The Odyssey

Play (2025)
by Kate Hamill
Based on the epic poem by Homer
Directed by Shana Cooper
American Repertory Theater
Loeb Drama Center
Harvard Square, Cambridge, MA
February 9 – March 16, 2025

Scenic Design: Sibyl Wickersheimer; Costume Design: An-Lin Dauber; Lighting and Projection Design: Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew; Sound Design and Music Composition: Paul James Prendergast; Hair, Wig, & Make-up Design: Rachel Padula-Shufelt; Puppetry Director and Designer: Kate Brehm; Movement Director: Stephanie Martinez

With Carlo Albán (Telemachus/​​Nausithous/​​Hector), Abigail Baird (Puppeteer), Benjamin Bonenfant (Elpenor/​Achilles/​Suitor), Wayne T. Carr (Odysseus), Ben Cherry (Polites), Alejandra Escalante (Woman 1/​​Nausicaa), Kristian Espiritu (Understudy for Penelope, Woman 3), Kate Hamill (Woman 2/​​Circe), Nike Imoru (Woman 3/​Madame/​Melantho/​Anticlea/​Andromache), Alexandria King (Understudy for Woman 1, Woman 2, Puppeteer), Keshav Moodliar (Amphinomus/​​Antinous), Andrus Nichols (Penelope), Jason O’Connell (Polites/​Polyphemus/​Ajax/​Suitor), Chris Thorn (Eurylochus/​Agamemnon/​Suitor), Rodney Witherspoon II (Understudy for Elpenor, Telemachus, Eurylochus)

The standard Homeric story goes that Odysseus (Wayne T. Carr) travels the long way home to Ithaca after the Trojan War which lasts ten years, taking an additional ten years to get there. Meanwhile, his devoted and faithful wife, Penelope (Andrus Nichols), waits for his return, supported by their son Telemachus (Carlo Albán), while suitors abound and hover threateningly. Odysseus’ travels take him through a series of challenges and adventures, including dealing with Polyphemus the Cyclops, landing on the island of Circe (Kate Hamill) – a witch who can turn men into pigs – passing by the island of the Sirens whose wonderful voices are irresistible, and to Calypso’s island where Odysseus forms a strong bond.

Kate Hamill’s modified narrative touches on the Cyclops episode, strongly emphasizes the stay on Circe’s island, makes short shrift of the passage by the Sirens, and skips the visit to Calypso entirely. In place of Calypso she posits Odysseus consorting with Nausicaa (Alejandra Escalante), who, in the original, plays a very different role in which a romantic connection is intimated but not physically realized.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch in Ithaca, things go a bit differently for Penelope. (Check out the spoilers section below for more details.)

Playwright Hamill has made a small industry out of dramatizing classics. I have seen a number of them: those based on the Jane Austen greats: Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility and Emma and one based on William Makepeace Thackeray’s great novel Vanity Fair. In general, Hamill’s attempt is to make these classics accessible to modern audiences, and she does so with varying degrees of success, but sometimes very happily.

In The Odyssey, the attempt to do so involves a lot of swearing, which is, I suppose, meant to make the traditional tale more accessible to modern audiences and to give it a contemporary twist, but the F Bomb is used so frequently in this play that it gets to be a bit much. As well, the guttural speech seems so mixed in with what seems like high-falutin’ articulation and recitation in the mode of a classic tale that the inconsistency stands out rather glaringly at times as though the script included (though it does not explicitly) lines like I do say, my good man… go fuck yourself!

It seems that Hamill wants to give the tale something of a feminist twist by empowering Circe and Penelope in certain ways. The section with Circe is so long and attenuated that one wonders what Hamill’s interest might be, other than that Circe is a rough-talking woman who can stand up for herself. The recent novel, Circe (2018), by Madeline Miller does a better job of conveying that sense and gives the eponymous character enough depth and heart to make her plight and situation more believable. In essence, Circe is already a quite well empowered and strongly self-possessed witch, so making her a bit rougher and grittier as Hamill does here does not change a great deal characterologically from the original.

Here, as well, Penelope is cast at once as faithful and devoted to Odysseus, and as resentful of him. More than once in this play Penelope talks of Odysseus’ wandering eye and his propensity for other women’s beds, which Penelope does not do in the original poem. Though this may, in Hamill’s view, deliver some sort of balance between the vagabonding Odysseus who certainly gets into some romantic entanglements along the way home, it is quite unfaithful to the original epic in which Odysseus and Penelope, before his journey to Troy and long journey home, have a strong and devoted bond. Though Hamill’s angle offers some idea of parity between Odysseus’ romantic involvements along his journey and might be seen as a feminist parity adjustment to the traditional theme, it does not quite come across as making sense. If Penelope complains so much about Odysseus’ roving eye and infidelity as she does in this play, why would she want him back at all? In attempting parity, such modifications in this play subvert the fundamental power of Penelope’s devotion to Odysseus which one might well regard as Homer’s far stronger moral portrayal than of his eponymous protagonist.

James Joyce’s depiction of Molly Bloom, the Penelope stand-in his great novel Ulysses (1918), certainly has affairs and a very big one with Blazes Boylan during the action of the book, but offers a compelling example of an independent woman who arrives at her own formulation of fidelity, which makes a good deal of sense in the context of the novel. In the final episode of that novel, famously identified as the Penelope episode, Molly, in a never-ending sentence that spans the entire chapter, speaks passionately and appreciatively of Leopold Bloom, the Odysseus analogue in the novel, whom she has betrayed sexually but not spiritually.

Traditionally, Odysseus is cast as the sharpest of the Greek warriors who comes up with all kinds of strategies – including that of the Trojan Horse – and who is known for his thoughtful incisiveness. Here, though there is some talk, mostly by Odysseus himself, about how smart he is, the character is depicted more as a feckless guy who gets pushed around a lot; and that mental acuity does not really come through.

The staging involves a certain amount of drapery with occasional touches of video and strobing and a nice neon-like red line of lights that twists around the stage. There is also a very cool projection of a big eye that accentuates what’s going on in the Cyclops episode.

The play is very long: three hours, with two intermissions. Especially since only part of the story of the original epic is told, I’m not sure why the play is so attenuated, but it is. Nonetheless, much of the audience seemed to enjoy it.

Playwright Hamill is cast as Circe, one of the juicier roles in the show and she gives it a very earthy and ballsy twist. It is indeed very nice to have the author right there on stage and at considerable length.

– BADMan (aka Charles Munitz)