Actors have always been travelers. So in 1991, when The People’s Light & Theatre Company, of Malvern, Pennsylvania, decided to take their original production of Achilles, A Kabuki Play to mountain villages in Cyprus and to state theatres in newly-westernized Hungary, they were following an ancient tradition. Peter Carnahan has written a unique travel and production journal of this most unusual play, a verse adaptation of Homer’s Iliad, done in the style of the 17th century Japanese Kabuki theatre.
From the Inside Flap
Actors have always been travelers. From late classical Greece, when tragedians toured the great plays from Athens to Delphi and Syracuse, to Shakespeare’s strolling players, to present-day Broadway road shows, actors have learned to live "on the road."
So in 1991, when the People’s Light & Theatre Company, of Malvern, Pennsylvania, decided to take their original production of Achilles, A Kabuki Play, to mountain villages in Cyprus in the eastern Mediterranean, and to state theatres in newly-westernized Hungary, they were following an ancient tradition.
Peter Carnahan has written a unique travel/production journal, telling the story of the trip and of the mounting of this most unusual production, a verse adaptation of Homer’s Iliad, done in the style of the seventeenth century Japanese Kabuki theatre.
With a fascinated, and occasionally skeptical eye, he describes early rehearsals at the home theatre in Malvern, final rehearsals in two mountain villages in Cyprus, opening night in an eighteen-hundred-year-old Roman theatre on a cliff overlooking the Mediterranean, and subsequent performances in Nicosia, and Budapest and Debrecen in Hungary.
Meet Danny Fruchter, the charismatic producing director of the company, Shozo Sato, a seventeenth-generation Kabuki master from Japan, Karen Sunde, a playwright with the talent, and the nerve, to take on rewriting The Iliad, but mostly meet a company of twenty-nine actors, college students and technicians, who could with great skill and energy and high humor surmount almost any hurdle put in front of them.
"It was like spending five weeks with Monty Python’s Flying Circus," the author says. Enjoy the trip.
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