One minute the stage is bare, then there's a blackout, some noise, and suddenly the stage is full of...a poet. Not just a poet, but The Poet, the guy who is going to tell us the story of ...not The Iliad but An Iliad.

And what's better than being told a story? Nothing, especially when the teller is as dynamic and as bracing as Henry Woronicz, who plays The Poet in this adaption from Homer by Denis O'Hare and Lisa Peterson, who also directs. The language is muscular, bold and modern (and drawn from the Robert Fagles translation); it conjures the horrors of the Trojan War in vivid terms that are both epic and intimate.