ART Voyages on a Hellish Highway

“I think we really just tried to tell a story,” says Robert Woodruff, director of Highway Ulysses, the new play which premiered last weekend at Cambridge’s American Repertory Theatre (ART). Indeed, the musical tells one of the greatest stories literature has to offer, that of The Odyssey.

As its title suggests, this adaptation follows a modern-day Ulysses as he travels to retrieve his son, who is being held by state social services after the death of his mother, Ulysses’s ex-wife. The play is a powerful and bleak journey through a mind tortured by a violent, war-filled past. Based on the prototypical road trip saga, Highway Ulysses is simultaneously the poignant memoir of an abused wife and mother and a commentary on the myths of war and heroism.

With its fairly straightforward approach to the original subject matter, Woodruff says that the project is really about the artist who created it all, Rinde Eckert, and the versatile talents of the company in residence at the ART. Highway Ulysses was born from a song-cycle written by Eckert about Vietnam veterans and problems with rage and violence that resulted from their war experiences.

At the same time, Woodruff was searching for a composer to write a work especially for the ART. He found Eckert, an award winning composer and lyricist who had already had several successes in New York and San Francisco and was already very well known in contemporary music circles. The two then worked on expanding Eckert’s original piece, adding a libretto as well as a plot. After reading George Lord’s work about The Odyssey’s impact on modern society, Woodruff noticed the parallels between his own story and Homer’s classic.

“Yeah, we just kind of slammed The Odyssey in there,” he says with slight laugh, “but it’s really about the work of a great American artist and giving him a canvas of this size to work on.”

But the adaptation is what sits at the heart of this 90-minute production. The familiar obstacles of the Greek play are all present. Three hookers in a jail cell serve as the play’s Sirens, an unstable, one-eyed librarian is the Cyclops, and a mushroom tea-bearing tattoo mistress combines Circe and Calypso.

Each scene’s connections with The Odyssey is also underscored by a computer projection of the corresponding book title. The projections emanate eerily from the captive Son, played with an appropriately contrasting combination of teenage awkwardness and godly grace and wisdom by Dana Marks.

What is new, however, is the postmodern, introspective take on this classic story of heroism and manhood. The sets are minimal but evocative; in an interesting move, the set is surrounded by three walls of clear plastic which serve as the holding cell for the son and on which he writes large and open-ended statements and questions such as “I am LIFE,” “AM I scared?” and “Until my father comes.”

These writings, most of which appear backwards—the boy is constantly behind the plastic—serve as manifestations of the boy’s thoughts and expectations, both of which literally frame the production and exemplify the show’s main theme: the myth of the American hero and the very real, personal consequences of war not just for those who fight but also for those to whom they return.

As the modern Ulysses, Thomas Derrah does an admirable job with a multi-faceted and tormented character. His voice is raw and powerful, at once conveying the suffering of a man who has tasted death and the drive of a father to teach the lessons of life to his son. This man must in a single scene go from cunning and collected to deranged and paranoid.

The whole production is tinted with a dark thread of violence, mostly manifested in Ulysses himself, but clearly felt by everyone on stage as well as in the audience. Maintaining this theme is no easy task, and Derrah handles it with a firm and deep stoicism.

The true star of the evening, however, is Nora Cole as Ulysses’ dead wife and the mother of the Son, simply called The Bride. Literally shining in her sparkling white wedding gown, Cole’s performance is marked by confident ease and elegance as she swims effortlessly though Eckert’s difficult and cyclical music, shifting from soulful low notes to a clear, ringing soprano.

Her role as wife, mother, storyteller and muse is embodied brilliantly in her graceful and knowing characterization of a complicated woman who has been through much and returned to tell about it.

In the end, though, Woodruff is correct in saying that the show rests on Eckert’s score and book. Eckert’s music takes the audience deep into the soul of violence and the horror of war.

The modern mix of string instruments and synthesizers, played with intelligence and skill by local Cambridge music group The Empty House Cooperative, conveys a stirring and bleak picture of this musical mini-epic. Repeated cycles of slow, minimal phrases contrasted with sharp, often jilting rhythms give a sense of the shock and unrelenting memories that accompany war veterans.

The music also implies an inability to move on that accompanies the psychological make-up of many war veterans, especially those who fought in Vietnam. Although the name of the war is never actually mentioned, it is clear from the Ulysses’ age and contemporary setting that this must be the war to which he is constantly referring.

What Eckert and Woodruff leave us with is an appropriate, salient message in this time of impending war. To paraphrase Ulysses’ intense iteration in the haunting final trio of the show, “For every Hero who comes home, a thousand more die in vain.”