In his play "The Cure at Troy," poet Seamus Heaney explores the wounds within

Theater preview

No poem or play or song can fully right a wrong inflicted or endured.

— Seamus Heaney, "The Cure at Troy"

"I am not a playwright," Seamus Heaney states emphatically.

And yet, on rare occasions, this Nobel Prize-winning poet has turned his hand to drama — most notably in "The Cure at Troy," now in production at Seattle Repertory Theatre.

Following in the footsteps of fellow Irish bard W.B. Yeats, Heaney looked to ancient literature for inspiration in his early foray into drama.

He chose to adapt a fairly obscure Greek tragedy, "Philoctetes" by Sophocles, for a theater world that tries, against high odds, to transform Greek drama into potent contemporary stage fare.

"The Cure at Troy" recounts the Homeric tale of the Greek archer Philoctetes, who is crippled by a festering snake bite and left for dead by his comrades. A pair of them — cunning Odysseus and young Neoptolemus, son of Achilles — hunt Philoctetes down and try to swindle his charmed weapons from him; the Greeks need them to win the Trojan War, then in its ninth grueling year.

What did this slender fable of loyalty, abandonment, expediency and revenge say to audiences in Ireland when Heaney's version debuted in 1990? And what, in the new Rep staging by prominent director Tina Landau, might it say to an American audience today?

Heaney, 68, first encountered the Philoctetes story at university, via the essay "The Wound and the Bow" by Edmund Wilson.

"Wilson saw Philoctetes — a man with a wound, wounded by his society, who proves in the end to be the one who is vital to that society — as a figure of the Romantic artist," explained Heaney, in a written response to e-mailed questions from The Seattle Times.

But it wasn't until decades later that Heaney, whose acclaimed poetry collections include the 2006 volume "District and Circle," put his own stamp on the fable.

In the 1980s, as a director of Ireland's Field Day Theatre Company (cofounded by playwright Brian Friel and actor Stephen Rea), Heaney decided to adapt the Sophocles text.

"By then I was coming under some slight pressure to deliver a play for the company. So when I discovered that the action of 'Philoctetes' involved an exploration of the tension between an individual's need to be true to himself and his feeling of loyalty to his group/cause ... I was inspired to try my hand at a version of the play."

He found the dilemma Sophocles dramatized akin to one "experienced in those troubled years [of the 1980s] by people of intelligence and sensitivity, on both sides of the political divide in Northern Ireland."

A native son of rural County Derry in Northern Ireland, Heaney set out to create "an actable script, in verse, which would be faithful to the sense of the original."

Working from several existing English translations of "Philoctetes," he hoped his own version "would allow a Northern Irish audience to recognize aspects of their own predicament in what was going on the stage."

Heaney could not have anticipated that an added speech he wrote for the Greek chorus — beginning with the phrase "Human beings suffer" — would take on its own life. It "would be quoted by all the principal figures in the Northern Ireland peace process," he recounted.

Heaney adds that former U.S. President Bill Clinton, who helped broker the 1998 peace agreement, and Irish Republican leader Gerry Adams still recite from memory several ringing lines of the passage: "Once in a lifetime / The longed-for tidal wave / Of justice can rise up / And hope and history rhyme." (Read the full text of this oft-quoted speech online: www.seattletimes.com/entertainment.)

Though the speech is reprinted often, full productions of "The Cure at Troy" have been sporadic. The only major Northwest staging before Seattle Rep's was the play's American premiere, in 1995, by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

Landau admits that making a Greek tragedy sing out from a modern stage, speaking fluently to present-day concerns, is a challenge for any American director.

Best known here for her hit mounting of William Saroyan's "The Time of Your Life" at Seattle Rep, Landau said "The Cure at Troy" is "one of the hardest things I've done in a while — not technically, but feeling out how to crack the material, and make it seem spontaneous and thoroughly human."

From the first, Landau "loved the play as a text, but I was nervous about how to bring it to life. Would it be dramatic enough? Would my production be too polite, too pretentious?

"But I'm thankful that the play has just surprised me over and over with how much it blossoms when you speak and perform it."

This is not Landau's first stab at a modern interpretation of Greek tragedy. But here she has departed from her freewheeling stagings of Charles L. Mee's collage-style treatment of Greek classics — including a student version of Mee's "The Trojan Women," guest-directed by Landau at the University of Washington in 1998.

In "The Cure at Troy," she is stressing Heaney's elegant language, an original music score by Josh Schmidt (the chorus sings most of their lines, as the ancients reportedly did) and an "expressive set" by designer Blythe Quinlan. Landau describes it as "an extraordinary, tall slope with real rocks" representing the rugged Greek isle where Philoctetes (portrayed here by Boris McGiver) ekes out an existence in exile.

"The play describes a world that's harsh, raw, aching. I wanted a set that would unite the poetic language with the terrain of the play. We've got the characters slipping, sliding and climbing all over those rocks."

Thematically, Landau said, "for me the story's very much about wounds, both physical and psychic, and what happens when a person, a group of people, a society, decides to cast one of their own aside.

"It's also about the tension between the desire to follow one's own heart, and one's duty to their government."

Though the war in Iraq is not referenced, Landau says the parallel with the Trojan War is striking and inevitable.

"The template of the Sophocles play, which Heaney follows exactly, is that in the midst of a very long war, questioned for its purpose and morality, a young man [Neoptolemus, played by Seth Numrich] is asked to do something that's against what he believes in his gut is right."

She also sees a connection here to wounded Iraq War veterans returning to the U.S. "The play looks at the way we treat a human when she or he is of use to some effort, and then the way we treat them when we don't need them for that purpose anymore."

Though Heaney did not write "The Cure of Troy" with those particular warriors in mind, he believes the play brings up "perennial questions."

And even if it cannot "solve the questions, just being presented with them in dramatic form is like being given coordinates," he wrote to The Seattle Times. "We see that other people once arrived at the same point of consciousness, at a similar intersection of lines of longitude and latitude in human understanding, and that in itself is a help."

To elucidate the point, Heaney quoted a fellow poet — an American. "This is what Robert Frost once called, 'a momentary stay against confusion.' "

Misha Berson: mberson@seattletimes.com