THE ODYSSEY
Is it a sign of the times, or just coincidence, that in the past three months I’ve seen two stage versions of The Odyssey that suggested the story was mostly a lie?
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The duplicity in NTD’s raffish, athletic Odyssey, seen in March at Barat College, was of a fairly innocent sort: the famous stories of Odysseus’s great wanderings were presented as stories told by Odysseus and his men to keep themselves distracted while they waited inside the Trojan Horse until it was time to emerge and sack the walled city. Thus the legends took on a universal quality: Odysseus became a kind of everyman, and his stories became our stories.
There are certainly grounds for this interpretation in the original epic poem. Much of the story–including the fact that Odysseus has been “detained” for eight years by the nymph Calypso on her island–are told from the objective, presumably truthful perspective of a narrator who is getting his information from the gods themselves. But the famous stories of Odysseus’s great wanderings–his encounters with the cyclops, the sirens, the sorceress Circe, his own dead mother in the underworld, and so on–are all told by Odysseus himself as an extended flashback. Why should we believe them, when we know that Odysseus is famous for his cunning and duplicitousness more than anything else?
The quality of marked artifice that is imposed on the cast is reinforced by the technical elements. The main set piece in the show is a series of platforms that stand against the theater’s exposed-brick walls; these platforms contain a three-piece band (equipped with keyboards, mandolin, pipes, and percussion instruments, though the bulk of Eric Huffman’s electronic score is heard on tape–again, that sense of nothing being left to chance), an offstage waiting area for the actors, and several lighting instruments. A movie screen is pulled on and off the stage like a curtain for the production’s several murky film sequences, which add little to the production besides justification for its claim to being multimedia.
