An Iliad

[darkemeralds]

I got in a bit ago from a performance of An Iliad at Portland Center Stage. It was incredibly moving, and I'm feeling a bit wiped out by it.

It's a one-man show. He comes in, drunk and dirty and disheveled in layers of clothes and a knit cap, carrying a bottle of tequila and a battered bag. He's mumbling to himself. The set is a series of what look like concrete or stone slab walls with the graffiti of ages carved into them in every language.

He begins chanting in ancient Greek, drunkenly, then switches to English and starts talking about how he doesn't want to tell this story anymore, but he hears the voices of Muses and is compelled.

He undresses, down to a white shirt and white jeans. He starts to tell the story.

It's the Iliad, partly in Homeric verse, partly in colloquial English, broken up and reassembled and explicated along the way as if by a man who was there, and who has been telling war stories for hundreds of years.

It builds and builds until he is acting out the feral, raging bloodlust of Achilles in avenging the death of Patroclus, and says, "And that is why I can't keep telling this story," and little by little you start asking yourself, "Why war?"

When Hector is dead and Achilles has dragged his body around for a while, the storyteller seems to lose sight of which war he's talking about. He says that it must have been...and then spends fully five minutes naming every major and minor war from that day to this.

I was bawling my eyes out by the end. The beautiful dead young men, the waste, the widows and orphans, the baby dashed on the paving stones, the funeral pyre, the white bones, the burial.

He puts all his coats and jackets and scarves back on and wanders away again, and you don't quite know whether he was an immortal bard of war, or just a homeless, traumatized vet of some one of the dozen or so recent wars he mentions.

It was brilliant. The text demands a tour-de-force performance ranging from near-Shakespearean declamation of verse lines to sweating, crazed street person, and actor Joseph Graves delivered.

Comments

[shezan.livejournal.com]

OMG I WANT TO SEE THIS!!!! NOW!!! WHY OH WHY ARE THEY NOT TAKING THIS TO PARIS????

[darkemeralds]

It really was the kind of theater I like best: somewhat challenging, new and different but with classical roots.

[communicator]

Wow, it sounds brilliant

[darkemeralds]

It was a memorable evening of theater. Very cathartic.

[lamentables]

You've totally sold it to me. Sounds like exactly the kind of thing we'd like, here at Lamentable Towers.

(You've reminded me of the marvellous experience of seeing Richard Schiff doing Underneath the Lintel - an irresistible and moving one-man performance.)

[darkemeralds]

[Dreamwidth ate my brilliant comment, damn it! I shall attempt to reconstruct.]

You saw Richard Schiff in a one-man play? I'm pretty envious. He's the kind of film-actor whose subtlety and stillness would translate well to the small stage. I looked up Underneath the Lintel, and am blown away: The sole character—the Librarian—embarks on a quest to find out who anonymously returned a library book that is 113 years overdue. A clue scribbled in the margin of the book and an unclaimed dry-cleaning ticket then take him on a mysterious adventure that spans the globe and the ages.

Now that is a plot! Good god, I get this tug right in the solar plexus just reading it. I want to hear that story so very much!

So I...found a source of the 2008 BBC Radio 4 production and am in the process of acquiring it right this minute. It won't be Richard Schiff, but I am intent upon hearing this story.

You're like a gold mine!

[darkemeralds]

Update: It IS Richard Schiff! I am so happy!

[lamentables]

Oh, oh, oh! Can you point me at your source? /lazy

It was absolutely fantastic. I liked Schiff anyway, but I had no idea how truly talented he is until we saw him on stage. The play is marvellously layered - one of those things where you can read it in many different ways: he's immortal, it's himself he's looking for, it's allegory. And the telling is fragmented, rambling, recursive. (I wanted to buy a copy of the text, but it seems only to be available for extortionate sums.)
He changed over the course of the performance. Evolved. Everything about it seemed real. It's all a direct address to the audience, but the nature of the audience being addressed changes over the course of the play, and somehow you felt yourself to change as required. There were moments when the actual-audience responded as the text-audience because they were so caught up in it.

I have a google alert on Schiff, because I'd travel some distance and pay quite a lot to see him on stage again.

And having hijacked your Iliad enthusiasm: I do hope that it's something that comes to the UK; I'd definitely make an effort to see it.

[darkemeralds]

What you describe sounds surprisingly similar in structure to what I saw last night, including the shifting nature of the audience as the storyteller speaks differently. I didn't think of it consciously at the time, but I began as the somewhat discomfited witness to the rant of a drunk and disenfranchised homeless person, and went on to be alternately a theater audience, a child sitting at the campfire, a fellow soldier, a tavern patron, some courtier at a royal dinner, and finally...I don't know what I was at the end. Myself, I guess.

I am still trying to acquire the file. As soon as I have it, I'll get it to you.

[lamentables]

I think your description conveyed that to me (on some level) which is what took me straight to my memories of UtL.

And speaking of memories: I have found the files of that Radio 4 broadcast which I recorded at the time. It was back when the BBC iPlayer wasn't very good and kept crapping out, so I did two recordings in the hope that I'd be able to edit them together into one good file. Of course, that would be lots of effort, which is why I've neither done it nor remembered that it needs to be done. So, if your efforts are not successful, I'll have to get my finger out...

[darkemeralds]

The file seems to be oozing in now, slowly. It's not terribly large, so I'll easily be able to share it with you, probably later today if all goes well. I'm excited!

[tehomet]

It sounds like a terrific production.

When Hector is dead and Achilles has dragged his body around for a while, the storyteller seems to lose sight of which war he's talking about. He says that it must have been...and then spends fully five minutes naming every major and minor war from that day to this.

I winced at that.

[darkemeralds]

As did everyone in the audience. Strangely, it was the "intermission" moment in the play. He has been ranting, and running, and re-enacting, and at this point, all his steam runs out. The lights dim, he sits on a bench (one of about four items on the set), and begins this litany. It's the quietest moment in the play.

It was a really well-constructed drama, full of thought and emotion. A great evening of theater.

[pandarus]

My God, that sounds SUPERB. Colour me envious.

[darkemeralds]

I'm so glad I was able to convey some of it. It really was a remarkable hundred minutes in my life.

[erda]

That sounds really interesting, but I have a low tolerance for grim right now, and from your description, I don't think I could take the intensity of it.

[darkemeralds]

I know just what you mean. A week or so ago, it might have been too much for me.

And If the same story had been graphically depicted I'd have been traumatized by it. As it was, lying at the crossroads of Homer, Sophocles, and 2010, it had the marvelous effect of catharsis rather than movie-style bludgeoning, and I came away rather more healed than beaten.

[ranunculus]

It is positively amazing what a good actor can do with basically a bare stage and a bit of lighting. Joseph sounds like the perfect actor, well directed in the right role, a wonderful combination.

I often am disgusted at the Opera House when designers spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on unweildly ugly sets that take dozens of people to manipulate. I wonder if they are trying to cover up for lacks in the singing, or, more probably, just grandstanding.

[darkemeralds]

Ah yes. Excessive decoration. Simplicity can be so much more challenging. (Except possibly in singing itself: I'd argue that Gregorian chant, though not easy, is way easier than some Handelian run of 16ths for forty-eight bars.)

The set in this instance was the aforementioned graffiti'ed stone walls, a bench, a couple of tattered chairs, a broom handle, a red scarf (which did duty as bloodshed) and thebjacket of a bronze-green military uniform (which became all the armor and all the armor-wearers in the story). The lighting was a huge part of the storytelling, and there was a wee bit of smoke and a minimalist "soundtrack" of an occasional drumbeat or Greek-style chant.

The coordination of these bare-minimum effects with the actor's words and actions was smooth and perfect, barely-there, heightening the power of the story.

There is nothing like great storytelling to fire the brilliant imagination in each of us.

I just read your profile. Cool! I've been going to Portland Center Stage since my sister started working there, so I have a slight feel for some of the complexities of the theater business from her. When she got the job, I told her she had to watch Slings and Arrows--have you seen it?--and she now owns her own copy: it helps her laugh off some of the more annoying aspects of theater work.

[without_me]

Wow, that sounds amazing.

[darkemeralds]

It was a terrific evening--the sort that is still getting better today, on reflection and recounting.

[kis]

OMG. I wish I'd seen that. How utterly wonderful and scary. Because, hell, we keep having to tell the same story, even when we don't want to.

[darkemeralds]

Yep. The play really had that inexorable Greek-tragedy feel. I'm still thinking about it a couple of days later, which is more than I can say for most forms of entertainmen.