Bruce Cromer Stars in AN ILIAD at Ensemble Theatre

In a long and diverse stage career, acclaimed Cincinnati actor Bruce Cromer has built a reputation as an amazingly compelling performer. Whether playing the curmudgeonly Ebenezer Scrooge in the annual Dickens' classic A Christmas Carol (Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park), theologian and celebrated fantasy writer C.S. Lewis (Freud's Last Session, Ensemble Theatre Cincinnati), or a myriad of Shakespearean characters at theatres across the country, Bruce Cromer consistently delivers a precision and edge that makes each of his characters particularly memorable and authentic. All that acumen comes into play with the incredible one-man show An Iliad, playing October 14 through November 2 and directed by Michael Evan Haney. A bold adaptation of Homer's masterpiece written by Obie Award-winning playwright and director Lisa Peterson along with acclaimed actor Denis O'Hare (Milk, HBO's True Blood), An Iliad unleashes the power of the epic story for a modern audience while asking us: how can we despise war, yet at the very same time glorify those soldiers who fight it?

An expansive yarn based on Homer's epic poem, An Iliad transforms the familiar tale of gods and goddesses, undying love, and endless battles into a sweeping account of humanity's unshakeable attraction to violence, destruction, and chaos. Homer's text runs to over 15,600 lines and would take about 24 hours to recite from beginning to end; it also has hundreds of characters-men, women, gods, demigods, a crying baby, and two immortal, talking horses, among others. Remarkably, An Iliad's ultra-condensed script compresses this vast scope into just 90 minutes-employing a single narrator called "The Poet," a mysterious, slightly bedraggled figure who, we learn, was present at Troy during the war and has been telling the story ever since.

Director Michael Evan Haney explains that he loves An Iliad because "it is a primal theatrical event. Just a storyteller who takes us back in time and steeps us in the brewing cauldron of the Trojan War." He also explains: "like Shakespearean works, The Iliad/An Iliad, is received by an audience with more feeling, emotion, and understanding when it is heard spoken-in contrast to reading it on the page. An Iliad reminds of us of the folly, the costs, and the bitter truth that Homer knew 3,000 years ago: that in the end, we bury our dead, try to heal our wounded, and realize that nobody really wins."

In Ensemble Theatre Cincinnati's production, The Poet's storytelling is underscored with vocal melodies from Deirdre Manning and Emily Scott. Inspired by these muses, The Poet stalks up and down the stage paraphrasing the events of Homer's poem, embodying the characters themselves, and, in heightened moments, quoting directly from classics scholar Robert Fagles' 1990 Iliad translation, upon which this script is based.