New play attempts to show how ancient wisdom is applicable in the modern world
What: Night Journey
Where: Arts and Letters Club, 14 Elm St.
When: Now, until Sat., July 11
Highlight: Realistic character portraits
Rating: NN (out of 5)
Why you should go: To try to see how The Odyssey is reflected in each character’s scenario
With Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation of The Odyssey selling out cinemas far in advance of its premiere, there’s evidently a renewed interest in Ancient Greek mythology in the air. Night Journey premieres at exactly the right time to demonstrate how the wisdom offered by Homer’s epic poem is still relevant today. Sadly, it is too subtle in its attempt to draw parallels between the ancient world and contemporary existence to be overly inspiring.
Written by Gregory Light and Martin Jones, Night Journey follows Professor Zuke (Thomas Gough) and students enrolled in a night class that focuses on (you guessed it) The Odyssey, who reveal their own experience of hardship to varying degrees as the course proceeds.
The play begins with Zuke being forced to pursue other means than lecturing to impress the importance of ancient literature when he discovers that the course is held in a storage room in the basement of a college building. That space is established by a realistic design by Andre Marques, which includes a small kitchen, boxes stacked at the back wall and white plastic chairs in the place of desks.
Ozzie (Fred Kuhr) is a brash and loud, often entertaining, truck dispatcher who learns his wife moved in with another man a mere week after he began a five-year stint in prison because he took the blame for said wife’s fraud and tax evasion. This scenario is the opposite of Penelope’s unshakeable loyalty and love for her husband, Odysseus. Maybe that inversion is the point they were going for, but if so, then it’s unfortunately not developed in a way that makes the parallel legible.
Paul (played by Erik Bracciodieta) embodies a snarky, impertinent trust-fund college student well. Like Telemachus, Paul is being forced to learn what is required of him to carry on his prestigious family’s legacy. The pressure and lack of freedom in Paul’s life, once again, vaguely echo the story of his Homeric counterpart.
Caroline Barr Ritchie — who plays a nurse, Joan, with a sense of realism that is almost filmic, meaning it occasionally does not project beyond the proscenium — shares her personal story of grief, having lost her son to war. And Brynn Bonne believably plays the youngest student of the bunch, Ashley, navigating her relationship with an abusive boyfriend. These scenarios might also have a parallel to The Odyssey, but what they might be is not clear to someone (admittedly like me) who only has a superficial knowledge of Homer’s epic poem.
The premise could be a compelling source of drama, but the stakes of these particular characters to get something meaningful from reading The Odyssey and from befriending each other are too low and underplayed. That being said, the Fringe is an incubator for new work. And so, with further development, Night Journey has the potential to get audiences singing the praises of ancient wisdom (as Zuke wants them to) rather than putting them to sleep (as he’s more likely to do).
