Contemporarily Like Achilles
There have been many, many plays about Homer’s Iliad and about the Trojan War in general. In the last few years alone, we’ve had The Salt Plays Part One: In the Wound at Shotgun Players and War Music at American Conservatory Theater. And that’s not even getting into the plays dealing with the aftermath of the war: recently we’ve had Odyssey plays from Shotgun, Central Works, and We Players, The Trojan Women at Aurora, and an upcoming Elektra at ACT. That’s partly a testimony to the timeless resonance of the stories the Greeks told in the first place, and it’s certainly only the tip of the iceberg as classical adaptations go (we’ve also seen plenty of Medeas, Oedipi and Phaedras), but it also attests to the human need in times of war to try to explore what drives people throughout history to strive to slaughter each other en masse.
