24 Sep TIO NYC: Getting Started! Lupita-Squared +
You would be right to think a two media events, one mega, both featuring a super nova, would add up to two magical experiences. Well, think again. Many have and will disagree with our thoughts on “The Odyssey” and “Pre-Existing Condition,” both featuring Lupita Nyong’o. Welcome to New York, the city that never sleeps. That goes for us too.
Image., courtesy IMDB.
In both stories, one BIG, one small, Lupita Nyong’o plays a woman marked by a violent partner. Of the two media happenings, one three-minute scene in “The Odyssey”shows that a scar and one cruel joke likely had more to say about domestic violence than the pile up of socio-cultural clichés that is “Pre-Existing Condition.”
The scar? It was inflicted by Helen’s husband, Menelaus, who jokes in the film that it was Helen’s face that launched a thousand ships – “or maybe five hundred now.” Talking to Odyssey’s son Telemachus, the aggrieved man makes clear the ugly mark was revenge for his wife’s affair with Paris.
The irony in that is Homer does include a famous scar in his writing – but that one belongs to Odysseus. (His old nurse recognizes him by the scar on his thigh when he returns home.) Nolan chose to move the mark from the hero’s body to the woman’s. Which fits his theme that war is futile and ultimately marks everyone, but here’s the big difference: Odysseus’s scar proves who he is; Helen’s destroys the very thing that defined her, namely her world-renowned beauty.
In general, we felt Nolan set his epic in the bardo, ie in Tibetan Buddhism the transitional phase of consciousness between physical death and the next rebirth.
In this adaptation of the story, Nolan chose to allow Odysseus to eat Calypso’s lotus, thereby surrendering to oblivion to forget what he and his band of boys did to Troy. To forget his guilt. One critic summed up the warrior’s double wish as wanting to go home and wanting to stop being the man who has to go home.
The bardo exactly: Odysseus’s old self has not died and his new incarnation is not yet born.
We found “The Odyssey” technical precision and grandeur staggering, drowning so much dialog Homer’s tale of woe gets lost in the whirling seas and storms, (literal and metaphorical).
Emily Wilson, the translator, whose version inspired Nolan, has publicly argued the film fails as an adaptation because of its heavy-handed antiwar message and its anachronistic Odysseus, represented as a a guilt-ridden PTSD sufferer – but from the 21st century.
And without the gods, Odysseus’s insistent wanderings lose their logic of divine persecution and become a string of accidents. What’s more, if indeed the weary warrior is in a variation on the theme of limbo, Nolan should have made that uncertainty felt. Hard to do with dialogue that is hard to hear.
Botton line: we felt Nolan lost sight of the story and its characters in his fever for technical bravura.
Lupita as “A” in “Pre-Existing Condition.” Image courtesy of TheWrap.
Playwright Marin Ireland’s 2024 story, “Pre-Existing Condition,” is about a woman struggling in the aftermath of abuse.
The action opens with Nyong’o on stage and clearly distressed (before Phillipa Soo, Susannah Flood, Hari Nef, Edie Falco and Whitney White each take over the role). And we feel her pain. However with all of the psychological cliches what follows felt more like a Public Service Announcement about interpersonal violence and what comes next than a play chock-a-block with lectures about domestic violence in general, while leaving Nyong’o’s character, simply “A,” a blank.
Yes “A” is Everywoman. She is kept generic on purpose so any female star can (and will be) stepping in. Need we say the Everywoman idea was meant to show how universal the abuse experience is?
Duh…
But the blank center of the drama (namely “A”) means everyone around the protagonist has to carry the play. Instead they end up as stock figures, each staging one all-too-familiar indignity after another.
A lawyer who says her case isn’t worth the trouble.
A friend who tells her to move on.
A date who asks what she did to provoke “the incident.”
The ex’s pregnant new girlfriend sent to broker peace.
“Pre-Existing Condition” sets out to take apart the clichés about abuse – but as we said, those socio-cultural tropes are the stuff the play is made of.
Nyong’o’s “A” is a woman who cannot believe this “bad thing” happened to her. That fits the play’s point that she never thought she’d be one of “those women” – in this case trapped in a script of stock humiliations.
And she isn’t. Nyong’o’s is a major star for a reason. Charged with filling the air around Ireland’s thin character, she was the only thing that kept a challenging evening alive. The text spells everything out, so the actress chose to move the drama into her body, wherever and whenever the script left room. (Or most of the 75 minutes in a theatre with no risers and bad acoustics.) But sad to say even the actress’ balletic movements – body clutching walls for safety; hands alive with the need to protect, could not save the day – or help “A.” (Or “A” for Audience.)
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