Jules: I have a troubling confession to make: I cannot help but spoil things for myself. Every time I see a Broadway play or start a new television show, I look up the entire plot beforehand so I know what to expect. Something about reading the Wikipedia summary of a particularly shocking moment—say, Tony Vlachos’s blindside of Sarah Lacina in “Survivor: Cagayan,” Nick Arnstein’s arrest in “Funny Girl,” or Greg Serrano leaving West Covina to go to business school in “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend”—establishes a mental image that I’m excited to see surpassed by the director’s own.
When I received an email from the Classics Department offering a free ticket to Kate Hamill’s “The Odyssey,” running through March 16 at the American Repertory Theater, I felt like I knew what I was going into. Not only had I read the epic the prior semester and written a paper about the symbolism of speech, but I had also seen a stage production drawn from the same source material two years prior. In the basement of St. Jean’s Church during my junior year of high school, I saw the York Theatre Company’s musical-comedy “Penelope, or How the Odyssey Was Really Written.”
Now today, while sitting in seat G-7 at Hamill’s production, my mind darted from the Canaday Hall dorm room where I read Homer’s words to the street outside St. Jean’s where I discussed “Penelope” with my father, to the meeting room in the Science Center where I would later write an essay on “Penelope,” the final chapter of James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” to the theater where at that moment I sat to Odysseus’s home island of Ithaca. Lots going on.
Hamill’s interpretation begins in Ithaca, where Telemachus (Carlo Albán) worries that one of Penelope’s (Andrus Nichols) suitors will woo his mother and usurp his rightful place on the throne of the island of Ithaca as his father, Odysseus (Wayne T. Carr), takes years to return from the Trojan War. Making use of shadow puppetry (all too reminiscent of Plato’s allegory of the cave), Penelope explains to her son why Odysseus had to leave for Troy—to save Telemachus, whom King of Mycenae Agamemnon had placed in front of Odysseus’s plow. (I promise this is important for later.)
Act I sees us dart between a veiled Penelope’s increasingly weaker rebukes of the suitors’ advances and Odysseus and his crew’s escape from Polyphemus’s giant projected yellow eye. Act II is spent with Circe (playwright Kate Hamill), who offers Odysseus a “Scott Pilgrim”-esque choice between forgetting the trauma of the Trojan War by staying with her forever or learning to live with his past on the open seas. He chooses the latter, while one suitor, Amphinomus (Keshav Moodliar) successfully seduces Penelope. In Act III, the sirens kill Odysseus’s men, then Odysseus explains how he ordered the death of the infant son of Hector, and eventually Odysseus and Telemachus slaughter all of Penelope’s suitors except Amphinomus, whom Penelope begs her husband not to kill.
This all sounds pretty heavy, and at times it was. Act III was noticeably darker in tone, perhaps even bordering on maudlin. Odysseus’s description of his crimes at war to the peace-loving princess Nausicaa, who welcomes him in after he washes up alone on her island, was gripping at first but grew tiring after the first few minutes. At that point, we know he’s about to return to Ithaca, so why keep us waiting any longer? I appreciated the levity of the first two acts, particularly the performance of Alejandra Escalante, Nike Imoru, and Hamill herself, who together played a trio of multifaceted female characters—at times sheep, the Fates, and Penelope’s servants.
One moment in particular made me chuckle: when Telemachus improperly barges into Penelope’s private quarters and she accosts him for scandalizing her ladies-in-waiting, one of them utters a flirtatious “Heyyy” before recoiling in awkward embarrassment. In Hamill’s reinterpretation of “The Odyssey” as a beleaguered man’s attempt to cope with the trauma of war, moments of levity offered a welcome counterpoint to the omnipresent threat of death.
The first few minutes make it seem like you’re in for a mythical drama; our first foray into Ithaca features almost exclusively expository premonitions and explanations. It is not until Odysseus’s introduction that the comedy sets in. As he and his suitors anger their female hosts by stealing all of their supplies, the first expletives are launched across the stage. Hamill deftly plays with our expectations of what a stage production of the “Odyssey” should look like.
The York Theatre Company’s “Penelope” of my high school days asked us to wonder if the adventures of Odysseus on the open seas were merely falsified letters written by Penelope herself to buy time with the suitors. Hamill’s play similarly requests a suspension of unwavering belief in the Homeric text as we watch and enjoy—there’s no mention of the nymph Calypso, the carnivorous Laestrygonians, or the precarious Scylla and Charybdis. Circe tells Odysseus that stories about him, including that he and his sailors have dined with an enigmatic group of flower-consuming beings (ostensibly, the Lotus-Eaters), are already circulating through the Aegean. And whereas Homer recounts how Odysseus and his crew outsmart the sirens, Hamill feeds the four remaining sailors to the musical monsters. What is it about “The Odyssey” that invites preference of alternative retellings over faithful adaptation? Could it be inherent in our understanding of the universal experience of the Odyssean journey to apply it to our own trials?
This dissonance between the source material and this rendition wasn’t a major shortcoming of the show as a whole, but at times it stuck out where it didn’t need to. For example, the choice to name one of the sailors “Antinous,” famously the first suitor Odysseus kills at the end of the Homeric text, was but one example of needless divergence.
On the whole, Hamill kept me on the edge of my seat as I was told a story I’ve read, watched, and heard countless times. Penelope’s adultery is a surprising but fascinating addition that reflects the sheer quantity of craft Hamill put into this production: we, the audience, can tell that something is off about the way Penelope is flirting back with Amphinomus at the end of Act I, but surely, we think, the play won’t depart that much from the source material—but then it does. Yet this choice gave me false hope for a more transgressive ending. While we’re left with Odysseus and Penelope staring at one another with uncertainty, surrounded by the corpses of the suitors, something felt lacking from the final scene. The suitors were so ridiculous and whimsical throughout the play that I was kind of rooting against Odysseus at the end.
Perhaps that’s what Hamill was aiming for with all the focus placed on Odysseus’s trauma from the war. We can see what he’s gone through, and we can see why he’s suffering, but we aren’t on his side. Nausicaa recoils in horror upon hearing his stories of war, and the Greek chorus chants of “Stop! Don’t! Please!” in recollection of Odysseus’s murder of Astyanax with swelling volume and desperation as the play persists despite their pleas. Hamill sets up an eerie parallel between the murder of Hector’s son and the survival of Telemachus, one that (I told you!) links the beginning and end of the production expertly.
Hamill’s performance as Circe unequivocally steals the show—her voice, creepy without bordering on cartoonish, unsettles the audience as much as it does Odysseus. The way she sits ethereally upon the baskets of fruit and meat center-stage evokes a strong sense of discomfort that I’m not completely sure how to explain. The performances of Carr, Imoru, and Moodliar, as well as Benjamin Bonenfant as a sailor and a suitor, also stood out from the cast. The sole weak link among them was Nichols, whose Penelope did not quite match her castmate Moodliar’s dynamic Amphinomus. I at times felt akin to Telemachus at the onset of the epic: desperate to leave Ithaca for whatever Odysseus was doing.
Nashla: As someone who struggled with the rigid interpretation of “The Odyssey” imposed by traditional AP literature classes, listening to Myth and Modernity: A Conversation about The Odyssey at the Loeb Drama Center this past Monday was particularly moving. My attention was drawn to Carr, Classics Department scholars David Elmer, Emily Greenwood, Naomi Weiss, and Museum of Fine Arts curator Phoebe Segal, as they discussed how interpretations of Homer’s poem have evolved across time. Notably, they emphasized that the storytelling tradition of the wanderer who must find a way home is not confined to Greek mythology.
When asked whether they welcomed modern adaptations of “The Odyssey,” Greenwood responded, “I want different versions of The Odyssey that rhyme with my own experience as a modern subject of the 21st century.” She then highlighted African American interpretations of Homer’s work, drawing connections to Frederick Douglass’s 1845 narrative—asserting that “there is not a better Odyssey than the adventures of fugitive slaves”—Jacob Lawrence’s “Great Migration” series, and Toni Morrison’s novel “Home.” The parallels between “The Odyssey’s” theme of wandering and the history of race in America were striking.
In this sense, Hamill’s adaptation achieves something remarkable: it shifts the focus to characters whose lived experiences have traditionally been marginalized. The panelists noted that the play spotlights the women left behind and the children who grow up without knowing their families. Drawing connections to contemporary struggles, Segal observed, “I noticed they all don’t know who is dead and who is alive. I think that’s relevant to what is happening today–coming home from war and not knowing who is still alive.”
The discussion also touched on the play’s portrayal of trauma, particularly the PTSD Odysseus suffers from. Carr reflected on the responsibility of embodying such a character: “As an actor, we are trained to hold up the mirror to life. A lot of the inspiration came from the people we talked to. My dad is a vet, so I talked to him about it. I don’t know anyone who has been in war who does not have PTSD. It is an honor to portray them,” he said.
The panel illuminated how Hamill’s “Odyssey” breathes raw emotion into Homer’s poem—the ache of suffering, the yearning for home, and the quiet, unbreakable strength that carries one forward. Hamill doesn’t just retell “The Odyssey”—she makes it pulse with the agony and hope that defines the human experience.
Jules Sanders ’28 (julessanders@college.harvard.edu) loved reading “Ulysses” in public. Nashla Turcios ’28 (nashlaturcios@college.harvard.edu) thinks everyone should visit the American Repertory Theater.