Some of us were lucky enough to catch MSU’s production of Mary Zimmerman’s Odyssey last fall. We all knew we had a top notch theatrical/classical experience, and apparently the judges at the American College Theatre Festival agreed. This just in from the Phi Beta Kappa blog:
Who’d dare to put on the stage in one evening a tale that, in its presumptive original performances, took the poets night after night of after-dinner recitations, weeks perhaps in the full telling? Well, there’s a stage version of The Odyssey, by Mary Zimmerman, of Northwestern, who has also done Ovid’s Metamorphoses for the stage, as well as The Arabian Nights and The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci. Look out Mahabharata! And look out, Minnesota State, Mankato! The production at the Kennedy Center was Mankato’s winning entry in the American College Theatre Festival. So there was this troupe of fine actors from Minnesota, superbly directed, doing a great job in a show that kept winking at the audience, as if to say: “There something totally bizarre about trying to show you a shipwreck on stage. You know that. We know that. So here’s our shipwreck scene.” And they pulled it off without becoming arch or coy or ironically self-mocking. It was a delicate touch, and never nearer the edge than when they had to show us the cyclops, Polyphemus, devouring Odysseus’s men. You did see it. You did laugh. But it worked.
Kudos, MSU theater students! And HT Sarah Hulke for the heads-up.