‘Odyssey’ emerges from smoky venue
A sumptuous staging at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival
ASHLAND, Ore. — The gods’ omens transcended the stage at the Friday, Sept. 1, showing of “The Odyssey” at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. In the days surrounding the performance, smoke from forest fires turned the moon the color of rust and the sun into a ray less hot pink orb. The day of the show, haze almost obscured the hills that should loom large in the southern Oregon town of Ashland. The smell of campfire kept nostrils in a constant tickle. Some festival patrons arrived to the theater in surgical masks. “The Odyssey,” adapted and directed by Mary Zimmerman and staged in the company's open-air Allen Elizabethan Theatre, was on hold for cancellation all day, depending on the hourly verdict on the air from the state’s Department of Environmental Quality. (At that point in the season, four shows had already been canceled because of smoke.) But just as Athena (Christiana Clark) always smiles on Odysseus (Christopher Donahue), so did Mother Nature, who let the show go on. With this production, the visionary and lavishly theatrical Zimmerman revisits Homer's epic for the
first time in 17 years. Her take makes the text urgent from its opening words, when Clark’s Athena wrestles with a line of Robert Fitzgerald’s translation — “Sing in me, muse” — as might a high school student encountering classical syntax for the first time. Just as she’s about to give up, the muse (Amy Newman) does “sing in” Athena, clutching her from behind. In a single jolt, apathy morphs into a life-and-death struggle to get the words out.
Zimmerman best sustains this tension in scenes that many stage adaptations of the epic poem omit: Odysseus’ son Telemachus (Benjamin Bonenfant) mustering the courage to grow up and journey in search of his long-missing father; Odysseus reuniting with his reclusive, abased father Laertes (Armando Durán) and then following the gods’ orders to plant an oar in a land that has never heard of the sea, in order that he might die peacefully.
Also refreshing is how much Zimmerman centers the story on women. Athena seems to propel the story forward, not Odysseus, in large part because of the way Clark mixes puckish mischief, overweening enthusiasm and an athlete’s strength. (Donahue’s Odysseus, by contrast, waxes singsong in his delivery, instead of making each phrase a spontaneous idea, each encounter unique.)
Equally scene stealing are a Penelope (Kate Hurster) who gets to be fun and funny instead of just abandoned and powerless; a nurse (Catherine Castellanos) who dresses down the protagonist with a barrage of thwacks; and the red-clad Sirens, who don’t sing to entrap Odysseus but breathily intone what all men dream to hear from women: “No. Don’t get up. I’ll take care of it.”
Especially for those familiar with the story, these inclusions make you wonder anew if Odysseus will make it home to Ithaca from the Trojan War. What they don’t do is create an inexorable progression out of the story’s episodic structure. Before too long, successive isles, monsters and temptresses tread familiar ground.
But an overabundance of sumptuous staging ideas isn’t such a bad problem to have. In a world where forest fires and much worse rage outside the theater, it’s all the more a treat to see the vengeful Poseidon (Danforth Comins) bustle about in a mermaid’s prom dress; Penelope’s pack of suitors assert their dominance via a percussive, almost violent dance; or Aeolus (also Durán), the god of wind, wear both wig and suit tie that swirl up to the heavens.
He puts the wind in Odysseus’ sails. If only he could bring more favorable weather to Oregon’s forests.