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Richard Termine ©2025  

How does one make Iliad: Book One, relevant for today’s contemporary audiences“ It’s a mystery, and after seeing the current incarnation of this production by the Aquila Theatre at the Lucille Lortel, it is still a mystery.

It’s not that the production is bad, per se. The actors, John Buxton, Nathan Flower, Jeffrey Gold, Jay Painter, Natasha Piletich, and Vaishnavi Sharma, are all energetic and committed; they play multiple parts, and there are no false notes among them. It’s that the production is gimmicky and tonally inconsistent: neither director Peter Meineck nor translator Stanley Lombardo know which way to go, so the middle ground was chosen, making every choice murky, and sometimes jarring.

Let’s take the costumes, for example. Why were WW I helmets chosen? The war theme, yes, of course, but WWI? And poor Vaishnavi Sharma, playing a daughter and the most beautiful goddess of them all; why was she in a faded, ugly dress worthy of a Dorothea Lange photo, circa 1935? What is wrong with traditional Greek costumes? Why was there loud, intrusive, synthesized music, other than to manipulate an emotion that otherwise would have been absent from any given seen? Why not a Greek chorus, instead of actors having to parse their characters in two: from, say, Hera to chorus and back again? Why all the walking in slow motion? Why the slapstick, alternating with the sentimental?

I have no problem updating the classics, including Shakespeare (witness Ian McKellen’s Richard the III, set during the Nazi regime, which was a stroke of genius because it brought something new, vibrant, exciting and relevant to the text). However, there has to be good reason for the update, not “Let’s do something different for the sake of doing something different.” And that is exactly what this production smacks of.

Richard Termine ©2025  

Three quarters of the way through, there is a scene with Zeus and Hera, a warring couple who happen to be gods, that gives a glimpse of what this production could have been had the right choices been made. Both Jay Painter (Zeus) and Vaishnavi Sharma (Hera) found the humor and brutality in the text, while the other four cast members functioned as a clever and funny Greek chorus.

There was also an astute depiction of Dionysian revelry, with song and dance, which illustrates our origins as the warring and (after battle) carousing people that we are: the war, the wine, the women, the song, etc… This is the beauty of the classics: to shed light on who we are today, and, one must ponder, since so many of the Greeks are being revived around town, the relevance to the world we currently inhabit. That is one way to make the classics relevant: to hold a mirror up to the audience, so they leave disturbed, in need of a drink and serious conversation. Sadly, in Peter Meineck’s Iliad: Book One, those moments of reflection are few and far between.