Seeing The Odyssey at the A.R.T. Gives CA’s 9th Grade Class a Common Literary Experience
For decades, The Odyssey has been one of the first books students read at Concord Academy. How is this foundational text of Western literature, which emerged from an ancient culture very different from our own, engaging students today? For those who arrive with prior exposure to Greek mythology and those who don’t, reading it can be a vastly different experience. That’s why when the English Department was considering ways to make its curriculum more equitable, the opportunity to give every 9th grader the experience of seeing a new interpretation of the story live on stage was too good to pass up.
In late February and early March 2025, all eight sections of 9th Grade English boarded buses for the short trip to Cambridge, Mass., to see the world premiere of Kate Hamill’s The Odyssey, a stage adaptation commissioned by the American Repertory Theater. An anonymous Boundless Campus gift enabled Concord Academy to provide admission for the entire class and the faculty members teaching the book.
The play retains most elements and characters from the ancient Greek epic but jettisons or recasts others entirely, and Hamill’s choices became grounds for much class discussion at CA. In her version, the gods are absent, seemingly invoked merely to justify human decisions, but a trio of fates acts as chorus and conscience. Hamill complicates notions of heroism by portraying Odysseus and his family in a modern psychological context. The action splits evenly between the exploits and entanglements of the ruler of Ithaca—still missing and presumed dead well after the decade-long Trojan War’s end—and his wife, Penelope, to whom he’s journeying back home. They’re not presented as mythic figures distanced by time and custom but as characters more realistic from our modern perspective.
In Hamill’s rendering, Odysseus is still wily, but he’s also haunted by his wartime acts and conscious that only in the retelling is violence transformed into heroism. Penelope struggles under increasing pressure from a host of suitors, weighing how long she can wait, what protection she requires, and in what ways she might allow herself to move on. Well aware of her husband’s faults, she identifies as a mythmaker and culture-shaper through the colossal tapestry she weaves and the stories about Odysseus she tells their son, Telemachus.
Other characters more minor in Homer’s epic climb into the play’s moral center. Hamill portrays Circe, whom she played herself at the A.R.T., as a ruthless truthteller, panting and witchy, cursed by seeing and hearing everything. She alone knows all Odysseus has done, and she wants him anyway. This stands in contrast with Nausicaa, reconceived by Hamill as Helios’ acolyte and another of Odysseus’ lovers, who recoils when she learns his identity. When Odysseus’ crew is at sea, the sirens’ song isn’t seductive but rather motherly: It’s an offer of comfort and forgiveness that lures the sailors to their deaths.
Through such portrayals, Hamill frames her story within a contemporary understanding of trauma as fuel for intergenerational violence and cycles of oppression and revenge. She recasts Odysseus’ determination to return home as a futile drive to reclaim the person he used to be. Analyzing Hamill’s characterizations added layers to CA students’ engagement with the text, asking them to consider how the themes of the story change when characters are given space to be more complicated and fully realized.
The A.R.T. production also introduced a strong streak of humor through the fluid way the ensemble cast moved between roles and reveled in theatricality, accomplishing much with gesture and minimal props and inviting the audience to engage imaginatively. Inventive shadow puppetry carried some of the play’s most shocking moments: When King Agamemnon puts the infant Telemachus before a plow to force Odysseus to fight in his war. When the cyclops Polyphemus rolls away a stone from his cave and devours one of Odysseus’ men. When, in a flashback that haunts Odysseus, Agamemnon takes slain Hector’s son from his mother’s arms, holds him tenderly for a moment, then hurls the baby from the tower.
After all of CA’s 9th Grade English classes had seen the performance, they gathered to discuss Hamill’s artistic decisions, comparing them with historical understandings of divinity and morality in the culture of ancient Greece. While they began by questioning many of the liberties the playwright took, they also examined the textual basis for her characterizations. Considering how the story was represented on the stage, they shared what they found effective and how they might adapt The Odyssey differently.
“They had strong reactions to the choices because of the authority they feel over the text,” says English teacher Andrew Stevens. “I think that’s a cool moment, when they say, ‘Well, that’s not my experience.’ They’re asking, ‘Are you having fidelity to the work, or do you have an agenda?’”
Stevens adds that “a lot of people see Homer as a magpie, collecting old myths.” He says he appreciated that the play “put students a little more in the headspace” of the poem’s original audience who, in the oral tradition that gave rise to Homer’s text, would have known the story and heard it episodically, out of order. The production partnered well with projects he had assigned beforehand: writing a poem from the perspective of one of The Odyssey’s characters and examining images from the Harlem Renaissance artist Romare Bearden’s Black Odyssey series.
“The pleasure of recognition was one of the benefits of attending the play,” says Laurence Vanleynseele P’22 ’28, who also teaches the book. “When you spend a long time studying a text (and we spend half of the second semester on The Odyssey), it is very rewarding to go see an adaptation and be able to trace its various components to the source you are so familiar with. You are in on the references. You get to feel that you are part of a community with shared knowledge. Realizing that this community does not just comprise teachers and fellow 9th graders but people of various ages and backgrounds in the audience, as well as cool actors, the playwright, and the crew members, creates a crucial bridge between classroom material and the broader preoccupations that we share as humans (about love, power, death, etc.) and that we express in art. Literature is not just what your teachers teach you, in other words.”
Vanleynseele says the A.R.T.’s “humorous, joyful, and bold adaptation” felt very relevant: “It breathed life into a text that many students enjoy but that some merely considered ‘required reading’ before attending the performance.” She cites as especially powerful Hamill’s choice to foreground Penelope’s experience, saying it “brought into focus some issues surrounding the gender dynamics in Homer and invited students to ask where Hamill had seen moments in the original that she had decided to ‘explode.’”
Comparing students’s expectations with how those stories were depicted, she adds, “raised productive questions about reading and interpretation” that reframe reading as a creative act: “When you read—when you construct a reading—you frame and adjust the lens, as you would when taking a photograph, for instance. The meaning of a text is not there, merely dormant. As a reader, you make meaning by selecting details and drawing patterns, using the raw material from the original; attending the play’s retelling of Homer really brought that home for our students.”
At Concord Academy, English is the only subject required for every student, every semester of their CA career. Students also have half of their English courses in common—all take full-year 9th and 10th grade English classes prior to upper-level electives—many more than in other subjects, given the school’s emphasis on choice and a breadth of course offerings. Even within the 9th grade curriculum, different sections read different translations. So when it came to considering how to enhance equity in the classroom, Hamill’s powerful adaptation of this text was an obvious choice as a vehicle for giving the class of 2028 a shared academic experience.
English Department Head Sabrina Sadique says, “From a visit to the A.R.T, I was aiming for our students to discern how translations of a text—from its verbal form to the staged adaptation—reorient our perception of the source material and how each adaptation shapes and interrogates the other.” Questions that guided all sections’ explorations were how translation speaks to and interrogates its source, how a poem relates to a play, what formal aspects both genres share, and how many ways—across cultures, genres, and histories—we can look at the same scene.
Stevens says he found value in the communal experience of seeing the play, and he noticed a marked change after the performance: “They did something together. Maybe it was a little strange, but they prepared for it, so once it was said and done, I think they had a sense of pride and belonging. We’ve never taken an excursion like this before. I was really happy with it, and I’d love to do something like it again.”
The Odyssey remains a touchstone for students throughout their time at CA, and beyond. Sadique says older students who saw the production on their own shared with her how powerful they found Hamill’s feminist adaptation and the equal emphasis it placed on female characters.
Earlier this year in his senior chapel, Axel Kapoor ’25 reflected on why The Odyssey is still relevant to students as they begin their CA education. “At its heart, The Odyssey is the story of a complicated hero—Odysseus, a warrior, a wanderer, and a husband—struggling to return home,” he said. “His journey isn’t just about finding Ithaca; it’s about reclaiming his place in a community that has changed in his absence. He doesn’t simply ‘reconnect’; he has to rebuild relationships and navigate what it means to belong again. This challenge is presented to all who come to CA.”
