Doomed to tell and re-tell the story of the Trojan War: Michael Peng stars as the Poet in An Iliad, at Shadow Theatre

A traveller arrives onstage Thursday at the Varscona Theatre, suitcase in hand, with a story to tell. He’s been telling it for, oh, about three thousand years.

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“And every time he tells it he hopes he won’t have to tell it again,” says Michael Peng, who plays that game, eternal storyteller/poet in John Hudson’s Shadow Theatre production of An Iliad.

As Lisa Peterson and Denis O’Hare, the American co-creators of An Iliad put it in their introductory notes, the storyteller is “doomed to keep telling the story of the Trojan War, in all its glory and devastation and surprise … until the day when human nature changes, when our addiction to rage comes to an end, when the telling of a war story becomes unnecessary. A day that has yet to come, of course.” After all, says Peng, “the one thing we do well as a species is kill.” And at the heart of it: “why we’re so angry, why we fight, why it’s it’s in our nature to fight.”

A one-person stage adaptation of Homer’s epic anti-war poem, compressed into the last 40 days of the 10-year siege of Troy by a Greek coalition, is, one way, an improbable theatrical enterprise, to be sure. Peng has found himself playing not only Achilles and Hector, the leading warriors of the narrative, but “all the gods, the heroes, the soldiers, their wives, Helen whose kidnapping started the whole brouhaha, and Paris who stole her. At one point Hector’s baby.…” In short it’s an all-ages, all-genders enterprise. “Epic, yes, but also intensely personal.”

“It’s a lot,” laughs Peng, fresh from the Citadel production of A Christmas Carol. “A lot of words. Intense, dramatic work. I’ve done a couple of one-person shows. But this is as emotionally and physically demanding as anything I’ve ever done.” He shares the stage with a Muse, musician Erik Mortimer, who plays his original score live. “Part of it is planned,” says Peng. “Part of it is us connecting onstage.”

Peng, who arrived here in 2006 from his southern Ontario home turf to get a master’s degree in directing at the U of A, began his theatre career as an actor, albeit an actor who started a theatre company, Lost and Found Theatre, in his home town of Kitchener before he moved here. He and Edmonton actor/playwright/director Chris Bullough launched an indie company, Wishbone Theatre, in 2010 with a production of Evelyne de la Chenelière’s Bashir Lazar, starring Peng as an Algerian immigrant substitute teacher in Canada. The Wishbone signature, as its inaugural 2010-2011 season — Falling: A Wake and Waiting For Godot — revealed, was challenging, hefty work, the opposite of lightweight. And Peng and Bullough took turns directing.

More recently, Peng has done more acting than directing. And the dark tonal palette for which he’s mostly known by Edmonton audiences, lightened when he spent last summer at Cape Breton’s Theatre Baddeck in two comedies. Dan Needles’ Ed’s Garage (“quintessential Dan Needles,” he says of the Wingfield playwright and  a “sweet, tender play full of prairie wisdom”)  was one. In the other, “a goofy Cape Breton comedy He’d Be Your Mother’s Father’s Cousin, “I spent most of the play looking for my keys and my glasses.”

“It was a delight to be able to do comedy,” Peng says. But now, he’s finding it especially rewarding “to be sinking my teeth into an important, timely story.” A story, as he puts it, “about fury and power,” both of those aided and abetted materially by social media. “If there’s one thing social media has fanned the flames of, it’s anger…. We’re so angry at one another all the time. Nobody talks any more. Nobody listens. There’s no civility. No compassion.”

Michael Peng in An Iliad, Shadow Theatre. Promotional image.

The travelling storyteller Peng plays in An Iliad has been on the road for 2700 years. But he acknowledges modern realities, and idiomatic language, at every turn. The audience is us; the setting is the brick-lined Varscona. “There are five or six times in the play when the Trojan War could have been avoided” if people hadn’t made bad choices.

And it’s not as if war has gone out of currency. “It’s very much of today,” Peng says, “almost shockingly modern, a story that continues to have meaning.” And authors Peterson and O’Hare encourage producers to update references. Wars and the anger that fuels them never end, so An Iliad doesn’t have a final resting place. Which makes the poet a sort of “embedded war reporter,” witnessing and recording.

Unlike movies, the Brad Pitt flick Troy among them, there’s no romanticizing the violence in An Iliad, no falling in love with it. When Peng began talking to director Hudson about the play he asked what the play meant to him. “The story is a warning” was Hudson’s answer. “It was ‘don’t do this; let’s find another way’…. It’s not escape; it’s immersion.”

PREVIEW

An Iliad

Theatre: Shadow

Created by: Lisa Peterson and Denis O’Hare

Directed by: John Hudson

Starring: Michael Peng with Erik Mortimer

Where: Varscona Theatre, 10329 83 Ave.

Running: through Feb. 8

Tickets: shadowtheatre.org