How do you introduce the backstory of Homer’s epic ancient tale “The Odyssey”? How Odysseus, the legendary Greek king and the story’s namesake, tried to evade service in the Trojan War by feigning insanity. How 10 years into the fighting, the cunning king brought an end to the siege of Troy by scheming up the Trojan Horse, in which the Greek soldiers hid themselves then tricked the Trojans into bringing it into their previously impregnable city.
In American Repertory Theater’s new interpretation of “The Odyssey,” rewritten by Kate Hamill and directed by Shana Cooper, they summarize what happened before Odysseus begins his decade-long journey home from the war by shifting the action from the cast of 10 actors to shadow puppetry. The choice allows them to recap what came before quickly—and almost as if a dream.
“It starts as this simple, playful childlike game that [Odysseus’s wife and son] Penelope and Telemachus have played through his childhood,” says Kate Brehm, the show’s puppetry director and designer. Over and over, mother has told her son the story of his father leaving for the war. “It became like this fairy tale that they tell each other.”
Shadow puppetry usually involves puppeteers behind a curtain dancing flat cut-outs between a light and the curtain. The silhouettes come to life as their shadows are projected onto the screen. Abigail Baird is the show’s lead puppeteer. In this scene, Andrus Nichols, who plays Penelope, and Carlo Alban, who plays Telemachus, go behind a screen to help perform the puppets—the actors’ own silhouettes joining the story.
A boat sails across a sea. Waves transform into the furrows of a farm field. Odysseus’s sanity is tested by his baby Telemachus being taken from Penelope’s arms and laid before the plow Odysseus is driving. Odysseus can’t kill his son, so he abandons his charade and goes to war. A decade of fighting. Then the Greeks construct the Trojan Horse, with its deadly secret within.
“It took us a lot of experimentation to figure out what material is the best material,” says Brehm, a Harvard teacher who has worked on puppetry for the Broadway productions of “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” and “Beauty and the Beast,” as well as with “puppetry prodigy” (New York Times) Basil Twist. Most of the “Odyssey” puppets are laser cut out of 1/8-inch plywood. They often used styrene for arms and heads and other moving parts, animated by plastic and wooden rods. The waves are a sheet of plastic so they can be bent to become the farm field. Sarah Nolen designed “the more complicated rods and mechanisms,” Brehm says. They chose materials to be durable enough to withstand weeks of shows. The designs formed a digital kit so new pieces can be quickly laser cut if the originals break.
“The way shadow puppets come into the show is their relationship to illusion and storytelling,” Brehm says. “Shadows are illusions and transformative. They change and morph as you see them. That really ties into the stories we tell and the myths we make. And, for me, this show’s really about making a myth.”
This version of “The Odyssey,” ART Artistic Director Diane Paulus explained right before the opening night performance, aims to be more feminist by foregrounding the experiences of the female characters and to reframe Odysseus’s journey as a traumatized war veteran’s physical and emotional struggle to return home.
Shadow puppetry was pitched as an option during a movement workshop in fall 2023. “We thought really big and wide about how shadows could invade the entire production,” Brehm says. The creeping shadows could reflect how Odysseus was haunted by what he did in the war. The idea, Brehm says, became more embodied by the acting, light and sound, but traces of this idea remain in the puppetry.
Such as when the performance uses shadows and puppetry later in the show to bring the giant cyclops to life or recount a massacre Odysseus took part in during the war.
“Puppetry as a medium has this inherent distance in it,” Brehm says. “There’s this distance between reality and illusion for the audience … which makes it a little bit easier to try to reckon with how awful it is. Because it’s not happening in front of them. But it is.”
“The Odyssey” at American Repertory Theater’s Loeb Drama Center, Cambridge, Feb. 11 to March 16, 2025.
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