In ancient Greece, the Odyssey was neither read nor recited. Instead, it was performed.

The text that remains to us today runs some 12,000 lines, which casts a somewhat daunting light on the poem’s first words: “Tell me, Muse, of the man of many ways, who was driven/ Far journeys, after he had sacked Troy’s sacred citadel.” And yet, despite the challenge for the performer and, later, the reader, the Odyssey has delighted for thousands of years.

Stanford University’s Stanford Summer Theater program takes up the challenge of not only reinstating the Odyssey as a performed piece but also compressing its 24 books into a two-hour stage show with eight actors—four men and four women, a mix between students and seasoned professionals. To achieve this goal, the plot has been compressed, focusing only on Odysseus’s journey and dispensing with the crisis at his home in Ithaca—hence the title, Wanderings of Odysseus.

Somewhat jarringly at first for students of Homer, the poet’s narrative voice has necessarily been disembodied and split among the eight actors. Working with a translation by Oliver Taplin, director Rush Rehm modified the text slightly to allow this transformation to work, as the retelling becomes a fluid mixture of narrative and dialogue, with characters switching back and worth seamlessly between these two modes of speech.

Indeed, this fluidity is a defining characteristic of the performance as a whole, one which breathes new life into the old epic by recalling its heritage—because bards performed the Odyssey alone, they had to somehow differentiate the incredibly vast array of characters with nothing more than their own voices and bodies, which necessarily required creativity and invention.

This skill finds its modern incarnation in Wanderings, where the bending, breaking, and adaptation of boundaries is the norm. Half the cast is female, but their dresses can be modified in an instant into hardy sailors’ tunics. The only three props onstage are a shawl, ropes, and a wooden block, and the latter serves as a bed and a boat in the first 15 minutes alone. The ropes allow characters to suspend themselves from the rafters in acrobatic poses, but they also allow Odysseus’s sailors to tie him as they pass the Sirens. Further, each of the four male actors takes a turn playing Odysseus, with roles often shifting mid-scene, giving a whole new meaning to that famous phrase, “Odysseus, man of many turnings.”

But Wanderings, for all its serious intellectualism, manages to bring out Homer’s sense of humor, which sometimes falls through the cracks of his stilted, complex language. When the Phaeacians entertain Odysseus, for example, the bard Demodocus—considered by some scholars to be a self-portrait of Homer himself—sings the tale of how Hephaestus tricks his cheating wife Aphrodite by catching her in an invisible net as she sleeps with Ares, god of war. Many modern readers, reluctant to attribute any kind of sexuality or dirty humor to the ancient Greeks (of course, they haven’t read Aristophanes!), miss the R-rated humor of the scene when the other Greek male gods joke about how eager they would be to have an orgy with Aphrodite, even with many times the number of nets and with the other gods watching. But Rehm and his actors grab onto the scene and treat it with the reckless, dirty, sexual attitude Homer intended, even dramatizing the “sex scene” between Ares and Aphrodite with exaggerated, silly motions to show how, ultimately, Demodocus intends not to retell some obscure myth but to entertain his (predominantly male) audience.

But, of course, all of Wanderings’ changes entail some costs. In splitting the narrative voice among eight different characters, the play detracts from one of the Odyssey's central motifs—the absolute brilliance but questionable reliability of Odysseus. When he entertains the Phaeacians with stories of his traveling in the original epic, he cleverly begins to tell of his encounter with Polyphemus the Cyclops but then declares that he is tired, that he will continue the next day. His audience, doubtless riveted, eagerly requests that he continue, and his host calls for more wine, more food, and more gifts for Odysseus if only he will oblige them. Of course, he agrees, reminding the reader of his never-ending appetite for both fame and valuable gifts (especially since all of his prizes from Troy were destroyed in his earlier shipwreck). Can the reader really trust Odysseus’s stories, or is he fabricating some if not most of them for his own gain?

In Wanderings, Rehm cleverly takes this moment and adapts it into an intermission, a moment for the physical audience to rest halfway through the performance as Odysseus himself takes a break. While the change is quite functional and useful, it also removes this element of ambiguity from the tale. And by enacting Odysseus’s stories onstage and distributing the narration among Odysseus and his crew members, Rehm lends a sense of reliability to the narrative that appears somewhat contrary to the Odyssey text.

Further, by omitting mention of the crisis in Ithaca, the play obscures the motive for Odysseus to return home and ensure that his wealth passes rightfully to his son (after all, no one knows whether Odysseus is alive or dead). But that loss is a necessary casualty for the play to function.

As a whole, however, Wanderings is a delightful reimagining of the Odyssey, one that lends it new life in a new time. For all of its differences from the original, the experience of seeing Wanderings performed by an inventive, creative, talented cast is perhaps closer to the “authentic” experience of the Odyssey than most of us moderns would imagine.