby warned that all materials in this book, being fully protected under the copyright laws of the United States, the British Empire including the Dominion of Canada, and all other countries of the Copyright Union, are subject to royalty. All rights, including professional, amateur, motion picture, recitation, lecturing, public reading, radio and television broadcasting, and the rights of translation into foreign languages, are strictly reserved. The stock and amateur performance rights in the English language throughout the United States, and its territories and possessions, Canada, and the Open Market are controlled by Dramatists Play Service, Inc. No professional or nonprofessional performances of the plays herein (excluding first class professional performance) may be given without obtaining in advance the written permission. Inquiries concerning all other rights should be addressed to Val Day, ICM Partners, 730 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10019.

  This edition first published in the United States and the United Kingdom in 2014 by Overlook Duckworth, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.r />
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  Copyright © 2014 Lisa Peterson and Denis O’Hare

  Translation © 1990 Robert Fagles,

  used by permission of Penguin Books

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

  ISBN: 978-1-4683-0808-2

  ISBN: 978-1-4683-1192-1 (e-book)

  Contents

  Praise for An Iliad

  About the Authors

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Authors’ Note

  Acknowledgments

  Performances

  Characters

  Part One: The Armies Gather

  Part Two: Achilles

  Part Three: Hector

  Part Four: Patroclus

  Part Five: Achilles’ New Shield

  Part Six: Hector’s Death

  Part Seven: Funeral Games

  Do not envy the violent

  or choose any of their ways.

  —BOOK OF PROVERBS 3:31

  Lisa Peterson and Denis O’Hare working at Sundance Institute, July 2009.

  PHOTO: FRED HAYES/COURTESY OF SUNDANCE INSTITUTE

  AUTHORS’ NOTE

  A work as monumental as Homer’s Iliad is not easily reducible to one or two themes. To say that it is about the glory of war is as wrong-headed as saying that it is an anti-war tract. When we started grappling with this work, attempting to form our own theatrical narrative, we did so using two distinct lenses: the lens of pacifism—summed up by the idea that war is a waste, and should be eradicated; and the lens of humanism—the idea that human nature is warlike, and can’t be changed. We let these two tensions battle it out in the person of our narrator and we threaded our way through the many chapters of Homer’s great work with these impulses in mind.

  As we developed An Iliad, we began to understand that what we were after was, in fact, very old-fashioned. Since our desire was to give an audience the sensation of being present at the very invention of this epic story, we found ourselves hearkening back to the bards of old, recalling campfire mesmerists, ghost-story purveyors, even con-men. Our narrator is one of a long line of vagabonds, or perhaps he is the original vagabond: a man (or woman) who ekes out a living by begging a crowd to stop, listen, and imagine for a while.

  We began talking about performing The Iliad not long after the United States invaded Iraq in 2003. We were both thinking about war, and plays about war—thinking that at the time, the best thing a theater artist could do was to find a way to talk about what it means to be a country at war. Most people think of The Iliad as an epic poem, not a play. We had both studied it as a work of literature, not a piece of theater—but the more we read about the ancient oral tradition and Homer, the more convinced we became that the staggering tale of the Trojan War really was spoken out loud and passed from storyteller to storyteller for centuries before it was ever written down. We began to imagine a character called The Poet: an ancient teller of tales who might still exist in the universe, doomed to tell the story of the Trojan War until the day when human nature changes, when our addiction to rage comes to an end, when the telling of a war story becomes unnecessary. A day that has yet to come, of course.

  We imagine that our Poet traveled across the wine-dark seas with Agamemnon and Achilles and the Greek armies. That he camped there on the coast of Ilium for nine years with the Greek soldiers, that he did lay eyes on Troy and fell in love with that culture. That he has roamed the world telling the story of Achilles and Hector and Hecuba and Hermes and all the hundreds of other characters that inhabit The Iliad. He has told this story for thousands of years, and in that time he has witnessed (or thinks, or imagines, he has witnessed) every war from the Trojan War onwards. He’s found himself at each battle, in every trench, at every wall, in the mess halls, in the infirmaries, over the centuries. He has wandered the scorched battlefields and befriended—then lost—soldiers in all corners of the world’s history, witnessing and recording everything. He’s a compendium of war.

  We imagine that on this particular night, our Poet finds himself transported to an empty stage, in front of a particular audience, and he chooses to tell the story in this way: as an inexorable collision between two great warriors—Achilles and Hector—and that on this particular night he becomes infected with rage himself, and nearly loses himself in a telescopic listing of all wars ever fought, and that on this night he tries to quit telling the story, but can’t. We think that he still believes in the old gods, and that the old gods won’t let him quit. They won’t let him out of his storytelling purgatory.

  Homer’s Iliad begins with the Poet asking the muses to help him, and throughout the epic poem you can find these invocations. We decided to make the Muse actually appear, and to us that means that music literally enters the world near the top of our Part Two. The inclusion of music in this piece is not just incidental. It is a vital part of the evening’s progress; we view the muse as the other major character in the play. In the McCarter and New York Theatre Workshop productions we used an extraordinary string bass player named Brian Ellingsen to embody this Muse. The back-and-forth dialogue between The Poet and the Musician was a real duet, and we would encourage other directors to either license Mark’s Bennett’s gorgeous score, or to explore using music in some other way.

  We imagine there are many ways to approach this script. We’ve had the great pleasure of seeing quite a few remarkable actors tackle this piece, and succeed. We look forward to that community of Poets expanding in every direction; there is no reason that The Poet could not be female, or any race, or differently-abled, or over 70 or under 30. We think of Homer as a kind of coat that anyone with the passion and the talent (and the ability to memorize) the story could wear. Though we definitely invented this play to be performed by a lone figure, we recognize that it could be performed by more than one person, and would encourage people to find their own way.

  We’ve been working on An Iliad for nearly ten years, and over that time the nexus of world conflict has shifted, of course. When we started, the U.S. had just invaded Iraq. Today, that war is officially over, but Afghanistan still rumbles, and around the globe new conflicts have made themselves known. For that reason, we recognize that are a few places in the script where, over time, there might need to be a bit of adjustment in order to stay current. We’ve noted those places in the script, with guidelines for keeping up to date.

  And finally, we fell in love with Robert Fagles’s glorious translation. To us, it remains the most compelling and playable English version of the poetry of The Iliad. It is written in fairly free dactylic hexameter—very different from the iambic pentameter that we’re all used to in the English language theater. In this script, we have indented the Fagles verse to set it off from the rest of the text. We highly recommend the introductions that Fagles and his editor Bernard Knox have included in their full editions of The Iliad, and would certainly recommend that anyone taking on this project read the entire Fagles translation of the epic.

  An Iliad started out as an examination of war and man’s tendency toward war. In the end, it also became an examination of the theater and the way in
which we still tell each other stories in order to try to make sense of ourselves, and our behavior. Someone started telling the story of the Trojan War, in all its glory and devastation and surprise, over 3,000 years ago. We pass it on.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  We were counseled very wisely by a number of people over the years, as we worked on An Iliad. We would never have had the idea without the wisdom of our friend Morgan Jeness. And we wouldn’t have perfected the Poet’s voice without the eagle eye of our dramaturg, Janice Paran. Many thanks to them, and to Philip Himberg, Christopher Hibma and the Sundance family; Jerry Manning and the Seattle Repertory Theater; Emily Mann, Mara Issacs and the McCarter Theater; Jim Nicola, Linda Chapman, and the team at NYTW; Lynne Fagles, Professor James Tatum, Professor Olga Levaniouk, Hans Altwies, and Stephen Spinella.

  PERFORMANCES

  An Iliad was developed in part with the assistance of the Sundance Institute Theatre Program.

  An Iliad was originally produced by Seattle Repertory Theatre (Jerry Manning, Producing Artistic Director; Benjamin Moore, Managing Director) in Seattle, Washington, opening on April 9, 2010. It was directed by Lisa Peterson; the set design was by Rachel Hauck; the costume design was by Marcia Dicxy Jory; the lighting design was by Scott Zielinski; the original music and sound design were by Paul James Prendergast; the stage manager was Michael B. Paul; and the dramaturg was Janice Paran. The production featured Hans Altwies as The Poet.

  An Iliad was produced at the McCarter Theatre Center (Emily Mann, Artistic Director; Timothy J. Shields, Managing Director; Mara Isaacs, Producing Director) in Princeton, New Jersey, opening on October 29, 2010. It was directed by Lisa Peterson; the set design was by Rachel Hauck; the costume design was by Marina Draghici; the lighting design was by Scott Zielinski; and the original music and sound design were by Mark Bennett and the production stage manager was Cheryl Mintz. The production featured Brian Ellingsen as The Musician and Stephen Spinella as The Poet.