‘An Iliad’ in a Sag Harbor Junkyard
For the past two weeks, the Southampton Cultural Center has staged “The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged),” a high-speed farce that condensed the Bard’s work into 90 minutes. Next Thursday, the center will present an off-site production of a similar length of “An Iliad,” a play by Lisa Peterson and Denis O’Hare, but, while there is humor in the text, the play is no laughing matter.
In the early days of the Iraq War, Ms. Peterson became interested in plays that deal with what it is like to be in a war. At a friend’s suggestion, she turned to Homer’s “The Iliad” and decided to adapt it for the stage. However, she did not envision a conventional theater piece but rather something that recreated the original experience of listening to a storyteller.
The play has been produced across the country since its premiere in 2010, but next week’s performances, produced by Brad Learmonth and directed by James Blaszko, take it farther from the stage than before. It will take place in the junkyard behind Reid Brothers auto repair shop in Sag Harbor at 7:30 p.m. next Thursday, and again on Friday, Aug. 5, and Aug. 6.
Mr. Learmonth, who was for 28 years the program director at Harlem Stage in Manhattan, explained that the idea for the production came from Mr. Blaszko, who had become interested in the play from talking to Patrick Vincent Curran, an actor who wanted to work with him on it.
“James said he would do it if he could do it in a very particular way,” said Mr. Learmonth. “His idea was to bring it outdoors and use devices like cars and trucks and drones, while the audience sat around a campfire listening to the story.” They mounted a prototype production in an old veterans’ cemetery in Jersey City last year. “They did a really great job. They asked if I would consider producing it, and I said, ‘Absolutely.’ ”
Mr. Learmonth has had a house in Sag Harbor since 1999 and decided to do some location scouting with Mr. Blaszko in the area. They had looked at a number of possible outdoor sites, including LongHouse Reserve in East Hampton, when Mr. Learmonth remembered Reid Brothers. “As soon as we went back there, we both said, ‘Oh my God, this is perfect.’ It’s full of trucks and leftover pieces of old cars, but it’s also used as a parking area for trucks. There are huge mounds of gravel and rubble.”
“It’s the perfect backdrop for the staging of the piece, because it’s an audience of only 30 people sitting around a campfire when this truck pulls up, and this poor guy, who’s a poet and has been put in purgatory to tell this story until it needs telling no more — which is never, unfortunately — starts to tell the tale.”
“It presents a lot of challenges,” according to Mr. Blaszko. “We’ve been calling the show site-responsive, because you essentially have to create a theater in every location you bring it to.”
The junkyard is the first stop on a three-stop tour. The team will bring the play to the Hopkinton Center for the Arts in Massachusetts for two performances in August, which will take place behind a barn with a pile of rubble as a backdrop. The third venue will be an apple orchard in Connecticut.
The cast, as it were, consists of Mr. Curran, who is known only as the Poet, and Courtnee Roze, an African percussionist whose musical accompaniment serves the function of the Muses in ancient storytelling. “The idea of it,” said Mr. Learmonth, “is partly that these were not so much theater pieces as we consider them, but songs. The ancient Greeks were orators. The play represents the whole story of mankind and war. It also represents who we send to war.” While the text of the play is never changed, each production includes references specific to the place in which it’s performed.
“It’s an incredible undertaking for an actor,” said Mr. Blaszko, “and Patrick does such a good job of understanding what he’s saying and the implications of what each character is saying. He plays 12 characters in the piece, so he’s not only narrating it as this man who has seen every war in human history, he’s also embodying each of the characters in the tale.”
Mr. Learmonth partnered with the Southampton Cultural Center because “as a newly independent producer working with emerging artists, it was important to connect with an established organization in each community we’re going to.” There is no cost to the center; Mr. Learmonth raised the necessary funds for the production with a Kickstarter campaign. Tickets are $40 and can be purchased at scc-arts.org.