1
ALFRESCO
EPIC
A
t six o’clock on a warm Sunday
morning, Joseph Medeiros, an actor
from Queens with a few Broadway cred-
its, had just ridden his mountain bike
across the Williamsburg Bridge into
Manhattan, carrying a big black food-
delivery bag, the kind that usually holds
pizza. This one was stuffed with forty-
two theatrical props, including a water-
melon, a loom, a rain stick, a goddess
headdress, and a Cyclops eye fashioned
out of leather. “This weighs at least fifty
pounds,” Medeiros said, setting the bag
down on the grass in East River Park.
He was sweating through his T-shirt.
The props were for his one-man per-
formance of Book II of the Odyssey, set
to begin at six-thirty. A few years ago,
Medeiros decided that he would mem-
orize Homer’s epic poem in ancient
Greek—twelve thousand one hundred
and nine lines—and perform it in the
course of twenty-four hours. “I’ve al-
ways wanted some sort of large-scale
solo performance, the idea of a little
man in a big world,” he said. He later
opted to stage each of the twenty-four
books individually, in outdoor locations
around New York. Book II was the proj-
ect’s public début (Medeiros performed
Book I for a private indoor audience in
2020), and he’d decided to stage it near
a cluster of trees beside the East River
Park amphitheatre. “Someone recom-
mended the amphitheatre,” he said. “But
it’s not welcoming. There’s, like, gravel
and dirt, and the stage itself is rough
cement.” But he liked the idea of per-
forming near the East River, in the
morning sun.
Medeiros, who is thirty-seven, has
gray-blue eyes and dark-brown hair.
When he was a child, in Modesto, Cal-
ifornia, his parents would take him on
road trips to Los Angeles and flights to
New York so that he could try out for
musicals. He made his Broadway début
at the age of eleven, in “Big, the Musi-
cal.” Recently, he’s been in Edward Al-
bee’s “Three Tall Women” and ClaudiaRankine’s “Help.” While doing “Wicked”
in Chicago, in 2007, he spent his free time
teaching himself ancient Greek. Ten years
later, he enrolled in a classics program at
Columbia. “I translated a little Emerson
into Greek as my final project,” he said.
In December, Medeiros began mem-
orizing the more than four hundred lines
of Book II. It took him six months. “I
made recordings of seven to twelve lines
at a time, and I’d listen to them while
riding my bike around New York,” he
said. He earned money by babysitting
and working for the census.
As he unpacked his props, joggers
passed by, and barges glided up and down
the East River, which was more glassy-
bright than wine-dark. By the amphi-
theatre, a woman completing her dawn
constitutional seemed to be shaking de-
mons from her body; a sinewy man prac-
ticed slow, balletic movements, like rit-
uals to greet the rising sun. Three guests
took seats on the grass.
At six-thirty, the performance began.
Medeiros used visual cues to help lis-
teners understand the story, including a
sign that read “Telemachus is sent
on a journey” and an array of nine
T-shirts with heat-transferred letters
that he rapidly changed in and out of,
to designate the speaker. Like Odysseus,
he navigated his share of distractions.
In the opening scene of Book II (in
which “two swift dogs” follow Telema-
chus), a couple of pups on the loose
sprinted across the grass, their panting
owner in pursuit. During the last third
of the book (Telemachus preparing to
load the vessel for his journey), a sun-
rise party boat drifted by on the river,
blasting house music. It was seven-
twenty. Medeiros turned toward the boat
and shouted, in English, “It’s a fucking
Sunday! We’re doing ancient Greek over
here!” Then, back in character, in Greek:
“Do not go searching for danger out on
restless seas!”
As he chanted, power walkers stopped
in their tracks; a few circled the impro-
vised stage, curious. In the final scene,
Medeiros did a costume mashup—the
Telemachus T-shirt with the goddess
headdress, which spelled out “Athena”
in glitter. As he packed up his props, Jo-
seph Grochowalski, a statistician, as-
sessed the performance. “When I got
here, it was a little bit weird,” he said.
“A lot of people were exercising. But“If you’re working from home today, do you
mind if I go hang out at your office?”and his colleagues posted suggestions:
“Share your thoughts on the book you
are reading this evening?” “Can we have
more dog walking actions?”“Would
some people volunteer for building some
sandcastles?”
More than four hours later, as the
opera was nearing its end, Lapelytė sent
a final note to the tired beachgoers:
“Please make the buzz.”
—André Wheeler