He laughs, looking up towards the other side of the street. “Good!” He chuckles. “Just…good. I’m alright. And how are you?” He’s friendly enough, I can see. Just caught in a sad moment of mumbling.

“Oh, I’m great,” I say, straightening up. The women walking past me into the theater continue catching my eye, now shooting me darts of warning, cautioning me against talking to someone so dangerous as him. But I keep up the conversation. “I’m feeling good, ‘cause I’ve got some ice cream.”

“Ice cream!” He laughs, lighting a new cigarette with the butt of his first one. “It’s too cold for ice cream!”

“But it’s banana ice cream,” I clarify. “It’s never too cold for that. What kind of ice cream do you like?”

He snuffs out his stub. “I’d like ice cream that’s ash flavored,” he snickers. “I bet that’d be a tough flavor to make.”

Brian shows up beside me, fog coming from his warm breath, and he alerts me that we’ve still got a few minutes before the cheap seats go on sale. I fill him in on my conversation with the guy on the ground, and the three of us laugh at the idea of a burnt-tobacco ice cream. We brought him a smile. It’s good.

Brian suggests a walk around the block before we go in, so I say goodbye to my cigarette friend and walk away. We pass another homeless woman asking for money around the corner and tell her we don’t have any cash, and I don’t even know if that was true or not.

As we get back to the theater entrance, our friend is now standing on the far edge of the sidewalk, looking directly into the doors to the foyer. I think he just likes people-watching, even if he complains while doing it. We walk in and go get a coffee at the Theater Cafe, and we sit down, keeping one eye on the Rush ticket counter.

And then he walks in. The homeless guy walks into the foyer, amidst all the well-dressed theater-goers, and he shuffles right through them. Brian’s still eyeing at the ticket counter, but I’m looking at our friend, unable to predict what might happen. The woman at the entrance desk speaks to him, as if to acknowledge that he’s done this before, but he gets swept up by the incoming crowd and heads downstairs. “Restroom,” I assume to myself. The other guests don’t seem to notice him, and he staggers slowly down the stairs in a foot-dragging daze.

A moment later, Brian gets up and buys our Rush tickets without a problem, and we follow the crowd downstairs to the playhouse. We gather with 50 other men and women who are talking in small groups, going to and from the restrooms and heading into the playhouse. And there’s our man on a bench at the bottom of the stairs, muttering again, surely about the fact that no one, still, has noticed him. He didn’t need to use the restroom. He was just following the crowd.

Brian and I walk into the small theater and find some seats, just a few rows up from the floor that’s peppered with a few props, across from identical seats on the other side. Plenty of people are already there, and more continue to file in. And I can’t get this guy out of my mind. Has anyone else spoken to him? Will he get kicked out when all other guests are out of the downstairs foyer? Was he drunk? Crazy? Sick? Would he stay out there in the foyer, now that all the people to be watched were gone? The lights go dark, and I shake myself out of it. Forget him. I had Greek mythology to focus on, and Lord knows, that’s going to take all the brain power I’ve got.

I hear a shout from outside. A loud male voice. Oh, and I groan. He’s yelling, I’m sure. He’s been asked to leave and now he’s yelling. The voice gets louder, and I get more uncomfortable. I want to go stick up for this guy, this not-so-bad guy on the sidewalk I met moments ago. I’m feeling sick. I’m feeling sad.

Louder still, the voice, I realize, doesn’t sound angry. I listen a tick longer, and the voice, I realize, doesn’t sound English. It’s…it’s Greek. A spotlight focuses on the entrance to the room, and that ragged, grumpy, mumbling old homeless man with the dingy red scarf stumbles right into it. He’s speaking Greek. Really well. He takes off his hat and moves forward into the room. I turn to Brian. “That’s him,” I mouth. Brian squints, smiles and nods. “That’s him,” he confirms.

I looked back at the man, blinking through the spotlight to triple-confirm that the mumbler I’d just met was actually speaking Greek and in the center of the room at this one-act play. I look around towards the faces of the other guests and not one looked shocked. Not one of the people seemed to recognize the face of the man they’d refused to notice just moments before.

My homeless friend went on to perform for nearly two hours, without an intermission. He was a poet, commissioned by the gods to retell the tale of the Iliad through eternity. The poet painfully related the hurt and long-suffering of this war to other battles of our own history.

He reminded us that the boys who died in the war of this story are the same boys of Michigan, Oregon, Georgia that we know and have lost in our own wars. He suggests that the war he tells of is the same war we’ve been fighting through time, just on different soil and in different garb. He cried. We cried. War is all around us, and it’s killing us.

As we stood in that ovation, I cried because of the staunch reminder of war’s horrible truth he’d given me that night, but I also cried because of the double-meaning of his message. For me, The Iliad was recalled in great detail and emotion, not just by a poet, but by a homeless person. He unwrapped one of the greatest lores of history, and we nearly all missed hearing it because we rushed right past him.

The friends I meet who live on the streets are those same brothers who the Poet in this play reminded us we lose to war. They are men and women who have endured the sort of trauma that folktales are written about. They’ve been abused, have known the face of loneliness by name, have been comforted by life-threatening addictions and have all but given up completely on the notion that life on earth has anything good to reveal to them.

But homeless people can also laugh at a silly joke, enjoy the simplicity of a meal and give of themselves to others in need. If you take a moment to talk to a friend on the street, you might hear a beautiful story from someone you’d never noticed before. You might find comfort in the fact that we are all brothers. You might just be brought to tears.

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Graves portrayed the storyteller, a scruffy wanderer who needs a shave and a good meal, but is haunted by the need to sing and to tell his tales. Meanwhile, the gods look on mercilessly, with only a rare sign of inspiration or help. I’m not going to recount the stories because I will still probably get the names and places mixed up (Achilles! Mount Olympus! Hector! Troy! Prium!) but the impressions will stay with me and deepen the magic.

These are stories of rage and pain and war. The grief is so real, such as when Achilles and Prium, enemies, weep together, as fathers for sons and sons for fathers. And you feel the impact in moments like this: the storyteller recites the names of wars, one after another - five, ten. His voice is weighted with the meaninglessness behind each war - thirteen, fourteen - the death and destruction, the hopelessness. He continues his list - thirty, thirty-eight, forty. He staggers to his chair, reciting. Fifty now, seventy-three, ninety. There is utter weariness in his face, naming wars, more wars, from every epoch all over the globe. You feel the list will never end. And then it strikes you with horror: indeed, it won’t.

I was especially captivated by the idea of the storyteller, and enjoyed Trisha Mead’s essay “In Search of The Poet,” where she explores the idea of the author, Homer, whom no one has been able to pin down in actual history. I would have loved if the script itself held more backstory about the storyteller, who drifts in from nowhere and is clearly plagued by what he has seen. Always, the unanswered questions hold for me the most delight - I want the writer to pursue them.

Because a writer is not allowed to cheat. A reader, always. And some stories need to be told over and over again, no matter how they break our hearts.

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An Iliad premiered last spring at Seattle Rep, where it was roundly criticized for talking down too much to the audience. I reservedly agree; the first 40 minutes of the 110-minute performance contain a lot of exposition and attempts to contemporize the material, and feel unpleasantly like a lecture from a hip high-school teacher. But this production, directed by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s Penny Metropulos and performed by Joseph Graves, a man whose day job is directing Shakespeare in China, tones down the didactic elements of the show in favor of fury. When Graves finally gets to do battle, he is extraordinary, wrenching forth the blood and sun and sand, the whole, miserable mess of Hector’s needless death and the rage of Achilles in a performance that can honestly be described as spellbinding.

What Graves conveys, and O’Hare and Peterson failed to realize, is that The Iliad does not need to be made contemporary; the war weariness, the pointless butchery and the petty pride of the generals that inhabit its pages are already very much of our times, and An Iliad is most compelling when it quotes the text directly. When Graves, channeling Achilles, shouts, “would to god my rage, my fury would drive me now to hack your flesh away and eat you raw,” we feel that rage immediately. No further translation is necessary.

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So my full attention was not with An Iliad—save for one riveting moment, when the lights dim on Graves’ recitation of the events of the Trojan War, and he quietly connects the story he’s telling to the global history of war. He had me then, my protesting bladder temporarily silenced, as he delivered the only litany in An Iliad’s creative retelling of a story that’s notorious for its endless lists of men and ships.

The determination of playwrights Denis O’Hare and Lisa Peterson to place the Trojan War in the context of other conflicts could easily have felt heavy-handed, were it not for the off-balance pathos Graves brings to the show. The narrator is an old man, and he drinks too much; but the reason he drinks is that his heart is broken. As he tells half-remembered tales of Hector and Achilles, he lingers poignantly on his favorite characters, on the nobility and the waste of it all.

Take some advice before you see the show: Read the Wikipedia entry on The Iliad, because if your Homer is rusty some of the names and allegiances may jumble. And one more thing: There’s no intermission. Don’t forget to pee.

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There’s some definite audacity in the writing of this play, and you need some good acting and directing to pull it off. Both go into the creation on stage of the storyteller who takes you through this Iliad, and since I don’t for a minute understand the art that goes into directing, I’ll just say that what Penny Metropulos did worked…and move on to the actor, Joseph Graves, who was so excellent in playing the drunken storyteller morphing in and out of all the sub-parts in the stories he tells. One-man shows can be a forum for actors to get up there and parade their ability to play different parts right down your throat, but Graves doesn’t do that. He plays the different parts but in a way that keeps the storyteller on stage. There’s some lovely, ancient storyteller magic that gets up inside him—you witness the transformation—and then moves him from narrator to Hector to narrator to Achilles to narrator to Hecuba fluidly and gracefully. In a way that keeps narrator folded into story and present folded into past—which could feel gimmicky if not done well.

Present-folded-into-past was set up really well by the stage set. Particularly the wall that surrounds the whole space of the theater—graffiti all over the stone in different languages. We all remember references in history books to old graffiti, whether in Pompeii or Egypt or carved by American frontiersmen. The mind bounces around these things, touches on the cave paintings at Lascaux, sees the thread through time and through place, which is just what the play itself does.

The show, the production, the set - it all has a way of letting you feel smart even if you were the kid who was bored by The Iliad in high school and didn’t retain any of it except for the thing about the face that launched a thousand ships.

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If you’re expecting to hear the story of the Trojan horse, you won’t find it here any more than you do in Homer’s “The Iliad.” In “An Iliad” as well as in “The Iliad,” the Greek warrior hero Achilles and the Trojan warrior hero Hector take center stage. Certainly, both Homer’s Achilles and his Hector, especially the former, seem to be driven by inordinate shares of testosterone, and the thousands of soldiers who man both the Greek and the Trojan armies of Homer’s tale are equally prone to violent deeds of anger and retribution, but, then again, what does one expect in war.

Homer shows us both the human and the animal aspects of his ancient warriors. The driving desire for glory, for honor, and the passionate loyalty to comrades are certainly not bad traits but in war have led humans to commit horrific atrocities against each other. The tragedy as O’Hare and Peterson eloquently underscore is that brutal and brutalizing war is so deeply embedded in the human experience. The capacity for animal rage lies just beneath the surface of all so-called civilized behavior, and this fact is something we need to know.

To help us to know this, to see this, O’Hare and Peterson create their version of a modern-day Homer to guide us through the ancient tale. According to the Ancients, the original Homer was an old, blind poet who would recite his epic tales at the courts of ancient Greek kings.

O’Hare and Peterson adapt this tradition by offering us a somewhat seedy, vodka- (or is it gin?) toting story-teller. He’s the kind of a guy who, for the price of a beer will entertain tavern customers with outlandish tall tales. As our poet/raconteur, Joseph Graves, dressed in loose fitting tan jeans and a blousy white shirt, wonderfully fits the bill. Looking a bit like a down-and-out, scruffy, stringy-haired version of Sid Caesar, Graves is a master story teller.

He abounds in energy, but carefully controlled energy. Sometimes he whirls about the stage; sometimes he flies up the aisle of one or the other seating area to take his story more directly to his audience. When presenting a battle scene he whisks about the stage overturning the few broken-down chairs and benches which make up the set while excitedly spewing descriptions of bloodcurdling violence—all in an effective effort to convey the adrenaline rush that might carry young soldiers into a surreal state of heightened enthusiasm.

And yet Graves can also carry us into a more thoughtful, contemplative space such as during the somber, ritualistically recited litany of wars that have been fought since the Greeks.

Graves is wonderfully effective when impersonating the various characters of the tale—sketching them with clean, clear strokes. He portrays the old Trojan King Priam with a slightly stooped stance and a wavering, deep, throaty voice. His Agamemnon, the leader of the Greeks, stands tall and speaks in an authoritarian, if somewhat snide, manner, but his Achilles seems to grow in size and speaks with a proud arrogance which even colors his moments of sorrow. Graves’ Hector is the most human of his warriors and perhaps the most tragic.

Perhaps the most humorous of Graves’ characterizations is Trojan Paris, who began the war by abducting the Greek Helen, yet here he is presented as a self-obsessed, airhead stoner.

Even the few woman of the tale are etched with artful clarity. Helen, the source of all the trouble, remains the seductive temptress in her conversation with the righteous Hector, while Hector’s wife Andromache has a soft, slightly petulant quality.

Graves is especially affecting in the moments when, speaking as the Poet, he pleadingly, urgently, asks us if we can “see”—if we can understand. There is after all, something important about us all to “see” and understand here, and yet if we see and understand, what then?

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