Is there an English major worth his or her salt who hasn't soaked up Homer's Odyssey? The complex tale still has a lot going for it nearly 3,000 years after its debut -- but one might not realize that watching the Handcart Ensemble's production of Homer's Odyssey, now at 45 Bleecker Street. The company has devised a truncated version of the classic Greek work -- as retold by Simon Armitage for a 2004 BBC radio program -- that runs close to three hours, but its length isn't why the play feels much longer!


The earliest tellings of Odyssey were very likely sung, which strongly states that the poetic language was musical by its very nature. But there isn't much figurative music in the Handca[...]