Tag Archives: Simpsons

Staging Homer for Generation Simpson

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Odyssey by Derek WalcottTHE ODYSSEY,
A STAGE VERSION- Greek myth would be no more complicated than JK Rowling, JRR Tolkien, or GRG Lucas, but I suspect that to impress Homer unto modern audiences might have the disagreeable consequence of educating them.

This weekend Colorado College students staged Derek Walcott’s 1992 The Odyssey in the South Theater of the Cornerstone Arts Building. And performed it brilliantly. Every role, every effect, executed with vitality and aplomb.

Except for the Jamaican nursemaid and Aussie shepherd, the CC actors dropped Walcott’s New World islander accents, but their production honored his post imperialism critique.

My favorite sequence depicted Cyclops as an all-seeing 1984 distillation of mortal man’s inclination toward totalitarianism. The Circe episode is nagging me for further reflection, if I’m to imagine that Walcott would not succumb to the traditional Siren/Mermaid/Nymph misogyny.

If you can’t shake the admonition that rational man’s chief torment is woman, you need look for no literary antecedent before Homer.

Obviously, not all that is Greek is instructional, but wouldn’t it serve our education nicely if, instead of the insipid nuances of fictional worlds imagined by scribes steeped in the decay of Western Civilization, our children could commit to their memories the literary plots –no less compelling– which form the building blocks to a greater appreciation of all art?

We told the kids that the Odyssey was Western Civilization’s first sequel. Of course, the Iliad was a lot to have to recap. Not surprisingly, their experience was “the most random ever.” But while I lamented my missed advance opportunity to have brought them up to speed on the gods and heroes of antiquity, our eleven year old noted, of the lines spoken by the mysterious personages: “Everything they said was always about something else!”

Poetry!

OF FURTHER INTEREST:
Creolizing Homer for the stage: Walcott’s The Odyssey, by Robert D. Hamner, Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 2001

Playing With Europe: Derek Walcott’s Retelling of Homer’s Odyssey, by Irene Martyniuk, Callaloo 28.1, 2005

Life as a ten year old boy at the podium

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COLORADO SPRINGS- The voice of Bart Simpson spoke at Colorado College last night. What began as a the memoir My Life as a Ten Year Old Boy, and debuted at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival four years ago as a “one woman play” reached CC’s Armstrong Hall looking like 52 card pickup with that too many index cards. There might once have been a day when Simpsons fans raved like Trekkies, but the show’s longevity has lapped this generation. It didn’t help that Nancy Cartwright dissed South Park and Family Guy as uninteresting.

I don’t think The Simpsons has lost any of its vitality, but its audience has certainly evolved an appetite for alternately focused irreverence. I’d think too, a tip celebrities shouldn’t ignore from their publicists is to refrain from telling their fans that the stars themselves don’t watch television. We know you are too busy, all of us ought to have better things to do. Would Fox pay you $80,000/hour if more viewers wised up to whose resources and energy are really being consumed by the half-hour financial exchange?

My best question for “Bart” Cartwright might have been how Fox, network of illest repute, manages Matt Groening’s subversive message.

Cartwright’s only questions came from middle school children because the college students had begun pulling out, pretty embarrassed for voice-of-Bart’s unselfconscious star tripping. The lecturer was prepared to detail the minutia of Simpsons lore, and to say she enjoyed the plots which carried a social message, but was unprepared to explain any, and even lacked for a favorite episode.

No one was unsurprised or unimpressed with the breadth of Cartwright’s animation voice experience. She’d worked from My Little Pony to Pound Puppies to Kim Possible, and had been the uncredited gurgle of Maggie Simpson, among others. But those in the audience who left early, whom I came so close to envying, missed the absolute highlight of the evening, when practically as an afterthought, Cartwright revealed that her most challenging character was Chuckie Finster of the Rugrats. A hushed swoon enveloped the crowd at the mere mention. There was Cartwright’s real impact in the waning Simpsons era. Today’s Simpsons viewers only recognize Ralph Wiggum’s voice as they bump him off in the Simpsons video game.