Food For Thought: Iliad, From Stage to Page

Your Speakers: Trinity Professor Thomas Jenkins, Ph.D.; Anthony Tresca '21

Lisa Petersen and Denis O’Hare's stage version of Homer's Iliad seems a fool’s errand: the distillation of a sprawling 24-book epic into a one-person show. It shouldn't work as theater, yet it does, as the authors find ingenious solutions for turning an expansive classical epic into an intense meditation on contemporary American society. With the aid of TU actor and political science major Anthony Tresca ’21, Professor Jenkins explores how Homer's myth makes a spectacular leap from stage to page, and how the idea of “translation” encompasses more than just language—it includes gesture, sight, and even thought.