By Patricia H. Kushlis
I confess, I read Homer’s The Odyssey as a college freshman and have rarely opened its covers
since. I did, however, enjoy seeing British playwright David Farr’s 2005 English-language prose adaptation of this ancient Greek poem performed by a new, rather funky theater company in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The company, “The Mother Road Theatre Company,” calls home a converted 1930’s filling station a short distance from the multi-million dollar National Hispanic Cultural Center in Barelas, the city’s very Hispanic and oldest neighborhood. But don’t let this company’s newness, unpretentiousness or location detract or deter from an all round excellent performance and cast.
A twenty year sea chanty
Let’s get this straight: if drama means Shakespeare or plays that take place on a conventional stage in a conventional theater, this production – indeed, this play – is not for you. But then, Homer’s The Odyssey is a meandering twenty year sea saga. It is one man’s adventures and misadventures told in verse. It was never a play meant to be contained within Aristotle’s 24 hour limitations on dramatic production. Indeed, whoever wrote The Odyssey did not know of Aristotelian dramatic constraints – after all – it was written centuries before Aristotle. Its setting is the Mediterranean Sea, and an aside, we still don’t know who Homer was – or if, indeed, he even existed.
Odysseus, The Odyssey’s hero sails, or rows, from Greek island to Greek island – reminiscent of my penurious student days in Greece. Reminiscent because each island differs so much from the other and the sea that shimmers or growls between them remains so changeable and temperamental – not because I fell into the dangers or the sublime pleasures – that Odysseus encountered.
The journey, not the destination is what's important
Years later when I worked in Athens, my young son often built boats and car ferries out of Lego. Our wooden living room floor – shone to a high gloss – became the Mediterranean; our varying sized oriental carpets the islands. I never learned his story line, if he had one. I think it was mostly about putting cars on ferries and sailing the boats from one island to the next.
It was the journey that was important to him, not the destination. But isn’t this what creativity and life are about?
That’s what “The Mother Road” Theater Company has done with Farr’s Odyssey. They have taken what they have and created a two and one-half hour production in the round that drives – sometimes comically, often relentlessly – to conclusion: Odysseus’s return twenty years later to a dramatically changed home after a harrowing journey that wrecks his ships and destroys his soldiers. Along the way, we meet familiar figures: the goddess Athena, Circe, Penelope and the grotesque Cyclops - some human, some mythological, some animal and some, well, in-between. But what’s most important is the portrayal of a man and his journey itself.
The Odyssey is also a war story – or actually the after effects of war on a victorious commander and his ever diminishing troops as he alone returns to Ithaca, a small Ionian island off mainland Greece’s western coast, from his conquest of the mighty city of Troy in today’s western Turkey. This adaptation of the story is stitched together by the use of two nasty interrogators in black rain coats to whom Odysseus, portrayed as a weary, hapless immigrant who just wants to go home, is forced to recount his incredible tale.
What did startle me, however, is Farr’s apparent haziness about Greek geography: For the record, Troy (or Ilium) was never located “in eastern Turkey,” as he is quoted as saying, in an interview printed in the “Mother Road” program. Or maybe the interviewer just got his observation wrong.
In fact, Troy’s ruins were discovered in the 19th century by amateur archeologist Heinrich Schliemann. This famous ancient walled city was situated in Asia Minor near the Aegean Sea not far from the entrance to the Dardanelles – just as Homer had described - and along the coast of what is the most western part of today’s Turkey.
Creative elements
Ernest W. Sturdevant’s music, composed for this Albuquerque production, is some of the inventiveness that The Mother Road Theatre Company introduces in its production of Farr’s play. So too are the original dances by choreographer Carolyn Wade that are set to Sturdevant’s music. The lyrics are Farr’s but the melodic and simple songs are Sturdevant’s. A single dominant musical theme also helps glue the scenes together: it is sung recurrently by the performers and performed by Sturdevant himself at the keyboard as the play progresses.
But there are a number of other creative elements that are part of this production as well: the use, for instance of translucent fabric – in this case two filmy white parachutes - that create an inner stage. And the inventive employment of desk chairs with caster wheels in which members of the nine member cast – most assuming different roles in different scenes – row across the stage. They represent Odysseus’ voyage from one island to the next. These are theatrical devices which I have not seen on stage in Albuquerque before.
In sum, Farr’s Odysseus is performed by seasoned players who work well together and draw the audience into the play. The parts are all well cast and played beautifully in this energetic and ambitious production. Hear! Hear!
Photo credits: Mother Road Theatre Company cast photos: 1) Odysseus and Athena and 2) Cyclops by John Maio, April 2008. Map credit: Ancient Greece, Perry-Castaneda Map Collection, University of Texas.
Farr's The Odyssey is directed by Julia Thudium and the nine members of the cast are: Vic Browder (Odysseus), Athena/Elpinor (Jean Efron), Athena/Circe/Mother (Kristin Hansen De La O), Athena/Maira/Penelope ( Bridget Kelly), Interrogators (Bill Sterchi and Steve Corona), Cyclos/Aeolus (Ray Orley), Euryochus (Chris Gonzales) Muse (K’Lynn Childress), and Sailors, Soldiers, Trojans, Sheep, and Pigs (ensemble).
The Odyssey runs through April 20, 2008, Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays at 8 pm. Sundays at 1 pm. For more information, contact [email protected] or call (505)873-4831.