Court Theatre has brought back to its stage “An Iliad,” a surpassingly wonderful riff on Homer’s ancient Greek poem, “The Iliad.” Starring Timothy Edward Kane in a reprise of his sensational one-man performance as The Poet, it is directed by Charles Newell.

This is the fourth time Court has staged the work, its most requested remount, according to the producers. But I knew none of this when I attended Saturday night, knowing Homer’s work, of course—the Greeks rally to retrieve Helen from the Trojans—and having a vague recollection of positive buzz around "An Iliad." What I found was the most spellbinding 90 minute display of virtuosic acting that I have ever experienced.

Expecting a stentorian delivery of something from “The Iliad,” instead I found a captivating retelling of the work, contemporized inventively by playwrights Lisa Peterson and Denis O’Hare. Their accomplishment, along with Kane’s incredible performance, may be truer to conveying what audiences experienced in Homer’s time, when poets were star entertainers in the public arena and at banquets.

Kane’s highly energized performance had me asking whether he himself had written this work. Similarly, audiences in Homer’s time may have recognized familiar epic scenes, but knew the poet before them was doing his interpretation of the source. The playwrights relied on an English translation by Robert Fagles, and indeed, at a number of points we seem to be hearing bits of Fagles' language, and even samples of the original Greek, in which the meter and rhyme are identifiable.

But the vast majority of words delivered by Kane, describing the Iliad's key plot points and players, and the emotional underpinnings of what transpired in Homer’s original epic, are all done in contemporary, accessible language. For example, in naming the wide range of areas of Greece that fielded militias for the assault on Troy, The Poet recites the list of towns and regions, which sounded so unfamiliar spoken aloud. He quickly translates this to comparable American locations gathered to form the Union army. It brought it home.

The Poet also describes the way Greek soldiers felt after nine years at the front (my rough notes): “You go away and you come back and your wife is fat, or had three affairs and two kids—your father is dead.”

Lighting (Heith Parham), music (Andre Pluess) and stage design (Todd Rosenthal) conspire to bring us from battle scenes to intimate moments. Kane as The Poet traverses the stage athletically, scaling and descending inclines and stairs audaciously. 

And we are ever reminded of the power of rhetorical prowess of The Poet. “I wish,” he says, “I could show you a picture of Troy.” As that line settles in our ears, realizations unfold for us: of course there were no photos, but could an artist’s rendering or a ruin be shown? But no, resoundingly no: this is an oral history, an aural experience, and “An Iliad" properly lives within that constraint—Homer didn’t do Powerpoint.

Trying to convey what Kane’s performance of “An Iliad” is like, the closest comparable would be a stand-up, not the jokester type running through punchlines, but the type like Dave Chappell who develops a story over the course of the show. Kane as The Poet is like a gripping conversationalist, in a lengthy monologue from which you cannot tear your attention.

But even more than that, much more. For the playwrights have given the script a weight and depth that can carry dramatic scenes. The recounting of Troy’s leader Priam as he pleads with Achilles for the return of his son Hector’s body, is recounted with such compelling urgency it brings tears.

The playwrights also build in a show stopper—The Poet recites a litany of major wars, naming each through history. It is a tour de force among many of Kane’s astonishing accomplishments on stage, and raises “An Iliad" from the particular to the universal, bringing an underlying message against the waste and suffering of war with crystalline clarity.

At the end, as The Poet exited and the lights came up, I told my companion, “I can’t imagine him ever doing this performance again.” And yet he has, in the previous Court Theatre production, and he will. (Jason Huysman, who has understudied the role for the past three iterations and again this time, will be featured in the evening performances on June 15 and June 22.) 

Highly recommended, “An Iliad” runs at Court Theatre at the University of Chicago through June 29, 2025. Do not miss it.