‘An Iliad’ on Stage Where Ghosts Keep Fighting

The Newhart Family Theater stage was dusty and bare, chalk scattered across the floor. A stool leaned beside sturdy boxes, and one man — wearing layers of time on his skin — began telling a story older than memory itself.

“Why not just give Helen back?” Kane said.

The charged question cracked through the dark theater Sept. 4, delivered with a thin nasality by Timothy Kane, Assistant Professor of Theater at Loyola. Kane performed “An Iliad,” the one-man adaptation of Homer’s epic by playwrights Lisa Peterson and Denis O’Hare.

As The Poet, Kane bore the weight of a war with only his body and voice. For 90 minutes, his performance swung between registers as his whispers pulled audiences closer, howls made them recoil, jokes made them cackle and crushing truths cracked like gunfire through the theater. 

At times he was a soldier, others a grieving parent, in some instances a beast and all along a weary bard nearly too exhausted to go on.

The invisible sword he dragged across the stage etched the play’s message into the chalk-dust air — rage fills humans, and rage will destroy them. 

“Two men’s pride was wounded because a wife was stolen, and so they went to war for nine years,” Kane said in an interview with The Phoenix. “That common theme of man’s inhumanity to man.”

Kane toyed with the pendulum of silence as it hung in the air, like dust after an explosion. Laughter broke out at his sly jokes, only to falter when rage tore across the stage. But, when Hector asked on stage whether returning Helen might end the war, Kane told The Phoenix he was surprised by the audience’s stillness. 

“The audience was very respectful last night,” Kane said. “The play has a certain baked-in irreverence towards this kind of monolith of literature, as some people have an appetite for it. And so in the fact that I’m a professor and there are a lot of students in the room, there was a notable amount of ‘Oh, let’s be quiet and watch.’”

Kane said audience interaction is crucial for a one-man show. 

“The whole point of telling the story is for the storyteller to connect with the audience as opposed to the illusion of the fourth wall,” Kane said. “It’s a living relationship and the audience is part of it. The more I’ve done the play, the more I understand the muscles of it. I hear the audience — or the absence of reaction — just as much as they hear me.” 

Kane said the working relationship he balanced between himself and the audience demanded both emotional accuracy and physical commitment as each surge of rage and grief left its imprints. 

On stage, the actor’s physical toll was clear. His gestures at scenes of war sharpened as if he was fighting, his neck veins bulging as he was retelling the story of Patroclus turning into a savage.

“There’s so much rage that the Poet goes through,” Kane said. “I feel it in my neck, my back, my knees. But then on the drive home, I sit quietly in the car and just let it all go. It’s not my story, thank God. It’s just a character.”

Even so, such storied violence bleeds into today. 

The Poet started reciting a litany of wars across centuries as he was recounting the fight ensued between Hector and Patroclus, he ended with a hoarse shout — “Gaza.” 

“You take this ancient story, and it is not very difficult, even if I hadn’t named what’s happening in Gaza, to see its relevance in the violence that’s overtaking the world right now,” Kane said. “Hopefully we’ll eventually learn something, and avoid what seems inevitable, which is that we’ll keep trying to kill each other.” 

“An Iliad” looked both forward and outward toward humanity’s uncertain future and toward Kane’s students. 

The professor will direct an acting showcase, wherein 17 students will step into the role of The Poet. The Poet’s role will become a study in interpretation as the students prepare to carry the story themselves. 

“They’re not going to be in lockstep, robot versions of the same Poet, let alone an iteration of my version of it,” Kane said. “The class is predominantly femme or non-binary. I embody the character in a particular way as a cis[gender] man, and there’s a certain masculinity to my performance that is inherent, but we’ll have a different version of that. It’ll have a different sensibility. It’ll be more fluid as opposed to one perspective.” 

The plurality reflects what theater does justice to — binding people into a single, fleeting act of storytelling, according to Kane. 

“When we’re in a room with other people, the simple fact that you’re sharing the experience makes it different,” Kane said. “The emotional experience is not just joy. It’s profoundly unique to see someone create something and have it immediately impact you.”