Review: Shotgun Players delights with modern take on 'The Odyssey'

Pat Craig
Friday, December 10, 2010
The San Jose Mercury News

A minimalist and deconstructed visit to Homer's "The Odyssey" on Berkeley's Ashby Stage offers a fresh and vivid look at Odysseus, the crafty Greek military leader who went to great lengths to save his own son's life, but during the Trojan War felt little ambivalence about leading others' sons to their deaths.

The new Shotgun Players production is the follow-up to last summer's "In the Wound" and the second part of the company's "Salt Plays," a wildly contemporary take on Greek mythology.

In fact, the show, written and directed by Jon Tracy, may send you back to your Bullfinch's Mythology for a bit of who's who on the various characters. On the other hand, I was surprised at how quickly the names came back to me. The last time I'd picnicked in the garden of the gods was my freshman year in high school.

With "Of the Earth," we meet a crazed Odysseus (Dan Bruno), trying to get home from a decade of war (parallels to our current 10-year entanglement in Afghanistan). His journey seems almost impossible as he is taunted by various gods, questioned by his son, Telemachus (Daniel Petzold), haunted by his wife, Penelope (Lexie Papedo), and beset by his own internal demons.

The ordeal unfolds on a futuristic set by Nina Ball, dominated by an enormous video screen that fills the back wall of the stage and supplies images that fill in the back story and add additional visual elements to the production. On the stage, itself, ceiling-high ladders offer plenty of acrobatic opportunities for the gods and goddesses that aid and inhibit, sometimes simultaneously, Odysseus' progress.

The deities, male and female, are all played by women -- Anna Ishida, Charisse Loriaux, Rami Margron, Emily Rosenthal and Elena Wright -- who wear futuristic costumes (by Christina Yeaton) that look like something you might see in a '50s sci-fi space movie.

This '50s theme seems to underline much of the production, although the time period isn't specific.

Overall, the piece is a well-done, delightfully off-kilter and highly entertaining interpretation of the Greek classic myth. Once you realize expertise in Greek mythology isn't necessary to enjoy the show, you can sit back and let it unfold in its own offbeat manner. The idea is to simply be delighted, which seems to be what Shotgun players is doing with remarkable frequency.