Julieta Cervantes
This isn’t a prediction. But one day black odyssey (Classic Stage Company, to March 26) should be mounted on a Broadway stage in front of the kind of engaged audience this critic saw the show around this weekend. The show feels like an irresistible hit on a small stage that would happily occupy every inch of a bigger one. Moving, fierce, laugh-out-very-loud funny, beautifully lit (by Adam Honoré), designed (David Goldstein), and directed by Stevie Walker-Webb, in black odyssey playwright Marcus Gardley takes Homer’s The Odyssey, and recasts it as an “epic poem in four acts” around Black history, pain, joy, resistance, love, and power.
Over a two and a half hour span we follow the journey of Ulysses Lincoln (Sean Boyce Johnson), who in 2017 is trying to return home from serving in Afghanistan. He is riven with guilt at a particular killing he has carried out—in this case, sadly for him, the son of God Paw Sidin (Jimonn Cole).
The latter wants to ensure Ulysses goes through every pain and hardship imaginable as he desperately tries to return home to Harlem and his wife Nella (D. Woods)—“He shot my son in the face so I’m eatin’ him. Revenge is a meal best served raw.” Paw Sidin is also engaged in a battle of wills and dares with brother Deus (James T. Alfred), and so—as we initially see—this is a chess-game with frightening consequences.