An Iliad, at Playhouse Square

Or: Lines in the Sand.

It looks like a theater rented for one night. A cinderblock wall, a push broom, a ladder. Any old performance space waiting for the arrival of an itinerate storyteller; The Poet (Tarah Flanagan). She has been traveling and telling for a long time; an impeded reporter in the Trojan War The Poet has been singing for the last three thousand years trying to bring some ray of light through her endless audiences about our addiction to rage and what draws us to destroy each other.

Flanagan sprightly coils her audience in the pit of the Outcalt Theater, running up and down the aisle steps, curling up next to audience members, speaking to us as she weaves the ancient poem and her modern interactions around. But three thousand years is a long time, and humanity has little shown its heeded the message that keeps the Poet trudging, keeps her singing. She is tired and her pluck is thin ice over a dark and deep well. Fortunately, the muses are on her side. A mythical cellist (Eva Rose Scholz-Carlson) arrives to lend a lift to the Poet's voice, sawing and taping and aging her way through the wrath of Achilles and the woes of Troy (the score composed entirely by Scholz-Carolson herself).

An Iliad is one of my favorite scripts. Ever. The way it quickens the epic to make it urgent and immediate, to turn mythic heroes into creatures of blood and tears, is a pinnacle of the art of storytelling. Speaking from my own soiled perspective this production holds itself in reserve. There is a conservation of charge and a muting of the wilder, more dangerous scenes. Flanagan, running up aisles and leaping over her hastily sketched maps, tries to wrap us up in the story rather than rope us into it. It’s the difference between grounded power and energetic performance, a burning forge and a sparking coil.

Her sinewy movement, ritualistic turns, braces, and throws are splendidly turned out, and she taps into a heartrending passion at just the right moments: giving voice to Andromache’s anguish on the battlements or walking us through a front line in World War One. She knows how to make the text sing, just not echo. As she sweeps together the lines she has drawn into the utter mess of civilization, we are faced with something tragic but still beyond our own grasp. We do not see. Not yet.