UW-Milwaukee Theatre presented a moving rendition of Seamus Heaney’s adaptation of Sophocles’ play Philoctetes using modern lyric language to transcend the war of an ancient world to the present, parallel concerns of today. The story centers on the rotting, wounded figure Philoctetes, a Greek warrior marooned on an island after the gods punished him with a snakebite that refused to heal. Odysseus and Neoptolemus, the son of heroic Achilles, arrive on the island with the intention of tricking Philoctetes into rejoining the Greek cause in the Trojan War and contributing the magic bow he was given by Hercules upon his death. The story seems stubbornly current, told by actors in modern military garb and bare feet, speaking with contractions and in contemporary informality as often as poetry.
The play is well suited to the black box space at the Kenilworth Studio, a stack of boxes draped in military camouflage netting and a trio of pillars each tied with a gash of red fabric as the only set elements—a simplicity which allows the story to soar through the poetry in the actors’ voices. The actors navigate the larger-than-life emotions and colossally high stakes of these mythic figures with elegant simplicity, almost entirely across the board. Standout performances include an indignant but dutiful Neoptolemus, played by the believably heroic Bryson Langer, and a fiery performance by Thorin Ketelsen, whose wild hair is rivaled only by his rough, guttural screams of agony over his plight.
The foundation of a tight ensemble and skilled storytellers is established from the beginning with chorus leader Youa Thao, whose strong, grounded voice expresses a gravity which held the audience in the palm of her hand as she morphed from chorus to ship’s crew, and did a hilarious stint as a professed merchant trader. The cast overcomes the difficulty of unfamiliar Greek names (which present the possible pitfall of creating distance), succeeding instead in finding the pure humanity inherent in the raw drama of the Greeks.
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One of Neoptolemus’ most striking lines sums up the play’s bleak theme: “Let me educate you in one short sentence. War has an appetite for human goodness.”
