In Conversation: Playwrights Lisa Peterson and Denis O’Hare
Playwrights Lisa Peterson and Denis O’Hare built successful careers respectively as a director and an actor before they came together to work on their very first play, An lliad. Originally intended as a vehicle for O’Hare to perform and for Peterson to direct, An lliad has taken off as a popular script in its own right, performed by theatres across the country. Prior to Court Theatre’s 2013 staging, Production Dramaturg Drew Dir spoke with Lisa Peterson and Denis O’Hare about how An lliad came to be; below is an excerpt of their original conversation.
How did the idea for An Iliad originate? Was it born purely out of an interest in adapting Homer’s lliad for the stage?
Lisa: It actually came out of a response to America’s engagement with a real war in Iraq, to our “Shock and Awe” attack on Baghdad in 2003. I started reading through war plays, because… I was very aware of us being a country at war in a way that I had never been in my lifetime. In the spring of 2003, I started thinking about how theatre should respond… mostly that we ought to be talking about what it’s like to be a country at war. Thinking about The lliad was a part of a bigger question: “What are the great war plays?” [Dramaturg] Morgan Jenness had told me years before that she teaches The lliad as one of the first plays, which surprised me because I had studied it in college as an epic poem, not a play. It was that idea that made me think: maybe it is a play, why is it a play… It probably was a solo performance before it was ever written down. When I started looking into that and thinking about it, I thought it would be fun to work directly with an actor on this, instead of with a writer.
Denis: My story begins with getting a phone call from Lisa, where she said, “Hey, have you ever read The lliad?” and I was like, “I think so. Maybe?” At that point, I don’t think either of us ever thought we would end up with a script. What we thought we would end up doing was a performance of some kind.
Lisa: I thought that it would be a good idea to find an actor who had opinions and could be articulate about them, because what I really thought we would be doing was recreating the improvisation of The lliad—that we would read The lliad, get really familiar with the story of the Trojan War, and that Denis would literally walk into a bar or a pub and say, “Hey, anyone want to hear the story of Hector?” and on any given night it would be different. Then, as we started working on it, we realized that we should codify it, write it, etc.
Describe the process of creating the script for An lliad.
Denis: It was very accidental. I’m kind of a documentarian, and I thought it would be fun to have a video camera present to document our conversations. So we had the camera, and we would go back to the camera occasionally for a reference; we would say, “Oh, what was that conversation we had last time? Let’s rewind and look at that.” We realized that what we talked about ended up becoming us acting it out —l’m an actor, so I understand things through the process of acting, which means that in order to talk about it, I’ll get up and start acting it out. We were talking about a contemporary understanding of The lliad anyway, so I was improvising on my own reactions to things. We wanted that contemporary reaction to the text, and that contemporary reaction ended up being part of the text.
How familiar were you with Homer’s lliad before you sat down to work on it?
Denis: I remembered very little, and I think I had a better grasp on The Odyssey. In fact, I may have not even read The lliad; what I knew about The lliad was the Trojan Horse (which, of course, is not in The lliad), I knew it had something to do with Helen and Paris, I knew it had something to do with Achilles (and Achilles’s boyfriend Patroclus), and I knew about Menelaus, and Agamemnon from The Oresteia, and what happens when they come back from Troy. I had a vague understanding of what The lliad was, and certainly did not appreciate that The lliad was not the entire ten-year war, that The lliad was only—as we came to find out—about forty days within that war.
Lisa: I had read it in college—not the Robert Fagles translation, but the Fitzgerald. I went to Yale, and in my freshman year, I did a thing called Directed Studies, which was like Crash Course Western Civilization, and The lliad and The Odyssey were probably the first books [in that course]. My memory of it was that it was powerful and difficult; I wouldn’t say that I immediately fell in love with it, I remember it just being hard. I think I probably liked The Odyssey better—I think a lot of people do, because The Odyssey has romance and adventure. When we went back to look at The lliad, in the Fagles translation, suddenly my eyes opened and I realized how glorious and surprising it was.
You’ve obviously condensed a lot of material into a relatively short performance. Was there material you particularly regretted leaving on the cutting room floor?
Denis: We struggled with the scope of the story and which stories to tell, because The lliad doesn’t tell one story, it tells many stories, and depending on how you edit it, you can produce a different emphasis. We kept boiling it down to the basics. We realized that the story is Achilles’s story. It’s the rage of Achille —it begins with “Sing goddess the rage of Achilles…” That’s a framing device, but it’s also the major theme.
What draws you to epic, foundational texts like The lliad?
Denis: They’re challenging and they’re terrifying, and that’s a good reason to do them. I would also love to do Dante’s Inferno, I would love to do Paradise Lost… But the other reason is that they’re just great works. Oddly enough, I think for Lisa and I, it’s not even a matter of taking on great works. What we’re taking on are great subjects, and those don’t have an expiration date, and those don’t have a time and a place, they’re universal and they’re timeless. So war, killing, murder, and death are the subjects we took on for An lliad…those are really exciting things to dwell on theatrically.
Lisa: It’s a passion that Denis and I just happen to share. We both are drawn to the history of culture just as much as literature… [we’re both] trying to understand how the human species developed this shared culture. I think it’s about that, as much as it’s about literature…these texts are key to how we organize ourselves as human beings.
This article was edited and reproduced from the 2013 program of An Iliad.