As I read my 946th Subwaystack Take™️ about the new Odyssey film, it hit me that I have something of value to add, and it has nothing to do with Christopher Nolan, whether his women are fully fleshed out or why Agamemnon looks like he’s about to answer the Bat Signal.
A man is going to perform The Odyssey alone, in Ancient Greek, for 24 hours. I’ve spent two years collaborating with him on one of its twenty-four books. We’ve been working on Book 5 - and it’s meant to be live streamed.
The work has us contemplating a question barreling toward the whole industry: How do we navigate the increasing intersection of in-person and digital audiences in our work when we have roughly two and a half millennia behind us where theatre was firmly contained between four walls?
Joseph Medeiros is an eight-time Broadway vet, creator of The Odyssey: A Theatrical Adventure and architect of one of my top in-person theatrical experiences of all time. He’s also the first interviewee in a sub-series I want to start including in this Substack - conversations with artists and producers in my orbit who are trying to figure out their work in the center of the Venn diagram between in-person and online audiences.
I can talk about business and models and data ’til I’m blue in the face but talking about the actual work is an equally useful way of making sense of this inevitable and seemingly foreign future. Also, I’m just excited to share with you the brilliant work of so many people I love and admire. You can access the full audio interview above.
But in case you’re more of a written word kind of person, I’ve pulled out three excerpts to provide some food for thought:
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity
JESS: [Part of your title] is “a theatrical adventure”. What are all the various implications of a theatrical adventure that touch this thing that you’re making?
JOSEPH: I mean the first, most obvious is it’s an adventure story. It’s an adventure story about this guy coming home from the war and his many adventures on the way back. And then the other part of it is the making of it is a theatrical adventure itself, that I have no idea how this whole thing is going to happen. You know, we’ve made it a certain amount of the way and have had some success on this certain amount of the way, but there’s still just huge questions to be asked about literally everything. Every kind of how and every kind of what. And I think figuring all of those things out - I want to frame that as the adventure as well. It’s a crazy idea. I don’t know anybody who’s done something quite exactly like this. People have done durational things. People have done things in ancient Greek. People have adapted The Odyssey, there’s no single part that’s unprecedented. But there is something about the combination of them that I’ve not seen exactly in this way.
And the shifting theatrical landscape of making theater in this country keeps changing…
JESS: Oh boy.
JOSEPH: …and is in the midst of evolving. So then here again too, to bring it back to The Odyssey, what kind of Odyssean cunning and inventiveness can I use to navigate… You know, I mean even navigate is based on “boat” anyway - the Greek word for boat. How do I make it through this crazy idea that I’ve had and for some reason committed myself to.
JESS: To like 20 years of work.
JOSEPH: 20 plus years. It’s already been ten!
JESS: I would also add in, I think it’s a theatrical adventure for the audience. As someone who has been in the audience for a couple of these and in fact, that’s how we met, right?
JOSEPH: Sure, yeah, yeah yeah.
JESS: Both from the perspective of being a non-Greek speaker going to watch theatre that is entirely in a language you don’t understand. What an adventure. Secondly - how do you describe this - the nontraditional setup, basically, of each of the books, right? One time requires me to get on the subway and go to some fucking part of Queens I’ve never been to before –
JOSEPH: It’s just Woodside!
JESS: - and walk into a stranger’s basement.
JOSEPH: Okay. Fair enough. Fair enough. Yeah, the basement apartment does change it.
JESS: Look, it was top five theatrical experiences of my entire life. But it’s an adventure, right? And then third, the durational quality of the project: I’m going on this adventure, as many people who are following along on this project with you are doing. When am I going to get asked to go to your basement? When am I going to show up for a reading at Theaterlab? When are we going to go out in a field with a broadcast truck and… you know what I mean? What an adventure.
JOSEPH: I know. I hope it’s an adventure on all levels for all people involved. I guess that’s the best case scenario.
JESS: Not to put more work on your plate, but I want you to do little notes that track the changing relationship you have to the text over this incredibly long period of time and iteration. That feels to me [like something I as an audience member want to invest in and follow along with]. In my world where I’m really thinking about how we bridge this life where we’re spending 4 or 5 hours on our screens a day and the 1 hour or 24 hours in your case that we want you to come to the theater. That’s a cool liminal space I am so interested in. I want to know everything about what you thought about a particular set of lines five years ago that has changed immensely as you’ve added new books. You know what I mean?
JOSEPH: I do want to do that, but there’s also a, you know, because the poem was… was, gosh. I’m choosing my words so carefully to try to be precise. So I’m going to not do that.
Because the poem came into being through the mouths and minds of generations of oral poets who composed on the spot; who used traditional material that they had learned and heard, but they composed extemporaneously in specific contexts; presumably based on what a host wanted, based on the occasion, based on the fads of the day in 13th and 14th centuries BC; because of the inherent morality of the poem, I had this desire to keep myself on the ephemeral side of it. Because that’s also the theatrical side of it, too - it doesn’t get pinned down. This performance changes every time. And it continues to grow and it continues to change. And so holding it inside of one specific moment feels almost, not in keeping with the spirit of the project. But then also there’s an importance of history and tracking evolution of things. And, you know, there’s a lot of value in that as well.
So I, so I go back and forth between archiving and having a history and, also just doing something in the letting it go and letting it go into the soil of my own mind and memory. It’ll do something and it’ll come out in a different way anyway.
JESS: I’m actually really glad you brought this up because this cuts to the core of why I wanted to start incorporating into my Substack conversations with the artists that I’m friends with, that I collaborate with. Because this is messy - this dialog and this tension between the increasingly digital way that we reach audiences and the nature of theater making, for which I have reverence personally for both. There’s always going to be, I think, tension and dialog. These two things don’t map to each other very cleanly. And so I think it’s really important to have these conversations and try to pick at where those conflict or perpendicularities happen, because neither of them are going away.
We’re not going to change how we make theater and that it’s ephemeral and that there is this piece of it that is so powerful because it just exists when it exists. And building an audience, or giving access to people who are never going to step inside a theater is also never going to go away at this point either. And I don’t know, I think a lot of people seem to pretend they have all the answers, and I’m much more interested in conversations and ideas like you just presented where it’s like, well, sure, Substack, but also maybe not, you know?
JOSEPH: Yeah. I mean, my quick initial reaction to that is just because something is happening on a screen doesn’t mean it’s not theater. And I think that that can open up questions about what theater is, what its values are and what its spirit is. My knowledge of your work is that it’s still about creating some sort of experience around a live event. And how do you translate liveness through a medium like live streaming?
I’m a bit of a luddite, you know, I don’t love technology. I love physical objects and physical books and reading - not on screens. I love that stuff. But it’s like, okay, but how can I take the spirit of a physical interaction and rope technology and different media and mediums into that. I can use those things as a collage, as theatrical collage. That’s my big gamble, you know - that I can add screens and I can add digital technology to my theater, which I’ve started doing. But I’m doing it in such a way where the screen is still framed inside of the theater event.
JESS: So now we get to where Joseph and I met. And the book that is a big part of why I wanted to talk today. Well, not so much about the book, but more about you as an art maker. And this relationship between in-person and digital.
So my friend Greg Kamp, who is also your friend, calls me right out of the blue one day and is like, do you want to go with me to Queens to see a one man performance of the first book of The Odyssey, all in Greek? And it’s only for three people.
And I was like, fuck yes. So we get on the subway.
And we – I relate this to help illustrate the kind of theatrical experience I had on the other side of your work, not knowing you, I hadn’t seen the New Yorker article at that time. I didn’t know anything. I’d had no idea what I had said yes to – we ride into the wilds. To your point, it was Woodside, but like, whatever. I live in Inwood. It’s very far.
JOSEPH: Wild enough.
JESS: And we walk through this neighborhood and we’re not sure we’re in the right place. And we knock on your door, which is to a basement apartment, and you open this door and invite us in with no words - only gestures. And I am like, what the fuck are we doing? Because you don’t know - it’s New York. Do you know what I mean? You’re like, come to my buddy’s one man Greek play or whatever. I might get murdered. Who knows.
And from that point, crossing that threshold into the rest of that evening, as I said earlier, still sits on like my top five theatrical experiences as an audience member of my entire life. It was extraordinary. And in particular, as the show ended - the show? The performance, whatever you want to call it, ended, I sat there thinking about how tactile the whole thing was. I’m going to give you some flowers. And I feel like this is going to embarrass you, but, whatever.
You’re a phenomenal actor. Period. Eight Broadway shows behind you. A lifetime of theater making great, fine. Your physical work in that show and the way in which it connected to what was happening, I thought was next world. Extraordinary. Your clowning. Your physical work you did was so detailed, you deeply incorporated a bunch of mechanical contraptions you had created, right? Lights, pulleys for things. It was really tactile in that way, as a piece of theater, and not sure I’ve ever seen anything quite like that before.
And so I say all that to say that the performance ends, the guy that’s there with me and Greg ends up leaving. You’re like, hang out and talk. I’m panicking, by the way, in my head because I’m like, we don’t know this guy. I’m sure people go fangirl over him. We’re in his house - like, let’s go. Let’s leave him alone. And you’re like, no, no, stay in talk. I was like, okay.
So then you ask, “hey, what do you do”? Right? And we talk a little bit about what I’ve been building with Broadway Unlocked over the last 13 years, and the night ends with you: I’ve had this thought about Book Five, it involves live streaming.
And when I tell you the entire ride home, I was thinking, how can what I just saw, and this theater maker who created that experience I just described, at all be thinking about digital expressions of this? That’s insane, because I am so used to, particularly in my work with the Broadway and institutions, war, just war, when it concerns theater making in person versus theater making on a screen.
And my mind was entirely blown that that was something you were thinking about. So, describe to the people where your brain was and is on Book Five.
JOSEPH: Well, I’ll start with dramaturgical for the whole poem. The first four books are Telemachus, and there’s a homemade, homespun, at the Kitchen Table arts and crafts project that’s going on there. Book Five is the first time that we get a glimpse of Odysseus, our hero. And so there’s, you know, from a sort of director outside standpoint - well, that’s a huge change. So how can we take the project and, and in some ways, wipe the slate clean and say we are starting somewhere else. We are not where we were before. We’re not with the same characters we were. We are now telling this story, which is of course related. But completely break the expectation of what’s going on.
Odysseus - his identity is about being clever and crafty and smart and cunning and wiley and all those things. And Athena is his guide companion, the goddess of wisdom and war and arts and crafts, right? The idea of using technology comes from the word technically, which is a Greek word meaning graft and skill. So, how can we use technology in a clever, subversive, interesting way to give an introduction to this clever, wily, unsuspecting character.
Then separately, he’s furthest away that he ever is from his goal. He’s at his low point of his life, on the island with Calypso, stuck there seven years and he cannot get away. He’s as far away as he’s going to be from his main goal of coming home and so live stream is about distance, right? It’s about theater at a distance.
JESS: How so?
JOSEPH: I can use a live stream to really make him distant - and then how do I bring the audience into this experience of watching this live stream and watching this character and being introduced to this character. The actual idea is to do a dawn to dusk live stream of Book Five.
The audience would then watch this thing unfold. There would be recitations of the text, but then also long periods of just action and activity that Odysseus and the other characters can be doing. Then the big trick is to have the audience also have a [physical] box of objects that they can then use and interact with while the performance is happening.
That gives them an interface with this distant character in their own spaces and lives. And then at the end, somehow we render Odysseus’s presence in each of those individual spaces through that box of objects. And I won’t say more than that at this moment, but if I can make the audience just believe for a second that there’s somebody in their space, then I will have executed a theatrical trick, which is Odyssean in itself. There’s my Trojan horse, you know what I mean?
Live streaming seems like a perfect avenue for exploring that and finding clever, interesting, theatrical, surprising ways to to think about that.
Hi hello, I'm Jess Ryan — director of 140+ live theatrical broadcasts and founder of Broadway Unlocked. I write about theatre, technology, live broadcast and digital audiences every other Tuesday.
I honestly feel like I want to die, condensing our extraordinary conversation down to these three short excerpts. I can’t recommend enough that you dive deeper into Joseph’s world. In the full conversation linked above we chat about:
Joseph’s background as an actor and why he doesn’t always consider the first part of his career as under his current title of “theatre maker”
A full description of The Odyssey: A Theatrical Adventure including a more detailed description of the first four books he’s already developed
Why seeing these books as theatre is so moving, even if you hated having to read them in school
Joseph’s origin story and how he went from Broadway actor to theatrical auteur
Tracking our work on Book Five, including a residency at Mercury Store and the process of planning and applying for the Creative Capital grant
Excavating our artistic and entrepreneurial excitement for the pieces and parts of the Book 5 project and how we hold space and weave the creative, marketing and audience-building into how we’re proceeding
Why so many people have told Joseph this project is niche and why we both beg to differ
How a 24 hour durational performance of The Odyssey is more closely related to The Olympics and David Blaine than it is to the movie
I’m obviously biased, but Joseph is brilliant, fascinating and this project is a once in a generation piece of theatre. It’s worth a listen - let me know what you think!
The Odyssey: A Theatrical Adventure
PS: Is video of this of any interest to you all as I do more of these?
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