An llliad

In An Illiad at the Guthrie, Stephen Yoakam brings to life the rage and resulting agony of the oft-relived battle between Achilles and Hector. He delivers it with an impassioned plea to the audience to "see" it, and not only the "it" of that long-ago battle, but the "it" of its tragically familiar premise. Rage, violence, the expectation of battle, the hubris of war, pride before the fall, all so easily packaged in some Homeric tale. Easy to shove aside, easy to ignore in its pertinence to the modern day.  But Yoakam does not allow the audience to escape the correlation he insists upon.  This isn't a long ago story, or a story of men unlike the men and women we know today.  It's the same story, retold a million times. 

The bulk of the 100 minute play allows Yoakam, The Poet, to use his storytelling gift to describe the environment of Troy and Greece, their path to war, and the violence that ensued. Yoakam is white-bearded and wears layers of well-worn clothing that could place him in ancient Troy or the hills of modern Pakistan. He's tired of the story and yet cannot avoid telling it. At key points he pleads for understanding from the audience, and when he struggles to find it, the harshest correlations begin. These boys sent to war are the same boys to war everywhere. Thebes or Kentucky. 

In one particularly harrowing moment, a tired Poet, collapsed on an overturned bucket, laments the list of wars that have destroyed lives since the Achilles-Hector battle. A list that sounds distant, perhaps, until the wars get closer to the modern age, until the wars listed involve our own country. 

Despite the jarring truths, at no point was I exhausted by the heaviness.  Yoakam's delivery is so well balanced, so perfectly teetering between brokenness, resignation, and a desire to impart the past to new ears, that the audience doesn't feel punished by the barrage of human failings. The Poet's words never feel accusatory, only sad.  Even when the Poet points out how quick his audience is to claim they would never succumb to such rage, even in those pointed statements Yoakam's Poet deftly shines a light on our frailties, our Achilles heel perhaps, but does not seek an apology for that frailty.  That's the sadness of it all, that resignation to a human condition built for violence despite the lessons of so many ancient battles. 

The poet often calls on the Muses for help in the telling of his tale, and often mocks the way the Gods screw absolutely everything up for we mere mortals. But the power of the Poet's story, his bloodthirsty depiction of rage before and against the Gods, gives him a certain God-like quality, as well. Some lesser God, maybe, not mischievous like the usual Hermes messenger, but a foil to that mischief, a messenger from the Gods who is tired of his role, tired of telling a story whose ending will never, ever change.

An Illiad plays in the Dowling Studio through May 26.

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