Okay, so I saw ACT's production of WAR MUSIC last night and I'm going to go ahead and talk about it with the following caveats: 1) I am a huge Greek Mythology buff and in particular myths and legends surrounding The Trojan War are of interest to me, which leads to caveat 2) I have been working on my own stage adaptation of this story for three years or so (weirdly enough, it's called WARHORSE) and so any reaction to this show, given my background, is going to be a loaded one. What I think will surprise most people is that I didn't hate WAR MUSIC as much they probably think I did. However, I definitely think my version of the tale is superior. Zeus knows it's certainly more exciting.
So, now that I've successfully sucked my own dick for a bit, I'll do my best to keep it out of my surmise of this play and why it totally fails, both as Greek Mythology and much more importantly, as THEATER.
As usual ACT has lavished the show with tremendous production values and while I do ultimately question the decision to put everyone in modern military ware (especially as it made people more indistinguishable- a major problem of the evening) I liked the look of the show and the kind of modern/classical fusion they had going on. There are also some lovely staging moments- the opening, the passing of dawn, the chariot at the end. There are also some lovely performances, though Gregory Wallace continues to stick out like the sore thumb he is, even more so playing Hector, a character that even Shakespeare hesitated to lampoon in TROILUS AND CRESSIDA, so dignified and regal is he. Wallace has no ability to play dignified, a fact that has become apparent after seeing him in a dozen shows over the years. I understand that ACT is probably saddled with him, but can't they at least put him in roles where his broad and flamboyantly flaccid performance will not be offensive? It seems to me that somewhere in here there was some minor character he could have played. He was a good horse, for instance. Why not just make that his cameo and find someone with poise and power to play the flower of Troy?
There are some directing choices which are bad choices. The soldier dance number with the hanging light bulbs was all the cheese of MISS SAIGON without any of the good stuff of MISS SAIGON. It looked just... stupid... and the second act, which was much weaker than the first, never ever recovered from it. The dancing Hephaestus moment was a bit ridiculous too but it worked somewhat better as I had already figured out at that point that the gods were going to be treated rather tongue in cheek and stripped of whatever dignity they usually have (though Thetis was still given her usual cold poise and elegance, thanks in no small part to Rene's typically majestic performance). In regards to both choices, however, I found myself having, ultimately, the same reaction: why? That reaction is the short story version of my whole review.
Because ultimately the problems I have with this show are with the script (and not just because I'm a rival playwright in this case), though I do think better directing choices could have been made to improve on a faulty script. However, in this case, the adaptor and the director are one, so the blame is really not too hard to pin, if one needs to pin it. And one does, because this is an incredible story and these are incredible characters and with ACT's resources and audience, we should have been given an incredible show and we weren't. And by the time the play ended last night the audience was one third empty, and I can't blame anyone who left. I would have too, if I didn't have such a high degree of professional curiosity in this case.
The problem with the script is that, for all its modern references and dance breaks, it's actually far too reverent to the true source material of the ILIAD. And I say the ILIAD because that is a distinct entity from the larger story of THE TROJAN WAR. As many a classics nerd will tell you, THE ILIAD is in fact one book of anywhere from 16-32 (depending on who you ask) telling the story of the Trojan War from it's very beginning (literally the building of Troy) to its very end- i.e. the last wandering survivor finding his home and/or grave. Most of the other books don't exist, though the legends live on through the plays, other poems (like THE AENEID), and general traditions that have survived the centuries in a way that parchment and stone tablets did not. The ILIAD focuses primarily on the conflict between Achilles and Agamemnon, and ends with Agamemnon killing Hector in retribution for Patroclus and the return of Hector's body to Troy to the sounds of Cassandra's lament. Taken in that light, one realizes that the characters of the ILIAD are ones which have been developed for a substantial time before the first line of the poem as we know it, and in many cases go on to be further developed in the now lost parts that follow that last line. So, one also realizes, when one is a modern adaptor, that they must do a fair amount of filling in the gaps if they want to have whole, substantial people on stage, because unlike the ancient poets, they can not rely on the idea that the general audience will come into this with knowledge or even possible access to the backstory, and thus understand the true SIGNIFIGANCE of the people whose story they are watching. WAR MUSIC, however, is almost a literal staging of most of the ILIAD (we never get to Hector's death) and with very little attempt at providing either context or back story. More importantly, because the adaptors have been so reverent to the word but not the spirit of the original, we are suddenly introduced, mid-action, to a whole bunch of characters who we do not know and never get to know and so this show shoots itself in the foot right off the bat- because if we can't get to know the characters, we can't relate, and if we can't relate we don't care what happens to them, and if we don't care we find ourselves, at the end of almost three hours, asking "Why?"
Anyone who attempts to adapt the Trojan Saga knows that this story is an embarassment of riches: there are hundreds of great characters to choose from and legends to keep or ignore. The only mistake I think you can make is to try and include ALL of them- because to do so in a two-three hour evening is essentially to dump your audience in a sea sans a life-preserver. This is exactly what WAR MUSIC does, however, and gives us so many random Greek kings and Trojan Nobles that the play becomes hours of talking heads, none of whom get enough singular stage time to really become fleshed out personalities. Some collapsing of minor characters and redistributing of major events into the hands of characters we've gotten to know would readily fix this problem but the adaptor/director seems to have no interest in creating characters. In my version of the story, Patroclus dies at the end of Act One, after only an hour and five minutes, and yet he has more lines and stage time than last night's Patroclus had when he was killed at the 2.5 hour mark. In my version of the story, I'd like to think it's sad when Patroclus dies- you liked him, he calmed Achilles, he defended Briseis, he feels compassion for the battered Greeks... in this version we barely got to know him because he only started speaking lines about five minutes before he's killed. This is clearly just a bad decision from a dramatic standpoint and illustrates my general problem with the show: stuff happens, but we don't know why, and it happens to people we're not permitted to get to know or care about; so thus, stuff happens, but it has no meaning. To me, that is the antithesis theater, which should be all about the witnessing or reporting of significant action- especially at nearly three hours long.
Sadly, WAR MUSIC makes no real attempt at storytelling or story presentation. It moves from point to point in the ILIAD, with each properly named but completely undeveloped talking head spouting poetry at the appointed time before slipping back into anonymity. This is further enhanced by the costuming, which makes everyone, even women, look relatively the same. The God's stand out because they have gold masks and are loud and brash, but their parts are fairly minimal. Achilles is recognizeable because he is barefoot and long-haired (and played by one of the better actors in the show) but he is only in the very beginning and the very end. When he doubles as Paris he is equally as successful and distinguished, and in truth, the only dramatically sound moments come when either he or Helen are on stage because while they might not be likable people, they are at least identifiable as human beings with human needs and not just vehicles for spouting poetry that, while undeniably beautiful, mostly fails as dialogue. The nail in the coffin is that, for all of it's expensive and professional staging (and it's a lot of clean lines, which as we all know, I LOVE), WAR MUSIC is almost entirely devoid of action. And I don't mean full on fight scenes or whatever- in my adaptation, there is intentionally on one "battle" scene and it is meant to hit like a ton of bricks after fifty minutes of talking- I mean action in the oldest and Greekest sense of the term: emotional catharsis. Cause remember, in most Greek theater you never see any action either: the murders, the suicides, the battles, by and large happen offstage and you mostly get some bodies revealed and a character (or the chorus) talking about it all. But they don't just talk: they relive these things before you AND THAT'S THE IMPORTANT PART. Theater began as a way to communally purge and pray together. I am all for narrative plays that rely more on storytelling than story presenting but in order for that to work you need 1) narrators you really care about so that you listen the same way you listen to a friend or family member tell you something to that happened to them and 2) emotional investment on the part of the narrator who doesn't just tell the story but (3) TELLS YOU WHY THE STORY MATTERS- i.e. how it affected THEM. And for all of its high brown poetry, WAR SONG ironically never once delves into the souls of its characters or lets these people say, "And this is how I felt about this!" So even when things happen they don't happen to people, just names we've been told in a sea of names, none attached to a personality or even really a memorable costume... and so why should we care? Who cares what happens to a list of names?
There is one really brilliant moment in the second act where Helen is possessed by the goddess Aphrodite and forced into reseducing her seducer. It is a dark, lovely moment that the actress pulls off nicely and which is frighteningly close to a moment in my own play where Poseidon possesses Odysseus. Both moments bring home the anicent belief that the gods were never very far away and might, in fact, be versions of ourselves we seek to deny or aspire to: thus making us ultimately responsible for the best- and the worst things we do. Derek Walcott, in his beautiful stage adaptation of THE ODYSSEY touches on this in the final moments between Odysseus and Penelope, who asks her husband, "Were there monsters out there?" to which he replies, "Yes. We make them ourselves." It is what makes Greek mythology so fascinating to modern thinkers: we are aware, because of the noble and yet flawed gods and the doomed but courageous heroes that we are not far removed from these brutal and alien people, no matter how many milleniums have passed. A professor of mine once told me he read THE ILIAD every year because over time he found he related to different characters: that once he was Achilles, proud and powerful and ambitious to be recognized; that then he became Hector, a family man with a million responsibilities and a golden-boy reputation that sometimes weighed too much; and now, almost seventy, he was Priam, looking for his lost youth, mourning friends who had died or disappeared, dreaming of Helen's who once touched him in passing. What he told me is the answer to that question of "why?" that we fling out whenever we are asked to watch a version of the Trojan War: because these characters are archetypes, yes, but they are HUMAN archetypes and the war is the context in which we watch these human archetypes battle it out. The war is the human condition, in other words, and the war is all there is. And it's a good story because it is OUR story.
But that's the point they missed last night, and after three hours of nice sets and pretty words, it's also the only tragedy I saw.
