KC Rep’s An Iliad makes its retold stories unforgettable

Like Sisyphus condemned to push a boulder up a mountain, only to watch it roll back down over and over again, the Poet of An Iliad, onstage at Kansas City Repertory Theatre, seems eternally bound to one task: Retell the events and battles of the ancient Trojan War.

That massive 10-year siege of Troy is just one conflict in our three millennia of drawn-out warfare, but this compelling 95-minute one-act, beautifully directed here by Jerry Genochio, feels altogether current. The Poet (an exceptional Kyle Hatley) sets up his story: “It’s been nine years,” he begins, and the soldiers have nothing to show for it but “exhaustion, poverty, loneliness.”

The playwrights, Lisa Peterson and Denis O’Hare (who has performed the piece himself), make their Poet the keeper of this war’s memories, but he addresses all wars, really. We are “addicted to rage,” he reminds us. He was there, within the walls of the besieged Troy, in the camp of the Greeks. He was by the sides and in the minds of the soldiers and the civilians. He saw it all. Yet this play isn’t so much about the burden of his fate — his charge to remember and reprise these battles — as it is about us. “It’s always something,” he says, that incites another war.

Adapted from Roger Fagles’ translation of Homer’s The Iliad, this Iliad is a masterwork itself, painting characters of myth and legend as authentically as present-day vets and their families. Agamemnon, Achilles, Patroclus, Hector, Priam, Hector’s wife and infant son — through our storyteller, we become well-acquainted. We invest in them.

There’s humor here, too, at the start, as the Poet sets the stage for the conflict. He pulls a bottle of liquor from his knapsack. “It’s easier to talk about these horrors in a bar,” he says. And as he switches from observer and commentator to enactor caught up in the action, Hatley animates the scenes with the vivid details that make storytelling such powerful, electrifying performance art.

Sometimes conversational, sometimes anguished, Hatley inhabits the Poet as much as he does the stage, a fascinating backdrop of ramparts and damaged ships that could be architectural ruins, the destruction of war, or perhaps a manifestation of his imagination (design by Martin Andrew). He’s alone but for the Musician (Raymond Castrey, who has also composed the music). Percussion, a lutelike ukulele and ethereal ambient sounds serve to augment the play’s tones and the Poet’s rhythmic speech. The Musician acts as the Poet’s muse and silent, understanding presence — prodding him to start, encouraging him to go on, supporting him when he isn’t sure he can continue.

Adding texture and depth, an intriguing overhead landscape of pendant light fixtures complements Grant Wilcoxen’s lighting design, which drenches the stage in the glare of a hot day, bathes it in red in the frenzy of battle, shadows a soldier in his moment of death, and diminishes during a somber recitation — a litany reminiscent of the reading of names on a 9/11 anniversary.

This is the Rep at its memorable best. Its moving Iliad, which connects an “ages ago” saga to our 2015 lives, is one that demands to be experienced not just once but over and over again.