Memnon

Memnon is briefly mentioned in Homer’s “The Odyssey” and his image figures prominently on vase paintings.

This world premiere production of “Memnon,” a collaboration between the Getty Villa and the Classical Theatre of Harlem, represents an act of cultural recovery.

The tone of “Memnon,” written in iambic hexameter, is direct, spare and cast in a tense of tragic inevitability.

But the proud, regal, calmly commanding voice of Eric Berryman’s Memnon puts the audience under a spell.

In terms of plotting, “Memnon” doesn’t manifest the structural ingenuity of a play by Sophocles, who understood that no matter to what extent fate controls the outcome of a story, it is in those moments when a protagonist is exercising free will that an audience is mostly deeply engaged.