Listings
Robert Avila
Wednesday, September 15, 2010
The
San Francisco Bay Guardian
Shotgun Players' annual free performance in Berkeley's
John Hinkel Park is this year an impressively staged
large-cast reworking of the Illiad from playwright-director
Jon Tracy. In the Wound is actually the first
of two new and related works from Tracy collectively
known as the Salt Plays (the second of which,
Of the Earth will open at Shotgun's Ashby stage
in December). Its distinctly contemporary slant on the
Trojan War includes re-imagining the epic's Greek commanders
as figures we've come to know and loath here in the
belly of a beast once know by the quaint-sounding phrase,
"military-industrial complex." Hence, Odysseus
(Daniel Bruno) as a devoted family man in a business
suit with a briefcase full of bloody contradictions
emanating from his 9-to-5 as a "social architect"
for the empire; or Agamemnon (an irresistibly Patton-esque
Michael Torres) as the ridiculously macho, creatively
foul-mouthed redneck American four-star commander-clown
ordering others into battle. While the alternately humorous
and overly meaningful American inflections can feel
too obvious and dramatically limiting, they're delivered
with panache, amid the not unmoving spectacle of the
production's energetic, drum-driven choreography and
cleverly integrated mise-en-scène.
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