Living in Exile Rehearsal Update!

Greetings from the Living in Exile rehearsal room!

Our first week of rehearsal has had some spectacular moments—chariot races and armed rebellion, funeral pyres and ritual sacrifice, celestial voices and divine intervention. Did I mention this all takes place in a living room? With a cast of two actors and two musicians?

What Bob Walsh and Tamara Hickey do on stage is some cross between veterans telling war stories and children playing war games. They jump across time, space, characters, and furniture taking us not just through the story of The Iliad, but also the 9 years prior to the start of Homer’s epic when the Greeks “lived in exile” on the beaches of Troy.

Playwright John Lipsky had the War in Vietnam on his mind when he wrote the play, but his words still have powerful resonance today. Whether we’re politically pacifist or not, stories of war and violence are at the heart of our Western culture and provide the backbone for our shared oral traditions. Confronting this reality in an intimate domestic space such as a living room (or in a storefront in Davis Square) makes for powerful drama.

In rehearsal we’ve been drawing on imagery from contemporary warfare as well as from Greek antiquity. Keep checking back here for in-depth discussion of the rich and varied source material we’ll be bringing to life on stage.

-Roxanna Myhrum
Assistant Director
Living in Exile