Sightlines: Odyssey – The Homecoming
By Daniel Mufson
Originally published in The Village Voice, 10 Feb. 2004.
Odyssey: The Homecoming. Photo: Chris Maresca.
Theodora Skipitares makes beautiful puppets, and she’s recruited an excellent team to create video images and a soundscape in support of her staging of Homer’s epic. Playing with shadow puppetry, Bunraku, and masked mime, she tries to place her abridgedOdyssey in the context of the Iraq war, although Iraq is only hinted at in a video with a character speaking in Bushisms and by a tangential scene about the Walter Reed Army Hospital.
In spite of—or perhaps because of—Homer’s example, Skipitares hasn’t figured out how to present her narrative. Penelope, played by Meredith Wright, introduces the story “as told by me, his wife,” and indeed she provides closure at the end of the show. But nothing in between reflects her perspective. Skipitares’s allusions to contemporary issues, hard to miss in the first two scenes, disappear once Odysseus begins his story. Homer’s hero says he only wants to entertain, but Skipitares provides little in the way of excitement or humor. (The spare text is about as funny as, well, The Odyssey.) While the show’s eclecticism succeeds when mixing puppet styles, Wright’s broad delivery, reminiscent of Broadway musical actors brimming with smarmy self-satisfaction, seems out of place. Skipitares’s journey has potential, but, like Odysseus, she seems to have lost her way.
Bio
Daniel Mufson is an American freelance writer, translator, and editor. He lives in Berlin. His articles have appeared in The Wall Street Journal Europe, The Village Voice, Washington D.C.’s City Paper, American Theatre, TDR, PAJ, and Germany’s Tageszeitung and Theater Heute, among others. He has translated plays, art criticism, and business texts. He is also the editor of Reza Abdoh, an anthology about an Iranian-American director and playwright, published by Johns Hopkins University Press under its PAJ imprint. He was the managing editor of Theater Magazine for two years in the 1990s, and founded and edited the (now defunct) online publication AlternativeTheater.com.
Daniel Mufson studied English and American History and Literature at Harvard. He holds an MFA and DFA (Doctor of Fine Arts) in Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism from the Yale School of Drama. More recently, he earned a Master’s degree in Kulturjournalismus (Cultural Journalism) at the Universität der Künste, having written a thesis on the depiction of foreigners, primarily asylum-seekers, on East German television after the fall of the Wall. He is currently writing a book on the war on terror.
Email: mufson [at] gmail.com
“Notes from Berlin” Blog: http://nyc-berlin.blogspot.com/
-
Archives
- March 2009 (1)
-
Categories
-
RSS
Entries RSS
Comments RSS
