Students take modern ‘Odyssey’ downtown

Descending the winding staircase into the underground box theater—only a few blocks from New York University’s diaspora of buildings—it seemed only appropriate that such a journey should be made in order to view “Homer’s Odyssey.”

With a small but flexible cast and a script remastered by Simon Armitage, “Homer’s Odyssey”—as performed by the Handcart Ensemble at the Bleecker Street Theatre—served as an intermediary between Literature Humanities’ study of the “Odyssey” and the work’s practical implications in modern life.

The British Broadcasting Corporation commissioned and broadcasted “Homer’s Odyssey” in 2004, though the play made its first stage appearance in New York this September. While all the September shows sold out online through Brown Paper Tickets, the Handcart Ensemble plans to reopen Armitage’s adaptation from Oct. 2-18.

An acclaimed poet and interpreter of classic texts, Armitage is known for converting works such as Euripides’s “The Madness of Heracles” into scripts with a distinct theatrical feel. In “Homer’s Odyssey” specifically, the tension between modern and archaic speech characteristic of Armitage’s work remains tenable throughout. David D’Agostini as Odysseus rolls his “R’s” and uses occasionally flowery but accessible language, while the piggish sailors in his crew lapse into modern slang.

Armitage’s interpretation begins with Odysseus’s washing up naked and starving on a beach in Phaeacia, barely distinguishable from seaweed. Nausicaa, the pubescent Phaeacian princess who rescues him, plays a much more important role in the play than in the original text. This grants the viewer greater insight than the reader into her character and reinforces the motif of women—from Circe to Athena to Penelope—as guides in Odysseus’s journey. She swoons girlishly over the protagonist at every possible interval—could “nauseating” stem from “Nausicaa”?

Later, with the audience set up to be guests and observers at their table, Odysseus chronicles his adventures before the feasting Phaecian nobles.

The gods appear frequently, but many plot elements are omitted, like the bag of winds, Scylla, and Charybdis. The underworld scene with Tiresias is most magical, with ghosts emerging from behind a curtain of black gauze. This contributes to the understanding of the play as continuous with the “Iliad,” as Agamemnon and Achilles appear, showing how even the greatest heroes are humbled by death. Achilles even seems to regret his decision to live a brief and glorious life, which was central to the plot of the “Iliad.”

Employing such stage elements as silhouettes behind backlit screens, life-sized puppets representing fantastical creatures, and poles that serve as sailing masts or hunting spears juxtaposed by the minimalism with props, the Handcart production colors the play with a modern edge.

Costumes are classic takes on togas and armor, and the audience is a curious hybrid of elderly folks and the college theater crowd, integrating Columbia’s young Lit Hum students with the greater contingent of people fascinated by Homeric epics.

“Homer’s Odyssey” will play a different role in Lit Hum classes’ discussion of the Odyssey than the movie “Troy” for the “Iliad,” whose summary was inferior to that of Sparknotes in terms of quality. Rather, Armitage’s interpretation is an expansion on the existing text with distinct points of emphasis that illuminate characters or events underdeveloped in the cursory hours of class.

"Homer's Odyssey" will run from October 2-18 at Theatres at 45 Bleecker Street.