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Living in Exile
Mar. 20th, 2011 11:28 pmTonight I saw the last of the three plays in ASP's Winter Festival, Living in Exile (Jon Lipsky, who died yesterday, not long after working with the group). It's an intense retelling of The Illiad, with the main female actor being Briseis, the main male actor being in turns Patroklos, Agamemnon, and Achilles. There were two other actors, who mostly did music, plus a few off-stage voices and such.
The play had been completely reblocked and reworked in the last two weeks: the main actor, Robert Walsh, had had some kind of accident, and was in a wheelchair (they added ramps to the stage, too). I've seen him in a bunch of plays before; it was odd seeing him so incapacitated (he had to move both his legs with his hands, and used his arms to move himself when out of the chair). Amazingly, it still worked, even though of all characters out there, I'd've thought those three Greek fighters would be among the worst to play seated. Tamara Hickey at Briseis was intense and wonderful.
The one thing I found a bit difficult to follow sometimes was which male character was happening. Sometimes it was easy, sometimes less so. I don't know whether I'd change lighting, or a prop, or what, but there could have been something to make it clearer.
The play starts before the book, with Iphigenia's sacrifice, Briseis' capture and life in the Greek camp, the issues between Agamemnon and Achilles, and so on, only getting to the official start of the book in after the intermission ,though a lot of the battle plot twists are elided in this retelling. I was amused that there was a section on Achilles' shield: I still remember the discussion of shield poetry in freshman UHUM class.
The Greeks' exile is of their own making, sort of (depending on how one reads the story, of course), which to me feels not quite like exile, per se. I will admit to having a bias on the topic, however. It is a decade of living away from home, slowly going mad, or perhaps just inhuman, in all sorts of ways. War changes people, in whatever ways, and long war changes people more thoroughly. ("Exile" still doesn't feel like the right word, though.)
The issues of how things change over the course of a decade of war feels incredibly timely, even when the particulars are so different, such as military technology limitations.
The play had been completely reblocked and reworked in the last two weeks: the main actor, Robert Walsh, had had some kind of accident, and was in a wheelchair (they added ramps to the stage, too). I've seen him in a bunch of plays before; it was odd seeing him so incapacitated (he had to move both his legs with his hands, and used his arms to move himself when out of the chair). Amazingly, it still worked, even though of all characters out there, I'd've thought those three Greek fighters would be among the worst to play seated. Tamara Hickey at Briseis was intense and wonderful.
The one thing I found a bit difficult to follow sometimes was which male character was happening. Sometimes it was easy, sometimes less so. I don't know whether I'd change lighting, or a prop, or what, but there could have been something to make it clearer.
The play starts before the book, with Iphigenia's sacrifice, Briseis' capture and life in the Greek camp, the issues between Agamemnon and Achilles, and so on, only getting to the official start of the book in after the intermission ,though a lot of the battle plot twists are elided in this retelling. I was amused that there was a section on Achilles' shield: I still remember the discussion of shield poetry in freshman UHUM class.
The Greeks' exile is of their own making, sort of (depending on how one reads the story, of course), which to me feels not quite like exile, per se. I will admit to having a bias on the topic, however. It is a decade of living away from home, slowly going mad, or perhaps just inhuman, in all sorts of ways. War changes people, in whatever ways, and long war changes people more thoroughly. ("Exile" still doesn't feel like the right word, though.)
The issues of how things change over the course of a decade of war feels incredibly timely, even when the particulars are so different, such as military technology limitations.