Live Arts Theater launches the 2024/25 VOYAGES Season in the fall with two plays alternating performances in rotating repertory: An Iliad and What the Constitution Means to Me.
An Iliad, written by Lisa Peterson and Denis O’Hare, is directed by David Minton. A Poet wearily enters with a suitcase, having endured an eon of traveling, reciting an age-old epic tale. A brilliant, spellbinding, modern retelling of Homer’s classic The Iliad, in a translation by Robert Fagles, An Iliad is a play about war and rage that resonates all-too-vividly today. We listen rapt to the Poet’s songs, of Achilles’ wrath, of heroism, loyalty and love, and are enveloped by the timeless story filled with dark humor, cruelty and pathos.
In their foreword, the playwrights say: “An Iliad started out as an examination of war and man’s tendency toward war. In the end, it also became an examination of the theater and the way in which we still tell each other stories in order to try and make sense of ourselves, and our behavior.”
“An Iliad is pure theater: shocking, glorious, primal and deeply satisfying,” Time Out New York said in its review.
Originally produced by Seattle Repertory Theatre in 2010 and directed by co-playwright Lisa Peterson, “An Iliad” was produced later that same year at the McCarter Theatre Center in New Jersey featuring Stephen Spinella as The Poet. In 2012, An Iliad was produced at New York Theatre Workshop featuring Denis O’Hare (also co-playwright) and Stephen Spinella alternating nights as The Poet.
Peterson is an award-winning American director and playwright/adapter and a two-time Obie winner for her productions of An Iliad (adapted with actor Denis O’Hare) and Light Shining In Buckinghamshire. O’Hare has appeared numerous times on Broadway in such pieces as Inherit The Wind, Sweet Charity (Drama Desk Award), Assassins (Tony nominee), Take Me Out (Tony, Drama Desk awards), Major Barbara, and Cabaret.
His television work includes two seasons of “True Blood” as King Russell Edgington, on the premiere season of “American Horror Story,” and as Judge Abernathy on “The Good Wife”. His film work includes “C.O.G.,” “The Eagle,” “Changeling,” “Milk,” “Michael Clayton,” “A Mighty Heart,” “Duplicity,” “The Proposal,” “Charlie Wilson’s War,” and “Garden State.”
What the Constitution Means to Me won the 2019 and New York Drama Critics’ Circle Awards for Best New American Play. The play was nominated for two Tony Awards and named Best of the Year by The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, Time Magazine, The Hollywood Reporter, and The New Yorker. A filmed version premiered on Amazon Prime Video, and was nominated for a Critics Choice Award, a PGA Award and DGA Award. Schreck’s other plays include Grand Concourse, Creature and There Are No More Big Secrets.
“Endearingly funny and deeply affecting … It would be hard to identify a work for the theater with its finger more on the pulse of America right now,” The Washington Post said in its review.
At once hilarious, Schrek’s play is touching, inspiring and thought-provoking. The playwright takes us back to her teenage years when she traveled the country giving speeches about the Constitution at American Legion halls to help pay for college. Using her very personal journey, along with the stories of her mother and grandmother, she dissects the document penned by our “founding fathers” more than 200 years ago. Act Two forefronts a live debate judged by an audience member: Should we keep or abolish the United States Constitution?
Commissioned by True Love Productions, What the Constitution Means to Me was produced by Clubbed Thumb and True Love at the Wild Project in New York City in 2017. The play premiered on the West Coast at Berkeley Repertory Theatre in 2018, and received its Off-Broadway premiere later that same year at New York Theatre Workshop, transferring to Broadway in 2019. The Broadway production subsequently opened at Washington, D.C.’s, Kennedy Center and began a national tour in 2021 at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis.
Both plays will have 11 performances each in the Founders Theater, Sept. 27 through Oct. 27, at Live Arts Theater, 123 E. Water Street, in Charlottesville.
Tickets are $28 per adult and $25 per student and senior citizens. Tickets are available through the Box Office at [email protected], by phone at 434-977-4177 x123, or online.
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Rebecca Barnabi
