Milwaukee Chamber Theatre's An Illiad banner
“Every time I sing this song, I hope it’s the last time,” says the Poet in An Iliad. Not The Iliad, but a play by Lisa Peterson and Denis O’Hare with an intimate relationship to the words ascribed to Homer, brought to the stage by Milwaukee Chamber Theatre.
“The Iliad is western civilization’s first great antiwar treatise,” says An Iliad’s director, Brent Hazelton. “It explores the relationship between rage and pride and their bad consequences, with the Trojan War as a metaphor.”
“Recontextualization is the word I come back to when comparing An Iliad to The Iliad,” adds Kellen “Klassik” Abston. He plays the Muse and composed the never-heard-before music for this production. “An Iliadreferences different wars throughout human history, bringing the story to our modern-day doorstep. An Iliad brings immediacy to the story. It’s not just a historical tale but it’s about the inclination toward rage and hatred that lives within us—and the awareness of it that can bring us closer to finding empathy and grace within ourselves.”
O Muse, Where Are You?
An Iliad is a two-person play starring N’Jameh Camara as the Poet, the story’s teller, and Abston’s Muse, who doesn’t show up when first summoned. With inspiration slow to arrive, the Poet “needs to draw back on her own memories,” Abston explains.
Abston is best known around town under his performing name, Klassik, a Milwaukee rapper-singer-producer who is no stranger to reinterpreting great work from the past. He has performed Woody Guthrie and “Amazing Grace” as well as his own messages of joy and inclusion. He worked on music for An Iliad while table reading the script with Camara.
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“It’s as much a sound design as a score,” he says. “The music is there to support the Poet’s stories, to put the audience in those environments for a full sensory experience.” The set where Abston and Camara stand will be nearly bare. The music will “sonically paint the production—the landscape for the battles, heartbreak, frustration and rage,” Abston continues.
In her performance, Camara will embody multiple, larger-than-life characters from Homer’s epic. “I don’t envy her job,” Abston says. “N’Jameh said to me in rehearsal, ‘It’s so refreshing to work with someone who’s a master of their craft, but not my craft.’ What I ask myself is, ‘How do I complement the things she’s doing—and stay out of the way?’”
An Iliad’s exploration of rage and its cost is as pertinent in 2024 America as it was in the Greece of 2,500 years ago. The Trojan War depicted in The Iliad is an absurd conflagration of injured pride and macho bluster. “An Iliad shows that story through a contemporary lens,” Hazelton says. “It explores the roots of where our anger and rage live—in a beautiful way.”
Milwaukee Chamber Theatre presents An Iliad, September 20-October 6 at the Milwaukee Youth Arts Center, 325 W. Walnut St. For tickets, visit milwaukeechamberthreatre.org.
