Kate Hamill reimagines ‘The Odyssey’ at A.R.T.

Susan Saccoccia

A recipient of NEA Arts Journalism fellowships in dance, theater and music, Susan reviews visual and performing arts in the U.S. and overseas.

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In playwright Kate Hamill’s “The Odyssey,” her contemporary retelling of the 2,000-year-old epic poem by Homer, this tale of seemingly endless violence and revenge takes a new turn.

Its world premiere production by the American Repertory Theater, on stage through March 16 at the Loeb Drama Center in Harvard Square, unfolds over a fast-moving three hours with two intermissions. Animating its action-adventure momentum are ancient storytelling arts such as shadow puppetry and mime and a nimble cast of 10 actors who perform the play’s 26 roles.

Orchestrating all this alchemy is director Shana Cooper, with scene design by Sibyl Wickersheimer, costumes An-Lin Dauber, lighting and projections by Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew, sound and music by Paul James Prendergast, puppetry designer Kate Brehm and puppeteer Abigail Baird.

Hamill performs two of her play’s 10 female roles. As the furiously funny sea witch Circe who holds Odysseus in thrall, stalling his homeward voyage to Greece by 10 years, Hamill relishes her character’s acerbic wit. When Odysseus accuses her of being a witch, she replies with a languorously flirtatious “Obviously.”

As Odysseus, Wayne T. Carr fully looks and acts his part as a rugged but vulnerable warrior.

Alejandra Escalante, Kate Hamill, Nike Imoru, and Wayne T. Carr in “The Odyssey.” PHOTO: NILE SCOTT STUDIOS AND MAGGIE HALL

The opening scene is staged with spare poetry as to low drumbeats, Odysseus bathes himself as if performing an ablution. But he is not cleansed. A trio of Trojan women (Hamill, Nike Imoru and Alehandra Escalante) haunt Odysseus for destroying their country and voice his growing inner torment.

Traveling with Odysseus are his five surviving crewmen, played by Benjamin Bonenfant, Chris Thorn, Jason O’Connell, Keshav Moodliar and Carlo Albán, whose multiple roles also include brief appearances as a host of Trojan and Greek figures in tales narrated by Odysseus.

Scenes shift between the zone of shadows, spells and hallucinations navigated by Odysseus and his men and his home in Ithaca, lit with flat bright light.

In the seething world Odysseus travels, a spell transforms his crew into snorting swine. His second-in-command, the truthteller Polites—a riveting Jason O’Connell—implores Odysseus, as light reveals his anguished face, to leave Circe’s island. O’Connell also stands out as he mimes the belching one-eyed Cyclops whose menacing shadow fills the stage.

The scene shifts to his home in Greece, where Penelope, the wife of Odysseus, and their son Telemachus await his return. 

An infant when his father left for Troy, Telemachus is now an 11-year-old brandishing a wooden sword and fondling a miniature Trojan horse—toys for future warriors. Carlo Albán gives an uneasy portrayal of Telemachus as a boy but later fully embodies the prince as a young man.

Attired in an emerald green gown and a tiny veil that she lowers in an attempt at privacy, Andrus Nichols is an ageless, regal Penelope. She dodges the menacing advances of lecherous suitors sporting pimp-worthy furs (Bonenfant, Thorn and O’Connell) who enliven scenes in the palace with their ribald antics and raunchy asides. As they taunt Penelope for her loneliness and lack of protection, they become Penelope’s own chorus of furies. Observing this mischief is her lady-in-waiting, one of five roles performed by Nike Imoru, whose sculpted features lend her characters a stern strength.

Unlike his fellow suitors, Moodliar’s smooth-talking suitor vies for her hand with tenderness and persuasive promises of security.

Meanwhile, after losing his men to the lethal seduction of the Sirens, whose songs lure them to their deaths, Odysseus washes up on a sacred island where he is tended to and loved by its diaphanous priestess, Nausicaa (Escalante). But he withholds his name, saying, “I am nobody.” Later, when again seeking ablution, Odysseus confesses his battlefield cruelties to Nausicaa. She denies him forgiveness. “I love Nobody” she says. “Go home, Odysseus.”

Such words as “honor,” “mercy” and “go home” recur frequently in Hamill’s play. In one of its few false notes, her Penelope says oddly mundane things, as when she tells her suitor that her cousin Helen, whose kidnapping launched the Trojan War, had bad breath, and assures her son that “When your father is back—it’ll all get sorted out.”

Hamill rewrites the homecoming of Odysseus. Disguised as a bedraggled elder and recognized only by his son, who now holds a real sword, he arrives as Penelope unveils the grand tapestry she has woven to illustrate his heroic deeds, Odysseus is about to show her an act of heroism unlike these battlefield triumphs.