A Reimagining of ‘The Odyssey’ Through a Female Prism

When the former director of The New York Theatre Workshop (NYTW) first brought up the idea of making a play out of The Odyssey, Lisa Peterson, who had adapted (with Denis O’Hare) and directed another Homerian epic, The Iliad, for NYTW, wasn’t particularly interested. She felt there were plenty of versions of the ancient tale of Odysseus’ ten-year quest to get home to Ithaca after fighting in the Trojan War for a decade.

Then Peterson read Emily Wilson’s 2018 translation of the epic story, the first one by a woman into English. It made her think an adaptation might be a good way to explore something she was interested in — telling a traditional male hero’s journey through a female prism.

That adaptation, Odyssey, which Peterson also directs, opens at the Marin Theatre Company in Mill Valley, Calif., on August 31 and runs through September 24. From there, it will go on a nationwide tour.

Peterson has worked as a director at many venues, including Los Angeles’ Mark Taper Forum (where she spent 10 years as resident director), Baltimore Center Stage, Yale Rep, and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. She’s also won two Obie Awards (one for An Iliad).

For this adaptation, she set the play in a contemporary relocation center for refugees on the Isle of Lesbos, where four young women, having fled conflict in their countries, tell Odysseus’ story with a personal understanding of the meaning of hosting strangers and of home.

Wilson’s translation made those issues clear, Peterson says, adding that Wilson writes in her introduction about xenia, or honoring guests, and the almost religious importance of hospitality to the Greeks.

“I was really struck by how Odysseus has this series of experiences of landing in someone else's environment and the difference between the way that, say, the king and queen of the Phoenicians welcome him in and say, ‘What do you need? Here's some food and what can we do for you?’” she said. “And then on the flip side, there are inhabitable islands that are basically full of monsters, and you can't even go near Scylla because [she’s] a six-headed 12-armed monster that snatches men out of ships.”

In her translation, Wilson included the women characters’ perspectives, such as Calypso’s when Odysseus leaves her island after seven years. Calling Calypso a “nymph,” as many translations do, is a way of dismissing her, Wilson says, when the word can mean boy, or woman at the age to be married, or a nature goddess. She’s a nature goddess, Wilson says.

“There's a tendency to read the terrifying goddesses of The Odyssey in terms of sort of modern misogynistic stereotypes,” she said. “Those have to do with witches or female monstrosity or condemning female sexuality.”

Reading Wilson’s translation, Peterson realized how many women had key roles in the story, from Penelope, Odysseus’ wife, to Calypso and another goddess, Circe, to Athena, the deity of wisdom and war who helps Odysseus and his son, Telemachus. That led the writer to think about having young women tell the story, and Odysseus’ circuitous travels made her consider the plight of refugees.

“I was thinking about the map of his journey in the Aegean and all these shipwrecks and trying to get home in a boat,” she said. “The migrant crisis is an ongoing issue in the Mediterranean, and we here in America have our own inability to know what to do about people who are risking their lives to come here, so what if we could put that far away and ancient but also not? So, I decided maybe the four young storytellers were from different parts of Mediterranean, all of them trying to get somewhere.”

Wilson, a professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania, says the story also made her consider the pressures that make people migrants and who gets to choose to go home.

“I thought a lot about The Odyssey as a poem that in many ways anticipates our current moment of globalization and forced movement of peoples from one place to another through war and climate change crisis and a whole range of other reasons. I sort of hesitate to say Odysseus is like a migrant because of course, he's the one who's chosen to go where the story is unfolding, the powerful leader,” Wilson said. “He can choose to move from one place to another and then get home, where there are these stories of all these other people, including those of enslaved people, and they don't get to choose whether they have a home at all. It’s obviously framed in that poem as such a privilege to have a fixed homeland.”

Wilson (who has also translated The Iliad, out this September) says she hopes with her work to take an old story and replicate what the feeling was like for ancient audiences.

Critics thought she achieved that, with many saying her translation changed how the poem is read, and reviews calling it “crisp and musical.” Josephine Balmer in The New Statesman wrote that the translation blows “away the cobwebs of pseudo-archaisms or epic pomposity.” Wilson’s first line of her translation reads “Tell me of a complicated man,” as compared to Robert Fagles’ “Sing to me of the man. Muse, the man of twists and turns.” It wakes you up, and that’s Wilson’s intention.

“I think stories that we've been listening to for a long time can become inaudible. It's not that this story isn't relevant, but whatever relevance it has might have changed because our culture might have changed,” she said. “It might be the story that used to be about one man's struggle, and maybe it's now about many people’s struggles. Maybe it used to be about heroism, and now it’s about refugees and migrants, which are already there implicitly in that story.”

Wilson found Peterson’s adaptation of the Iliad powerful, and she looks forward to seeing Odyssey when it comes to the East Coast. The poems were meant to be performed, she says, which is why she did her translation in iambic pentameter verse.

“Part of the point of that is to invite reading out loud because meter is something which you might be able to hear in your mind while reading, but it doesn't really activate until you hear a performance out loud, so I’m excited about the possibilities of verbal music, which are there on the stage,” Wilson said. “There’s never been a more urgent time to do a play which both looks back to the past but also speaks to this current crisis about refugees and migrants.”