It’s been nearly 3,000 years since the savageries of the Trojan War and roughly as long since the Greek poet Homer wrote “The Iliad.” The 24-book, door-stop retells the nine-year conflict in an epic packed with gods, mortals and monsters.
Court Theatre’s production of “An Iliad” — a 90-minute, one-person drama based on Homer’s original as translated by Robert Fagles — burns away the distance of the past, giving the story a contemporary patina edge impossible to miss.
Penned by Lisa Peterson and Denis O’Hare, “An Iliad” debuted at the Hyde Park theater in 2011. Back for the blistering remount: Actor Timothy Edward Kane and director Charles Newell, who served as Court’s artistic director from 1993-2024. The reboot is a howling, Sisyphean tragedy steeped in rage, as bleak as it is riveting.
“The Iliad” spans nearly a decade, its plot a labyrinth of slaughter. The basic plot is this: The Trojan War was sparked by one man’s jealousy. Menelaus, Greek King of Sparta and husband to famed beauty Helen of Troy, became apoplectic when his wife was abducted from (or fled) Greece to Troy with a prince named Paris. So Menelaus launched a thousand ships to sack Troy. An added incentive for wreaking indiscriminate, violent havoc: “Prizes” of enslaved women would be distributed among Menelaus’ men.
“An Iliad” whittles the story to a blade as Peterson and O’Hare’s often haunting dialogue veers from contemplative to frenzied. Our portal to the war is Kane as The Poet, a nameless troubadour who somehow survived the carnage.
As with Homer, “An Iliad” weaves in the exploits of humans, gods and demigods. We hear about the warrior musician Achilles, son of a sea goddess, raised by a centaur; Hephaestus, god of the forges that turn steel to swords; Hermes, the trickster messenger for the Gods of Mount Olympus; and Patroclus, Achilles’ beloved companion. Kane renders them all vivid.
Midway through “An Iliad,” The Poet hurtles through a litany of wars, starting with ancient Greece and ending with the 2021 fall of Kabul. Kane starts the list almost dispassionately, like a history professor reviewing bullet points. By the time the scene concludes, The Poet has transformed both vocally and physically becoming a wild-eyed prophet of doom. The scene is embedded with a harrowing, implicit message. Men have been waging wars since the dawn of recorded history. The two are entangled like the double helix of a DNA strand. War is as constant as the stars.
“An Iliad” opens quietly and builds quickly. The Poet doesn’t speak in the opening moments, his silhouette murky under Keith Parham’s alternately harsh and stygian lighting. The Poet materializes from the dusk, unmistakably in the throes of shell shock. It’s a dark mood. It resonates with gut-punching impact.
Newell amps up the intensity as the story progresses, Kane keeping up with the hurtling pace. Potentially melodramatic moments reverberate with authenticity. We also get a glimpse of The Poet’s life before the war: He was a troubadour who sang stories across the land, a keeper of oral history. The arts, in The Poet’s wistful recollections, are always among war’s earliest casualties.
Throughout, the text flickers between the ancient worlds of Greece and Troy and a time far more contemporary.
The body count takes on contemporary urgency when The Poet pulls out a necklace of dog tags and describes their owners in detail — young men with hometowns in Ohio or Illinois or Kansas, their lives reduced to cannon fodder.
Todd Rosenthal’s set and Rachel Anne Healy’s understated but effective costume design further blur the line between (approximately) 1184 B.C. and now. The stage has a Mad Max sense of devastation about it. We’re in the shell of some nameless, bombed-out building, crumbling bricks and cement blocks sprayed with graffiti (in Greek). At one point, The Poet opens a funnel filled with sand, the falling torrent evoking unmarked graves.
When he sheds his cloak of rags, Kane is in nondescript trousers and shirt. The utterly ordinary look wouldn’t draw a second glance today. It helps paint The Poet as an Everyman futilely trying to make sense of lethal cruelties that defy rational explanation.
“An Iliad” is an unsettling triumph. It’s an echo of the past, a commentary on the present and an ominous warning for the future. It was timely in 2011. It’s even more so now.