John Manfredi’s role in An Iliad may claim him to be “the Poet”, but this play is a complex exercise in storytelling, and Manfredi is a master at the craft. In weaving the tale of the Trojan war, he also weaves an intensely layered web of emotions: grief, rage, bloodlust, and desperation. These build upon each other throughout the performance, wonderfully developing the narrator as a character, as well as steadily climbing to staggering climactic scenes. Though Manfredi is alone on the stage, one wouldn’t believe it by the end of the play, watching as he fills the set with motion, whipping the air into a maelstrom of words, feelings, and the ghosts of the fallen.
Helpful for those who haven’t read The Iliad, or slept through the lectures for which they were supposed to have read The Iliad, is Manfredi’s friendly approach to the material. He eases the audience into the vast and tumultuous sea of unfamiliar names and characters, neglecting to name some as he argues it would take forever (and as anyone who’s ever read the works knows, it certainly feels like it does), and bringing the enormity of the armies home by naming American hometowns and cities in place of the ancient Greek locations. Later, Manfredi will pick his way through a battlefield that is resurrected in his mind, and demonstrates how they’re not just bodies by naming them, telling their stories, such as one who was going to go Oxford “first in his family to go to university…he’d won a scholarship for writing.”
It is here that the beauty of the piece comes through, for the purpose of this enactment of a tale known so well as to have lost all meaning, the tale of a wooden horse and a city foolish enough to bring it into their gates, is to plead with the audience to remember and to realize the implications that this story has on our modern day. The world is no less filled with strife and warfare as it was during the nine bloody years that the Greeks sieged Troy. We all know about the wooden horse, it’s a trope that’s been repeated endlessly, a particular favorite of mine is Sir Bedevere’s giant wooden rabbit in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Manfredi’s narrator is haunted by the horrors he witnessed in his time during the Trojan war, but also at the atrocities of war that have transpired since. He seems as though he has been cursed to bear witness to the cruel violence humans continue to commit against each other, while attempting to warn us through his tale but like Cassandra, the prophet of doom who was cursed to never be heard, his words fail to stop the fighting.
Thus, Manfredi’s approach is a direct appeal to the audience, he acknowledges and addresses us for we are the ones who have come to hear his tale, providing him with the chance to honor and bring to life once more, if only in his mind, the friends and good men who fought in those days. His tale is emphasized by his record player, which plays everything from Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” to the Forrest Gump soundtrack, though there are times when the Muses (or a faulty hand-cranked generator) cause the power to cut out. Several props and bouts of re-enactment move the story along as Manfredi dashes across the stage swinging a pipe to substitute Achilles’s spear. Manfredi’s story flows from Achilles to Hector to Patroclus, giving an intimate perspective of these incredible characters of myth, sweeping us up in the pain with which he recollects, for the focus on Manfredi allows us to examine the toll that war takes on the human mind and heart, even though Manfredi never discusses who he is or the role he specifically played in the battle. All we as the audience know is that he was there, that he knew the taste of blood, and that now he stands before us, broken and reaching out in desperation.
If you can, I recommend that you go, go to hear his tale and give an old soldier the audience and absolution he so dearly needs. Honestly, we all need it too.
