An Iliad (review)

The deeply performative nature of Homer's poetry is all too often lost on his modern audiences. Although the Iliad and Odyssey are the products of a rich oral tradition, that vital context frequently remains distant and abstract to modern readers encountering the poem on the page and in translation. Lisa Peterson and Denis O'Hare's adaptation bridged that gap by staging unaltered passages of the Iliad annotated with witty exegesis and copious parallels to contemporary society. This structure, combined with historical contextualization and skillful choice of translation, established An Iliad as an effective popularization of Homer that, through a focus on solo performance, demonstrated the theatrical potential of Greek epic.

An Iliad was structured as a commentary on the text, rather than as a reworking of the original. Interpretative philological commentaries on classical texts have been written since antiquity and are central to their modern study. As such, An Iliad was an innovative dramatization of how (at least in terms of form) Homer has been studied for centuries. Approximately ten distinct passages from the Iliad were included unabridged. Most of the canonically famous scenes received treatment, including the initial conflict between Agamemnon and Achilles, Patroclus' death, the ekphrasis describing the shield of Achilles, the death of Hector, and Achilles' final reconciliation with Priam. The recitation of these unaltered passages was the backbone of the show, adumbrating the contours of the plot in a succinct and fast-paced format. The remainder of the performance consisted of material written by Peterson and O'Hare discussing, inter alia, the historical and literary context of Greek epic, the explication of various passages, and parallels between the burdens of war in the Iliad and in contemporary conflicts.

Within this framework, Peterson and O'Hare sought to argue for the relevance of the epic to the modern spectator. On many occasions, An Iliad drew a direct parallel between a passage in Homer and a familiar event or motif of US society. One strong example involved the catalog of ships in the second book of the Iliad, a notoriously dry passage for most modern readers. In the performance, Stephen Spinella, the lone actor in the piece, transitioned seamlessly from reciting the details of the Greek warships moored at Troy to listing numerous US towns and cities—some familiar, others obscure—in which residents had been recently conscripted for an unnamed war, thereby enlivening a moribund passage with a compelling analogy. A few such comparisons, however, were inadequate, as when Achilles' grief over the death of Patroclus was likened to the anger one feels after being cut in a supermarket checkout line—a hopelessly trite and diminishing juxtaposition.

Peterson and O'Hare's use of Robert Fagles's 1990 translation of the Iliad, which he composed with careful attention to the tradition of Homeric performance, contributed to the effectiveness of their adaptation. Fagles's loose and recitable translation was a natural choice for a popular staging of selected passages in the Iliad. Additionally, due to his distinguished reputation as a translator and the widespread adoption of the text in high school and undergraduate literature courses, his Iliad is one of few translations of a classical work with substantial cache among the general public. The familiarity of Fagles's works—especially strong in Princeton, where Fagles lived and taught for decades before his death in 2008—both enhanced the commercial

Stephen Spinella in An Iliad. (Photo: T. Charles Erickson.)

potential of An Iliad and provided many audience members with an immediate connection to the production.

The popularizing features of the production were balanced by inclusion of material that made connections to the original language and performance contexts of the Iliad. An Iliad was configured as a solo performance piece, in which Spinella, as an itinerant reciter of epic poetry, portrayed all characters—from Achilles to Hector, Patroclus to Thetis. In this regard, Spinella's character was based on the scores of traveling bards...