Stephen Yoakam (The Poet) in the Guthrie Theater’s production of An Iliad. Photo by Aaron Fenster.
How can one actor play the size, the scope, the meaning of the Trojan War – or any war? He plays it as one man against another. He gives these men names and families. He puts them in a place in time: Ancient Troy or modern-day Ohio; a champion named Hector or a kid named Bobby.
An Iliad, which just opened in the Guthrie’s Dowling Studio, is a potent reworking of Homer’s epic poem that connects the horrors of its war – the Trojans holding off the Greeks for nine years – with our own wars, or any wars. They all come down to men — sometimes just kids, really — from towns all over the world, sent to kill each other for someone else’s transgressions. Written by Lisa Peterson and Denis O’Hare, the play maintains its centering in the ancient story, but the anti-war message it carries crosses the centuries.
In the tradition of storytelling, one person – in this case, The Poet, played by Stephen Yoakam – shares information, interprets what he has seen and heard, and provides commentary. Yoakam is all we need on that stage to recreate Hector’s tender moments with his wife and baby, Achilles’ hubris-infused spat with Agamemnon, Priam’s pleading for the body of his son and all the unspeakable horrors of hand-to-hand combat, one warrior against another.
The challenge for any adaptation is to make it as good at what it does as the original was good at what it did. It should illuminate something new that we may not have seen before in that same way. At this, the play succeeds, making a strong case for its writers’ pacifist views. The senselessness of war, and the capacity for men to kill one another, the play says, transcends culture, ethnicity, geography or history.
But it should also move us as the original must have moved its audience. That I doubt, in this case. In trying to connect the dots for us, the script just couldn’t let the poetry soar, instead knocking us back into our own mundane and petty grievances just as Homer’s depiction of war’s tragedies were beginning to sink in. Pieces of Homer’s poetry, recited like music, grab us and transport us– majestic as performed by one so skilled as Yoakam. It isn’t just what the words are saying, it’s the rhythm and its cadence that touches our senses in a way that straight prose can’t.
But not for long. With a flip remark, we’re reminded that this is someone else’s play, another “take†on the one ancient war everyone has at least heard of. It’s their idea and their politics and their metaphors. (Can road rage ever be comparable to battlefield slaughter? The cheap laugh just wasn’t worth it.)
The effect was to make the play hop around, then limp, then race. This was accentuated Benjamin McGovern’s directing that appeared to meddle a little too much. Yoakum is magnificent when the script and the production of it give him space; he is more than capable of filling it.
The set is intriguing, but almost too much so in the Dowling’s intimate space: bare light bulbs in our eyes, scaffolding that we could speculate (as the Poet paces around a small pool’s pathways) would be used for the ramparts at the play’s end. And the water, running from somewhere offstage into that pool – nice trick, but did it enrich the story? The Poet as Priam, removing his shoes and socks and wading in that pool seemed more an effort to convince us that, yes, there is water in it, rather than to support Priam’s achingly beautiful plea. He turns his back to us and steps out, the hems of his pants dripping. I smell an esoteric metaphor.
Still, it’s an interesting piece and honorable premise, and watching Yoakam wrangle it makes it very much worthwhile. An Iliad runs  through May 26.