By Doug Margeson

Reprinted from the King County Journal

Comedy, according to one definition, is the art of placing people in a situation where they have to act completely contrary to their nature. Then, you stand back and watch what happens next.

Well, few people have been thrown into surroundings quite as unfamiliar as those faced by Odysseus in Homer’s epic poem: cannibalistic cyclopses, six-headed monsters, seductive sirens, peevish gods and, above all, Odysseus’ own crew, as bungling a bunch of screwups as ever pratfalled across a Vaudeville stage. The Three Stooges had nothing on these guys.

Gillian Jorgensen couldn’t help but notice. Someday, she thought, I’ll get the chance to direct “The Odyssey” as a comedy.

That sometime is now. Youth Theatre Northwest on Mercer Island plays the classic for laughs through Sunday, March 27.

Jorgensen, director for the production, acknowledged that not everything in “The Odyssey” is funny. It contains no small amount of hacking, stabbing, drowning and other forms of discourtesy because, well, that’s the way folks did things in those days.

“The story is actually pretty simple: Odysseus is trying to get home, but things keep getting in his way. He copes the best he can,” Jorgensen said.

The story begins when the Trojan War ends. Odysseus, king of Ithaca, set out for home, only to be waylaid. A storm blows the ship to the land of the Lotus Eaters. The tasty plant removes memory and ambition. Odysseus’ men love it. He finally drags them back to the ship. Then they end up at the land of the Cyclops, a race of giant, one-eyed cannibals. Odysseus has to kill one of them to escape.

That one happens to be the son of Poseidon, the sea god, who makes their voyage all the more difficult every chance he gets.

They do have one friend, the wind god Aeolus, who captures all the adverse winds and seals them up in a bag. Then just as Ithaca is in sight, Odysseus’ crew, true to form, just has to open the bag and have a look.

Back to sea goes the ship, where it spends a few more years fighting off more cannibals, as well as particularly determined sirens, multi-headed monsters and on and on.

Time after time, it is on the verge of reaching safety when the crew manage to screw up, tick off the gods or whatever, and blow the whole deal.

Meanwhile, back in Ithaca, Queen Penelope is busy fending off suitors who want Odysseus’ place on the throne. Penelope is doing her best, but Odysseus has been gone 10 years and she’s running out of convincing excuses.

Penelope’s predicament, which is actually the main serious note in the play, provides just the right contrast to Odysseus’ tribulations, Jorgensen said.

Giving “The Odyssey” a comic tone proved fairly easy, Jorgensen said, much easier than designing its special effects. In most productions, for example, the cyclops is an elaborate puppet, sometimes eight-feet tall. The Youth Theatre can’t match that. So, Jorgensen made the cyclops man-sized — a guy in a suit — then staged the fight between him and Odysseus with hand puppets. The cyclops manipulates a big cyclops puppet, the crew use smaller man puppets. In other scenes, the theater will use shadow puppets for special effects. In still others, some of the actors are made up as animals.