Kings: The Siege of Troy March 11, 2011

WHERE AND WHEN:
The Workshop Theater Company, 312 West 36th Street, Fourth Floor East, btwn 8th/9th Avenues.
Presented by Handcart Ensemble, Verse Theater Manhattan and WorkShop Theater Company
Preview March 10, opens March 11, runs through April 3, 2011
Thursdays through Saturdays at 8:00 PM; Sundays, 3PM
$18 general admission
Box office: SMARTTIX (212) 868-4444, www.workshoptheater.org
Running time 1:15. CRITICS ARE INVITED on or after MARCH 11.

DETAILS AND ARTIST INFO:
Handcart Ensemble, Verse Theater Manhattan and WorkShop Theater Company are teaming up to present "Kings: The Siege of Troy," a new stage version of The Iliad of Homer, Books I & II as adapted by noted English poet Christopher Logue. The production is adapted for the stage and directed by Jim Milton. Two actors in modern dress enact all of the characters, using Logue's savage poetry to create the unsparing world of Bronze Age Greece. Performances are March 10 to April 6 at Workshop Theater, 312 West 36th Street, Manhattan.

Christopher Logue's sprawling, cinematic account of the Iliad, almost fifty years in the making, has been described as "one of the major achievements of postwar English poetry" (Paris Review). This production centers on the conflicts between the Greek king, Agamemnon, and its fiercest warrior, Achilles, in the ninth year of the siege at Troy. With the Greek army encamped outside the walls of Troy, these two vainglorious figures clash over a captured woman. Achilles' bruised honor, the exhaustion of battle and disease among the troops all combine against the Greek war effort, but the gods' intervention ensures that the campaign survives, culminating in a fierce assault on Troy.

More than twenty characters, Greeks, Trojans and Immortals, will be acted by two actors in contemporary dress, allowing the audience to focus on Mr. Logue's savage invocation of a world of terrible beauty and pain. The production was developed by Verse Theater Manhattan, which is devoted exclusively to verse dramas, primarily stage adaptations of works by leading poets, and styles itself after Poets Theater Cambridge of the 50's.

Jim Milton (director, adaptation, sound design) directed several productions at the NY Shakespeare Festival, including "Dexter Creed" (by and starring Michael Moriarty). Regional work includes productions at Cincinnati Playhouse, StageWest, the Magic Theatre and ACT in San Francisco. He has directed for National Public Radio; Off-off Broadway at La MaMa, Theater for the New City and Soho Rep, among others; and has been a resident director at New Dramatists. Milton has been the principal director of Verse Theater Manhattan since 2001, staging ten of its productions, including Mr. Logue's "War Music." He was dramaturg for Handcart Ensemble's production of "Homer's Odyssey," winnowing Simon Armitage's BBC radio script from four hours to under two. He recently completed a screenplay based on F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Pat Hobby Stories."

Verse Theater Manhattan (http://www.versetheater.org) was started by Richard Ryan in 1998 with a production of Seneca's "Madness of Hercules," translated to Dana Gioia, at HERE. Ryan, a devotee of verse theater, had seen Christopher Logue's "Kings," a version of Books I and II of The Iliad, performed by Logue and Alan Howard at Tricycle Theatre in London in 1997 and was forever changed. Soon after founding his troupe, Ryan undertook producing a succession of stage plays taken from Christopher Logue's adaptations of The Iliad, beginning with "The Husbands" in 1998, part of the Second Annual NY Fringe Festival. Subsequently, with Jim Milton at the helm, Verse Theater of Manhattan undertook two more productions of Logue's work. "Kings," with its script based on the 1997 Tricycle Theatre production in London, was presented in June 2001 at the tiny Experimental Space of Blue Heron Arts Center near Grammercy Park. It was followed by "War Music," Logue's adaptation of several later books and acted by three women, whose debut in September, 2001 at Wings Theater was cut short by the events of 9/11. The piece was re-staged in 2002 and subsequently toured in the Midwest and the United Kingdom.

The current production, named "Kings: The Siege of Troy," is quite different from its predecessor of a decade ago. Director Jim Milton explains, "The first time around, I stuck pretty closely to what Logue and Howard had done in the London production; I was, frankly, a little scared of Christopher and wanted to avoid the kinds of flare-ups which sometimes occur between author and adapter. However, having taken some liberties (including the all-female cast) in 'War Music,' which Christopher saw several times and loved. I felt I could be a bit freer with 'Kings' this time around, both with respect to the text and the staging. I drew from both Logue's original BBC and revised versions of the work and even interpolated pieces from 'Husbands,' 'Cold Calls' and 'All Day Permanent Red' (other sections of Logue's 'Iliad'). The script is much tighter this time around, while it also has a good deal more scope. Working in a good-sized space instead of the tiny platform at the Blue Heron means that the actors will be much freer to embody the outsized personalities of Achilles, Zeus, Agamemnon, Athena, Odysseus and the rest. Music and lighting will delineate changes of scene and mood, but the primacy of Logue's brilliant poetry will remain the same."

Lighting design is by Heather Skye Sparling.

Even working on a tiny stage in 2001, "Kings" was creatively successful and critics validated the concept of an Iliad onstage that simply celebrated the power of language. D.J.R. Bruckner (New York Times) dubbed it "ear theater . . . snatches of story in many voices that demand to be heard, not read." Donald Lyons (New York Post) deemed it "an exciting American premiere" that "makes for enjoyable, wild theater."

New York's contemporary verse theater community is tightly knit and Verse Theater enjoys definite synergies with its co-producers on this project. Verse Theater Manhattan has had a longstanding creative relationship with WorkShop Theater (www.workshoptheater.org) since Elysa Marden, who was to become Artistic Director of WorkShop Theater, directed several of Verse Theater's early productions, including: "A Phoenix Too Frequent" by Christopher Fry (1998, The Clurman on Theater Row), "Husbands," its first Christopher Logue project (1998, Second Fringe Festival), and "The Forever Waltz" by Glenn Maxwell (2005, VTM's first co-production with The Workshop Theater).

Last fall, Handcart Ensemble (www.handcartensemble.org), under the direction of J. Scott Reynolds, presented the stage premiere of "Homer's Odyssey" as adapted by Simon Armitage, one of Britain's most gifted and prolific poets, at Theaters at 45 Bleecker Street. The production converted to an Off-Broadway contract and was extended twice. Jim Milton, director of "Kings: The Siege at Troy," was dramaturg of that production. Handcart Ensemble produces new adaptations of classical material, specializing in works that make powerful use of the English language and imaginative use of the stage. Founded in 1999, the organization has produced New York premieres of works such as "The Burial at Thebes,"an adaptation of Sophocles' "Antigone" by Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney; and Euripides' "Alcestis" in a version by Ted Hughes. Reviewing "Alcestis" (2007), Martin Denton (nytheatre.com) wrote, "what would we do without this invaluable indie troupe that keeps on finding brilliant poetic drama that others have somehow ignored?"

"Kings: The Siege of Troy" will be acted by Dana Watkins and J. Eric Cook.

Dana Watkins played F. Scott Fitzgerald in "The Jazz Age" at 59E59. He appeared in "My First Time" at New World Stages and in five productions of Classical Theater of Harlem. He has been featured on TV's "One Life to Live" and "The Guiding Light" and played leads in several independent films. He has appeared in regional theater and in many productions and national tours with NY City Opera and Metropolitan Opera Company.

J. Eric Cook has appeared in five productions of LAByrinth Theater Company. He was host of "Nikole's Tick Parade" at Dixon Place. He has also appeared in productions with the Royal Shakespeare Company's residency at Ann Arbor, with the Upright Citizens Brigade, Vampire Cowboys (NYC) and regional theaters in California.

CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON CHRISTOPHER LOGUE
'Think of the east Aegean sea by night, / And in an open bay before that sea / Upwards of 30,000 men / Asleep like spoons among their hightailed ships.' This is the deceptively peaceful opening of Kings (1991), one of the books comprising War Music, Christopher Logue's epic work-in-progress which re-tells episodes from Homer's Iliad. As this panoramic wide shot suggests, Logue's art is thoroughly cinematic - alternating blood-drenched, melodramatic, or erotic scenes - and cuts between intimate close-ups and aerial views, featuring the gods and their favourites: super-heroes and psychopaths, lovers and victims, survivors of political intrigues and battles. Graphic and sensationally vivid in imagery, its artfully anachronistic detailing and contemporary references place the Trojan War imaginatively in a direct line to the eternal succession of military conflicts, with all their epic endurance, courage - and futility. War Music is not a translation so much as a great dramatic war poem 'dependent on the Iliad,' and has been praised as such over the almost five decades of its making by Ezra Pound, Lawrence Durrell, George Steiner, Derek Mahon, Doris Lessing, and many other literary luminaries. -- ContemporaryWriters.com (Dr. Jules Smith, 2008)

Logue's account of the Iliad has been described as one of the major achievements of postwar English poetry, the most important translation since Ezra Pound's "Homage to Sextus Propertius." George Steiner has called it "a work of genius . . . the most magnificent act of translation going on in the English language at the moment," while Louis MacNeice praised it as "not a translation but a remarkable achievement of empathy," and Henry Miller exclaimed, "I'm crazy about it. Haven't seen such poetry in ages." -- Paris Review (Shusha Guppy)

For the past 44 years, a British poet named Christopher Logue has been engaged in one of the most peculiar and quixotic literary projects of our times. He has been rendering Homer's Iliad into English, issuing his efforts in a series of slim volumes, each representing two or three books of the original epic. In the process, he has modernized it without compunction, bringing to bear all the techniques of contemporary poetry--mixed line-length, tricks with typeface, fragmentation, allusions to the literature of the last century or so; and the kicker is: Logue can't read Ancient Greek, not a word of it. He fashions his Iliad by consulting pre-existing translations, getting a sense of what the thing is about, and then setting off to write his own version--inventing new episodes, ignoring others, renaming characters, and occasionally drifting off into a narrative entirely of his own making.-- Slate (Jim Lewis)