Milwaukee Chamber Theatre’s ‘The Iliad’ Is a Modern Take on an Ancient Tragedy
Photo courtesy of Milwaukee Chamber Theatre
You know The Iliad – the verbose, forlorn older brother of The Odyssey – full of grim tales of a war, meddling Greek gods and predetermined fates.
If you don’t know the book, maybe you have heard of Helen of Troy, the most beautiful woman of the world and daughter of Zeus, whose kidnapping kicked off a 10-year Greek-Trojan war.
Or perhaps you know of the fighter Achilles, son of the Greek King and Thetis, a sea nymph goddess, whose fable gave the world the expression “achilles heel.”
The stories of Homer have left an indelible mark on the world. The Odyssey takes place after the Trojan war, giving us stories of adventure, including Circe’s Island, the sirens, a visit to the underworld and the famous Trojan Horse story, where the Greeks tricked the Trojans, seized the city and ended the war.
Photo courtesy of Milwaukee Chamber Theatre
The Iliad, however, is the story of the war. It’s markedly more heartbreaking, speaking to the absurdities and atrocities of war that still plague humanity today.
That’s the crux of this unique one-woman interpretation of The Iliad, a Milwaukee Chamber Theatre production being performed at the Milwaukee Youth Arts Center. In this play death is the defining trait of humanity, and war is the harbinger of death. Bob Balderson, a Vietnam Veteran, spoke before the performance about the nature of war stating “only the dead have seen the end of war.”
N’Jameh Camara (The Mountaintop, Macbeth) plays The Poet, the storyteller. She enters onto a sparse stage, only a wooden bench awaits her. The stage is low and round, and visitors sit around in a raised circle to spectate– the set up gives a distinctly ancient feeling, like we were sitting in the Theatre of Dionysus, watching a play much like one that would have been performed thousands of years ago.
The Poet is here to share the saga of the Trojan War, an ancient war that lasted ten years. Her retelling starts at year nine. The Poet goes through the familiar story, sharing the life of Hector the Trojan hero, his wife Andromache, and their son Astyanax. Hector’s brother, Paris, was the one who abducted Helen of Troy after the goddess Aphrodite promised her to him, kicking off the ill-fated war.
She also shares the story of Achilies, a superhuman warrior driven by ire and revenge, prophesied to die young in glory. The Greek-Trojan battle had been going on for years, and there was no end in sight. The gods had abandoned them, leaving the two factions to incur death after death, blow after blow. “How do you ask a person to be the last man to die in a lost cause,” asked The Poet.
Photo courtesy of Milwaukee Chamber Theatre
The play is packed with lessons about masculinity, individualism, fate, family, friendship and freewill, but more than anything it’s about the catastrophes of war, a lesson that the time traveling poet believes we have not learned enough about. There are moments where The Poet connects the Trojan war with modern tragedies. There’s even a part where she lists off seemingly every recorded war in history in an exasperated cry to humanity.
Camara is tasked with running the entire show, which was billed for 90 minutes. Her performance was nothing less than a feat, and she didn’t miss a beat. She was evocative, touching, heartbreaking and, in some moments, funny. The task of bringing Homer into the 21st century was a herculean effort that Camara pulled off without a sweat.
Writers Lisa Peterson and Denis O’Hare did a fabulous job modernizing and re-contextualizing the words of Homer, leaving Camara, and director Brent Hazelton, to knock it out of the park.
A fun aspect of this play was the live scoring, performed by Milwaukee artist Kellen Abston aka Klassik. He’s credited as “The Muse,” and brought a great atmosphere to the stripped down performance. Instead of being hidden behind curtains, Klassik performed right beside the stage, adding a fun interactive element and bringing gravity, and sometimes levity, to Camara’s performance.
In this powerful retelling of The Iliad, Milwaukee Chamber Theatre delivers an apt reminder of the horrors of war, and the threads of humanity that endure it. Despite the progress humans have made through the millennia, The Iliad is a grim reminder of the lessons we have yet to learn about violence and war.
The Iliad, a Milwaukee Chamber Theatre production, runs through October 6 at the Milwaukee Youth Arts Center. Tickets can be purchased online.
