Collaborating with Komunyakaa: The Creation of Gilgamesh

On a Sunday afternoon in March, 2004, I anxiously awaited the arrival of Yusef Komunyakaa, and, almost as important, the first pages of our dramatic adaptation of the Epic of Gilgamesh. I had assembled a group of actors to read the first draft, and after 25 minutes of waiting, they had grown restless. I finally called Yusef and found him snug at home in Trenton, expecting to meet the next day. The scheduling snafu was my fault, and I felt terrible.

After a few moments of harried discussion, we decided Yusef would fax us the script. I dragged a fax machine out of the closet and placed it in the middle of the room. The actors—who were beginning to doubt whether Yusef actually existed—glanced about skeptically. Finally, the fax began to churn out pages. I gathered them up, hurriedly copied them, and distributed them to the cast. With no idea what to expect, we began reading Gilgamesh's first words:

I glimpsed a star
falling in the sky,
and all the people of Uruk
crowded around that descending orb
aglow, and I was enraged and envious
and attempted to grab it up
in my arms, but to my surprise
my knees buckled
because I was too weak.

I was dead in my dream.
Mother, what does it mean?
I have never dreamt
such a dream before.

It took some time to find the rhythm, but by the end of the night the language and the story had mesmerized us all. At that point, I knew my collaboration with Yusef Komunyakaa would be a success and that my dream of fostering a dramatic, melodious, and memorable adaptation of Gilgamesh would be realized.

* * *

I first encountered The Epic of Gilgamesh twenty years ago in Will Durant's grand tour of the ancient world, Our Oriental Heritage. There I discovered that Gilgamesh was a Sumerian king who ruled around 2700 B.C. A story cycle coalesced in the following millennium, and Babylonian scribes codified the epic we now possess between 1700 and 1500 B.C. I hunted down a good translation, and for weeks after reading it I was haunted by the horrifying realization at the heart of the tale:

Over his friend, Enkidu, Gilgamesh wept bitterly.
He wandered through the wilderness and cried:
"How can I rest? Despair is in my heart.
I too shall die, for am I not like Enkidu?"¹

At about the same time, I was reading The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker's "neo-Freudian" illumination of human behavior. What struck me was how much this book shared with Gilgamesh. The twentieth-century understanding of the human dilemma—the impossible project of reconciling our seemingly infinite and soaring spirits with our earthly and decaying bodies (or living as "gods with anuses," as Becker put it)—would not have been foreign to the ancients who compiled the epic.

The story insistently strikes at the problem of mortality and links Gilgamesh's fear of death with his inability to rule well, his mourning over his friend's corpse with his own unconscious fears, and his ultimate acceptance of his fate with a consolatory wisdom that echoes the great psychological and religious traditions of the world. Thus, in one of humankind's earliest stories, the essential questions are thoroughly explored. And they are explored with such beauty and power that the tale is rightly considered not just a historical document but also a masterpiece of literature.

* * *

Years ago, I began to think about bringing the epic to the stage. Working for nearly a decade as a dramaturge (an editor and "story consultant" for playwrights) gave me experience in nurturing ideas in scripts, while running a theater company gave me the chance to bring these scripts to the stage. I kept my eyes open for a playwright who could bring Gilgamesh to life, but I found none who could do justice to the epic.

I first met Yusef Komunyakaa at a reading that I...