Most Cincinnati theatergoers know Bruce Cromer as Ebenezer Scrooge in Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park’s production of A Christmas Carol, a role he has filled annually since 2004. (For seven years before that he was Scrooge’s beleaguered but good-natured employee Bob Cratchit.) He teaches acting at Wright State University, so a few years ago I asked him what advice he gives his students.
“I tell them they need to be off-book before they begin rehearsing,” he says, meaning they must have their lines memorized. “The joy is making eye contact with your partners onstage and starting to find all the little nuances in what makes this particular moment or sentence different from the next.”
Cromer, a meticulous and multi-faceted actor, practices what he preaches — but he’s about to perform a one-man show where he’ll be the only one onstage. The show, An Iliad, was inspired by Homer’s great classic poem, The Iliad, written around 850 B.C. Cromer is grateful he didn’t have to cram all 15,600 lines of Homer’s poetry into his brain, but he has memorized a script of more than 40 pages. The play, by award-winning playwright Lisa Peterson and renowned actor Denis O’Hare, opens this week at Ensemble Theatre Cincinnati.
They reduced the sweeping tale of the Trojan War to a few characters and one speaker, “The Poet,” who has been telling the story repeatedly for nearly three millennia. In that role, Cromer enacts the story’s famous characters — the professional warrior Achilles and his friend Patroclus; Agamemnon, the commander of the Greek forces; Troy’s King Priam; the valiant citizen-soldier Hector and his steadfast wife Andromache; and a couple of gods who manipulate the actions of mortals.
Cromer portrays each one, sometimes in conversation with one another.
“I adjust my physical stance and bring my voice forward or down to distinguish them,” he says.
For instance, in one scene he plays Hector and Andromache. She implores him not to go outside the walls of Troy to do battle with Achilles; he tells her he must. Doing that convincingly requires a lot of skill.
Cromer has done solo work before. As a young actor, he created a performance piece using the words of Holden Caulfield, the protagonist of J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. He’s also played the Librarian, the only character in Ensemble Theatre’s staging of Glen Berger’s Underneath the Lintel in 2002, and he brought to life the remarkable narrator and 40 other characters populating Doug Wright’s I Am My Own Wife in a 2007 production at Dayton’s Human Race Theatre Company. So this category of show isn’t an entirely new experience.
Nevertheless, Cromer’s performance as The Poet in An Iliad is no easy task. He’s playing a world-weary soul, sick of repeating tales of devastation and death. Sometimes he can barely bring himself to speak them again. Yet he carries on, citing lines from Homer’s epic — a few in the original Greek and many more as translated by scholar Robert Fagles.
Cromer says, “I give myself over to the words, as I do with Shakespeare’s text, and they flow naturally.”
The show is a reminder that, while war is a terrible thing, mankind returns to it over and over, often with only the slightest provocation. The Poet feels compelled to remind anyone who will listen to the tragedy of conflict and strife. Cromer points out, “He keeps asking us, ‘You see?’ trying to deliver a message we need to hear. In fact, the last line of the script is ‘You see?’ ”
Director Michael Haney is a fan of this script, too, calling it “a primal theatrical event, just a storyteller who takes us back in time and steeps us in the brewing cauldron of the Trojan War.” He says that Cromer conceived his own interpretations of the characters; Haney helped him shape those portraits and keep them focused so that the message connects with audiences.
The play’s power derives from the words being spoken by an actor, in contrast to reading them on a page, according to Haney. “An Iliad reminds of us of the folly, the costs and the bitter truth that Homer knew 3,000 years ago: that in the end, we bury our dead, try to heal our wounded and realize that nobody really wins,” he says.
The acting skills of Bruce Cromer will be showcased in this dramatically powerful piece of theater, one that’s likely to make a lasting impression on audiences at Ensemble Theatre through Nov. 2.
CONTACT Rick Pender: rpender@citybeat.com
This article appears in Oct 15-21, 2014.
