Theater review: 'In the Wound: The Salt Plays'
Robert Hurwitt
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
sfgate.com
War is raging in Berkeley's John Hinkel Park. It isn't
pretty. It isn't particularly heroic. But it's damned
good theater.
"In the Wound," Jon Tracy's liberal rewrite of Homer's "Iliad," pulsates to the drums of goddesses and throbs with the combat, tedium, confusion and carnage of extended war. Not that this ambitious project, the first part of Tracy's two-play Homeric "The Salt Plays," is anywhere near as gory as the average war movie. The swords are drumsticks. The carnage is choreographed and the bloodshed left to your imagination. Which may make it more intense.
Written and directed by Tracy - with a stirring and yearning percussion and vocal score by Brendan West and the unusually large 31-person ensemble - the Shotgun Players world premiere runs weekends in the park through Oct. 3. It is by no means a straight dramatization of the "Iliad." Like "The Farm," Tracy's very loose adaptation of George Orwell's "Animal Farm" last year, "Wound" takes considerable liberties with its source.
It encompasses the entire Trojan War, for one thing. Where Homer focuses on the ninth year of the siege of Troy, "Wound" covers the whole decade, from the sacrifice of the Greek leader Agamemnon's daughter, Iphigenia (Nesbyth Rieman), - a more cynical act in this version - to the Trojan Horse (or a modern military equivalent of the ruse that ended the war).
Just as Christine Crook's costumes mix ancient Greek military gear with corporate suits, Tracy's script inhabits a fertile no-man's-land between the old and new. Michael Torres' domineering, semi-articulate Agamemnon, more in love with command than life, cops (and creatively mangles) bits from Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. Daniel Bruno's scheming "social mathematician" Odysseus is a master of corporate-speak.
But "Wound" is a more radical rewrite than that. The gods are comparatively powerless. The unseen Zeus is only a phone call away, but the beauteous nurse-goddesses - the perplexed Athena (Elena Wright), Troy-loving Aphrodite (Charisse Loriaux) and fed-up Hera (Emily Rosenthal) - can only seek to influence men's minds when they're not drumming up martial frenzies from the camo-netted watchtowers of Nina Ball's set.
Tracy reframes the story around the long journey of Bruno's cold Odysseus and on the Greeks' suffering as payback for the murder of Iphigenia. Lexie Papedo's sweet Greek-crooning Penelope and Yannai Kashtan's wise-child Telemachus keep beckoning Odysseus home. Rieman's still-stunned Iphigenia haunts the father who betrayed her, Odysseus as the man who engineered her death and the lover who let it happen - Aleph Ayin's tortured, athletic warrior Achilles.
That's not all. Tracy fills the stage with sharply performed subplots, involving the Achilles-besotted Patroclus (Roy Landaverde), Dave Garrett's deteriorating Menelaus, Alex Hersler's snarky Hektor and more. Dave Maier's combat-maddened Ajax is a searing indictment of the senseless agony of war by himself. The "Salt" Tracy rubs in this "Wound" becomes a remarkable drama.
