Joseph Medeiros crouches on the whitewashed floor of Theaterlab, a small performing arts space in Manhattan’s Garment District, gesturing at a weathered leather briefcase. “In the next pocket,” he tells his new stage manager, Jane Abbott, “are the Aegisthus guts.”
Medeiros has spent the past several years collecting such odds and ends as he’s set about creating a singular theatrical experience: a full-length solo performance of The Odyssey, and not in translation, but in Homeric Greek. He started out performing the first of the epic’s 24 books for three-person audiences in his cramped basement apartment in early 2020 and slowly built a small but dedicated audience for the next three books. He also accumulated boxes and boxes of props, including the aforementioned guts, made of colorful yarn.
Medeiros has now memorized the first four books of Homer’s 24-part epic, often called “the Telemachy” because they focus on Odysseus and Penelope’s son, Telemachus. He has performed each section independently and is now stringing them together in a six-hour public workshop at Theaterlab through Jan. 13, under the title Telemachus: Books I-IV of Homer’s Odyssey.
More than 2,000 years after its composition, Homer’s story of a warrior’s return from the Trojan War still resonates in popular culture. In December, Universal Pictures announced that Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer follow-up will be a big-budget take on The Odyssey. Other recent adaptations include the novel Circe and this winter’s Ralph Fiennes vehicle The Return, while dueling line-for-line translations by classicists Emily Wilson and Daniel Mendelsohn have kept the poem in literary headlines.
For his part, Medeiros believes the story is so universal that modern English speakers can connect to the text in ancient Greek, without supertitles. How? To make The Odyssey legible without a word of English, Medeiros tries to turn language into action. As he learns each line of Greek poetry, he considers etymology and thinks like a dancer. As he reflected in a 2016 blog interview about memorizing texts in foreign languages, “So many words are rooted in very real, physical verbs” that he can turn into physical movement, “and the weaving together of the text in this way makes memorization almost a non-issue, nearly a byproduct of the process.” Even in the tiniest space, Medeiros has choreographed each beat of the poem to show viewers something about the original poem.
I first saw Medeiros perform Telemachus at Home, his staging of Book One, in the fall of 2022, on the advice of a friend who had done a show with him at the Finger Lakes Musical Theatre Festival. As I waited on the curb, a trim man with a lamp emerged from the apartment building in Ridgewood, Queens. He silently nodded hello and beckoned for me to follow him to the basement. I was immediately hooked. When the other two audience members arrived, Medeiros still did not speak. Instead, he wrote a series of preshow Post-it notes: “It’s so nice to meet you.” “Would anyone like some wine?” “The gun is fake.” I have kept these notes as souvenirs.
This mysterious silent ritual gave the apartment an intimate, otherworldly feel. By the warm glow of lamplight, the plush ox’s head that hung from a bookshelf was a totem; a wall-mounted handsaw was a harbinger of doom. Medeiros lit incense, then took a seat and turned on an old Kodak slide projector. He clicked through a slideshow outlining the plot and introducing the central characters, intoning each English name that appeared on the scrim in Homeric Greek so we could catch them later. Then he undercut the summary with a slide inviting the audience to become lost in the ancient “word music,” just as Telemachus feels lost in his own home—fatherless, surrounded by suitors who would wed his mother Penelope and seize his birthright.
As he moved around his cozy living room, Medeiros rapidly shifted between a range of characters. He has reconstructed this living room space on one side of the playing space at TheaterLab, where he takes the same approach. His vocal register transforms to signal age, status, and character. So does his body, from the stately stance of a god to the awkward slump of an anxious young man. In tight quarters, the most mundane actions—flicking a light switch or picking up a prop—seem integral to the storytelling. Medeiros trusts audience members to catch the crumbs of meaning he drops, to distinguish the sprightly, stuttering Telemachus from the leering, languorous suitors who pursue Penelope. With an elaborate system of switches and dimmers all around him, he uses light to build a “visual language.” Blue-green lights suggest the presence of an angry Poseidon, while warmer ones mark Pallas Athena. The dim, hazy projections are interspersed with candlelight, bridging the ancient world and the modern one.
In Medeiros’s version of the Telemachy, Book One is a meditation on childhood and growing up without parental guidance. When Athena appears in disguise and encourages Telemachus to search for Odysseus, then rout the suitors from their home, the boy is easily swayed. Over the course of the show, Medeiros slowly takes out relics from his childhood: a Game Boy, a toy gun, a Sesame Street TV dinner tray. At home among the wreckage of his youth, Telemachus decides to grow up.
Medeiros is slim and athletic, and he carries himself with a dancer’s easy grace. When he performs, his entire body is engaged. At 40, he still exudes the youthful brio of a child actor—a glimpse of the kid who first stepped onstage at a community theatre in Modesto, California, and soon performed at nearby regional theatres like Sacramento Music Circus. When he wasn’t onstage, Medeiros remembers trying out lighting effects with a flashlight in his darkened bedroom.
“I didn’t like that if I put a shape over a flashlight, I couldn’t get a clear shape in the light,” he recalled. “The mirror on the back throws the light in a weird way so you get that light circle in the middle. I hated that I couldn’t make a gobo of something.”
His parents drove him to Sacramento for shows there, then to L.A. for more auditions. At age 11, Medeiros moved cross-country to make his Broadway debut in the 1996 musical adaptation of the Tom Hanks movie Big, with his mother and two of his four siblings in tow. Later, in 2008, he returned to Broadway in a pair of shows: as Hero in Grease and “the Greek” in Guys and Dolls. The connections to Greece were incidental; he had already started learning the language a year earlier.
Medeiros was in the ensemble of the Chicago production of Wicked when he got a hankering for verb conjugations. He’d taken Spanish and French in high school, and he loved the grammar. So he wandered into the Borders bookstore across from the theatre and picked up introductory textbooks in Latin, Sanskrit, and ancient Greek. The last one stuck. He was excited to learn a new alphabet, and he had an interest in Greek literature, in part because he loved the song “The Origin of Love” from Hedwig and the Angry Inch, which is based on part of Plato’s Symposium. “John Cameron Mitchell: Thank you, I guess, for that,” he said.
He taught himself the basics of ancient Greek over the next few years. In 2010, he was dancing the dream ballet in the York Theatre’s production of Yank! when he befriended David Zellnik, the show’s book writer and lyricist. Zellnik was already a polyglot: He spoke German, French, and some Arabic, Russian, and Turkish. (Since then, he has learned Portuguese and some Farsi.) He was drawn to the young actor with the Greek textbook. “I wanted to be his friend,” Zellnik said. “He was charming. He was very talented. And he loved languages.” As rehearsals continued, they started studying Greek together during their lunch breaks.
For several years, Medeiros found consistent work in musical theatre, with ancient Greek as a side project. Zellnik thought he would stay on that track. “He’s an amazing singer, an amazing dancer, and a really wonderful actor,” he said. “He could audition for any Broadway show and find a place for himself.”
But by 2015, Medeiros felt like something was missing. “I was doing a show out of town, and I got very sick,” he said. “At that point I just knew that something needed to change.”
When he got back to New York, he rented a studio space in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and started trying new things as a performer. Around the same time, he first read the entirety of The Odyssey, in an English translation by Robert Fagles. The experience galvanized him. “I was shocked by all the things I didn’t know were in it,” Medeiros said, including a ribald tale of a love affair between gods; a prophet on the lam after killing a relative; a brutal fight between Odysseus and a beggar who insults him. The text was endlessly surprising. Within a year, he started to memorize the original.
Medeiros kept performing on Broadway, in shows ranging from Matilda to Three Tall Women. While appearing in Groundhog Day in 2017, he received the Legacy Robe, given to the ensemble member with the most Broadway chorus credits. But his focus had shifted to The Odyssey. He dug deeper into the language and enrolled in Columbia University’s post-graduate Classics program. He first performed the first book just before the Covid-19 pandemic hit. With more formal training in Greek under his belt, as well as the excess free time afforded by the pandemic lockdown, the second book took him just six months to learn.
Though Medeiros has taken other acting jobs in recent years, he always returned to Telemachus. During the pandemic, he kept himself afloat by babysitting and working for the U.S. Census Bureau. These days, he does some teaching and performs in Squid Game: The Experience NYC. With a few breaks, he has spent almost five years performing Telemachus at Home, and his performance has only grown richer. When new audience members see the show, they hear Homer channeled through someone who has lived with this language for years.
Medeiros says he wants to make his performances engaging, even for audiences who aren’t steeped in the story. “One of my primary responsibilities and directives is: Don’t make this miserable for people,” he said. “I take that challenge, and I also enjoy and delight in that challenge.” His diversions in Book One include whimsical props, from a toothpick to a toy piano.
And Medeiros stages each book with new strategies for audience engagement. Where Odyssey I: Telemachus at Home is intimate and highly choreographed, its follow-up is public and rowdy. Medeiros first presented Book Two in East River Park in the summer of 2021, when few theatres had reopened after the pandemic lockdown and outdoor entertainment was in vogue. Those performances earned him a wider audience and a short write-up in The New Yorker. Since then, he has performed the show in Central Park (I saw it there in the Ramble, a popular spot for birdwatching).
Medeiros sets a time for these public performances, then waits for the audience to arrive and rides up to the meeting spot on his bike, a large black food-delivery bag strapped to the back. Then he launches into the performance. Instead of the carefully timed slideshow that situates viewers in Book One, Medeiros furiously flips through a stack of handwritten signs offering English-language context. Packing and unpacking his bag, he treats the audience to a never-ending series of props: a watermelon, a wig, a plastic boat, a blanket, a rain stick, and nine T-shirts emblazoned with character names.
Book Two went through several subtitles (among them Telemachus Rambles) before Medeiros settled on Odyssey II: Telemachus Assembles. It’s a fitting title: Telemachus is calling an assembly of Ithaca’s citizens, seeking support in his search for Odysseus. Medeiros makes the audience part of that event, launching “Friend of Telemachus” T-shirts to his supporters like a cannon operator firing up the crowd at a basketball game.
Because Medeiros doesn’t invite audiences to the park in the dead of winter, Book Two is a bit of a seasonal show. Though he has performed it less often than Book One, the show is still in his bones. Over time, he has added details that make his performance richer, even if the audience never gets them. When Telemachus addresses the assembly, for instance, Medeiros stands on a literal soapbox inscribed with the word “Ivory”—a type of soap, but also a subtle reference to Book 19, in which Penelope confronts a visitor who has dreamed of Odysseus’s return, saying that all dreams pass through two gates: one of horn or one of ivory. The dreams from ivory are false, while those from horn are true. Medeiros does not expect his audience members to pick up these references. “It’s my hope that all of those things are inside of the performance,” he said. “All the complexity that’s in the text and in the characters.”
Book Two ends with Telemachus loading up a ship for the search party. Athena, disguised as Odysseus’s friend Mentor, has recruited a crew for the ship, and she sees the travelers off as they depart, sending a favorable wind to help the journey. In the show, Medeiros frantically gathers his props, shoves them back into the bag, and leaves the park on his bike. His T-shirt says “Telemachus,” but his glittery headband says “Athena,” as if the goddess were watching over him.
Though he currently lives abroad, David Zellnik has managed to catch three of the first four books. He told me the project feels incredibly special, and not only because of his history with Medeiros. “He’s whispering those words back into existence in a way that they don’t even do in Greece,” Zellnik said. He sees Medeiros as the conductor of powerful ancient wisdom, sharing information with audiences “in such a way that he still knows more about what’s happening than we do. Because he has the secret knowledge of what these words mean, it’s both generous and a little bit distancing in a way that’s creatively interesting to me.”
The classicist Emily Wilson, who became the first woman to translate the The Odyssey into English when her iambic pentameter version was published in 2018, has had a similar experience with the work. She read about Book Two in The New Yorker and took note, then made it to Telemachus at Home a year later. “I didn’t realize the extent to which it was going to be accessible to people who don’t have any knowledge of the original,” Wilson said. “I was sort of amazed.” The other two audience members at her show had no background with The Odyssey, not even in translation. Yet, according to Wilson, “They were able to be totally immersed in it.”
Wilson said she appreciates the way Medeiros plays with The Odyssey—how he incorporates “vintage Americana,” draws attention to recent history, and uses photos and props from his own life to help the audience relate to the text. She also sees him as a serious Homeric scholar, interpreting the text line by line. As Wilson put it, “There are different ways of being serious.” You can write scholarly footnotes and critical papers, sure, but, she said, “I also think that performance is a serious engagement.” Last spring she invited Medeiros to perform for the Classics department at the University of Pennsylvania, where she is a professor.
Medeiros has now performed Telemachus at Home roughly 100 times, and Telemachus Assembles around 40. The rest of the Telemachy is much fresher. He workshopped portions of Book Three in September 2023 at Theaterlab, in his first residency there, and first presented a fully staged version last fall. Book Four, which is nearly twice as long as the average book in The Odyssey, was workshopped around a conference table at Theaterlab in September.
While his performance often takes a conversational tone, especially when he plays a young, nervous Telemachus, Medeiros still follows the dactylic hexameter of the original poem. In Book Three, he chants one 10-minute section to a metronome with a bell that rings every six beats to accent the end of a line. As I heard the word music and watched projections from the recent past flash across his T-shirt, I felt the language transcend time and place, connecting our world to the oral poets who originated the poem, asking us to reflect on a war before our time but never quite out of reach.
The remainder of the Telemachy follows our hero’s visits to leaders who returned safely from the Trojan War, searching for news about his father. In Book Three, he visits Nestor and learns about xenia, the ancient Greek social contract of hospitality. Medeiros has asked audience members to host performances of Book Three in their apartments, making him a guest alongside Telemachus. In Book Four, the young man travels to Sparta and meets Menelaus.
“I think most people have many feelings about home, family, and the different points in their lives when they feel lost,” said Medeiros. In the course of these four books, Telemachus grapples with the possibility of losing his home and leaves it for the first time. He searches for a family he has never known, questioning his right to claim his father. He feels lost and begins to find himself.
By presenting all four books of the Telemachy as a six-hour show at Theaterlab, Medeiros is taking a big step toward his eventual goal: a planned 24-hour durational performance of the entire Odyssey. With this next step, however, he is also leaving something behind: He gave the last stand-alone performance of Telemachus at Home in October. In December, he packed up his apartment in Ridgewood and moved out after seven years. As an audience member at one of his final shows pointed out, Odysseus spends seven years as a captive of the nymph Calypso. So while the show still captivates Medeiros, and he is still performing Book One as part of the larger project, he is leaving home in a sense: presenting his work in more traditional theatre spaces, selling tickets online, and receiving support from two commercial producers (Dan Stone, a co-producer on this season’s Broadway revivals of Gypsy and Othello, and Chris Greiner, general manager at Park Avenue Armory). Medeiros thinks the project can scale up without losing its immediacy. After he completes the run at Theaterlab, he will keep adding books to his repertoire. He even hopes to present one of them on Broadway one day, though he declines to say which one.
A durational performance of this magnitude is daunting, but Medeiros is confident it can be done. A touring show by the company of Denmark’s Odin Teatret convinced him that foreign-language theatre without continuous subtitles could be vital and moving. David Greenspan’s lengthy solo performances made him sure he could find the stamina to go it alone, and Taylor Mac’s daylong 24-Decade History of Popular Music proved there was an audience for durational theatre at this scale.
“Nothing I’m doing is unprecedented in any of its individual parts,” said Medeiros. Then, smiling, he conceded: “Maybe the combination is unusual.”
Emily Wilson is among those hoping to attend the 24-hour Odyssey one day. “This is a poem that you can live in for a day,” she said, “or for years, as obviously Joseph does.” She hopes other audience members are ready to take that chance. For now, Medeiros hopes audiences are ready for six hours at a time–first in the current public workshop performances at Theaterlab, then in a full production next fall.
Back at Theaterlab, Medeiros crouches on the floor. He snaps the briefcase shut. “And now,” says Abbott, the stage manager, “you’re ready for a day at work.”
Douglas Corzine is an arts and culture writer based in New York City but rooted in Nashville. He has written for Jacobin, Nashville Public Radio, and the Princeton Alumni Weekly.
