From: Alexuma-AT-aol.com
Date: Sat, 21 Feb 2004 18:27:31 EST
Subject: PUPT: Theadora Skipitares new show - NYT review



Link below - also cut and paste the document below for those who cannot 
access NYT site (you have to sign in and get the cookies, though it's free).  
Anyone who has seen the show care to comment?
-Serra
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/21/arts/theater/21ODYS.html

Odysseus Goes Home. Slowly.
By NEIL GENZLINGER

Published: February 21, 2004


f nothing else, Theodora Skipitares's "Odyssey: The Homecoming" explains why 
it took poor Odysseus so darned long to get home from the Trojan War. He and 
everyone else in ancient Greece apparently moved in ultraslow motion. Snails 
and turtles would have had to stop and wait for these guys to catch up.
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Not that Ms. Skipitares's show, the second of a trilogy, is overly long; the 
tale is done in less than 90 minutes. It's just that when a story is told with 
puppets and largely without words, speed takes a back seat. This "Odyssey" 
unfolds at roughly the pace of a "Mark Trail" comic strip.
But the story is secondary. Ms. Skipitares's show, at La MaMa E.T.C., 74A 
East Fourth Street in the East Village, through Feb. 29, is primarily a visual 
experience. A colorful collection of shadow and other types of puppets are used 
to tell about some of Odysseus' adventures on the way home, with video 
projections and elaborate music by Arnold Dreyblatt and Tim Schellenbaum adding to 
the mix.
Among the most memorable elements are some strange creatures with video 
screens for heads. A segment early in the piece that bluntly links the classic tale 
to modern war, presumably the current one in Iraq, seems didactic, 
cliché-ridden and at odds with the elegance of the rest of the show. But elsewhere the 
merging of the ancient and the modern works just fine. A fight scene in which 
Ms. Skipitares's puppets are superimposed onto clips from old films is very 
clever.
Last year Ms. Skipitares tackled the war itself in "Helen, Queen of Sparta," 
and the third piece of the trilogy, about the prelude to the war, is scheduled 
for next year.


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