The Odyssey
The Odyssey
Adapted and Presented by Charlie Bethel
From a Poem by Homer
Directed by Michael Carleton
Orlando Shakespeare Theater, Orlando FL</strong>
As the lights go up on Indiana Bethel, it looks like he’s broken through the curse on my office door except this tomb of literature has much nicer amphora and taller Caryatids than mine. As he digs though the classics that won’t be ready until the sequel, he tosses aside The Iliad and Joyce, but when the dust rises along with Rosy Fingers of Dawn he dives into this jaunty retelling of the word oldest epic poem. Rather than burden us with 12,110 lines of dactylic hexameter, Bethel uses a trick Andy Griffith applied to Shakespeare – he cuts out the boring parts, embellishes the battles, and leaves in as many jokes as you can tell without having to explain them in the original Achaean.
I’ll summarize the summary – Odysseus and his buddies whup on the Trojans, steal their women, rape their cattle and destroy their temples. The first two are assumed, the last event ticks off Poseidon, God of the Oceans and that was a bad move: Odysseus’s three hour cruise turns into a multiyear sitcom. He gets stoned with lotus eaters, pokes the eye out of Polyphemus the Cyclops, spends 7 years shacking up with a Goddess, and nearly gets home only to take a nap an get blown all the way to Malta. Once he does get home, he defeats the suitors to his supposedly widowed wife Penelope, pets his old dog, and resumes ruling Ithaca after a 20 year interregnum. This guy is a dynamo.
So how did this class in the classics go over? It’s much more fun that studying irregular Greek verb forms, and it’s important to remember that these epics of old were intended for unamplified reading at a banquet where people were eating, drinking and not always paying attention. Bethel mercifully edits the story down plays up the jokes we still get and purges those too obscure to work. He does beat on the “Rosy Fingered Dawn” phrase, I’m guessing he’s trying to get the audience to chant along but even the sonorous Alan Bruun took several years to get the Mad Cow crowd to parrot “And You Know Who You Are.” Bethel has previously condensed Beowulf for our entertainment and ran this project at the 2012 New PlayFest, the product is spritely and enjoyable, and might even count for a few credits at Community College. If you must adapt a piece of classic literature, this is the way to do it.
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