Actor and writer Paul Susi is using his decades-long experience as a social services professional and social justice activist to bring an adaptation of Homer’s The Iliad to prisons, church groups and community centers. He just returned from a New England tour of An Iliad by Denis O’Hare and Lisa Peterson, a monologue with music that condenses Homer’s Trojan War epic about heroism and the horrors of war. Susi talked with Dmae Lo Roberts about this project and his devotion to social justice work with the unhoused and the incarcerated.
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In this episode you’ll hear…
– How Paul started performing “An Iliad” at West Sylvan Middle School’s outdoor school.
“There are Ukrainian and Russian immigrants and children in those schools. And so their, their sixth grade teacher Dr. Holly Graham was teaching her sixth grade class The Iliad as a way of processing all of their rage. And that sixth grade class knew me as Badger at Camp Angelos and, and and they begged me to, to bring An Iliad to their classroom.”
– The effect “An Iliad” had on incarcerated women at a correctional facility in Wyndam, Maine.
“And we have one woman, I would say in her 60s, a white woman, shorter, she was stony-faced the whole show. I couldn’t tell if she was in it or not. But the moment she raised her hand and started, she started speaking. She was quietly weeping. She’s a mother who is serving a life sentence. She’ll never see her children or grandchildren again. And she had built walls around herself for that to protect herself, right, to, to survive her sentence.”
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– What gives him strength in his work with the unhoused community.
“Doing, doing the right thing that’s in front of you, whatever that right thing might be with whatever power you have.”
About An Iliad and The Fig Tree Committee:
- An Iliad was written by Lisa Peterson & Denis O’Hare
- Directed by Patrick Walsh
- Music composed by Anna Fritz
- Performed by Paul Susi & Anna Fritz
- Production Management by Lyndsay Hogland
- Conversation Facilitators include: Julia Waters, Emily Squires, and Douglas Detrick
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Paul Susi is a theater artist, educator, writer, social services professional, and activist. As an actor, he has appeared onstage with the NW Classical Theatre Collaborative, Anon It Moves / String House, Shaking the Tree Studios, Push Leg, The Forgery, Island Stage Left in Washington state’s San Juan Islands, Shakespeare Santa Cruz, Vermont Stage Company, Teatro Solo/Boom Arts, as well as in self-produced, original work.
Paul has served on the boards of directors for numerous cultural nonprofits, including Streetbooks and Cerimon House, as co-chair of the Multnomah County Cultural Coalition, and as executive director of Portland Actors Ensemble / Shakespeare in the Parks.
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For five years, Paul specialized in managing new emergency homeless shelters for Transition Projects. He currently serves as a conversation project facilitator for Oregon Humanities, and is working on a project commemorating Chee Gong, a migrant worker wrongfully hanged for a murder he didn’t commit in 1889, and buried in an unmarked grave at the historic Lone Fir Cemetery. Find out more about Paul and The Fig Tree Committee at: www.figtreecommittee.org.
Dmae Roberts is a two-time Peabody winning radio producer, writer and theatre artist. Her work is often autobiographical and cross-cultural and informed by her biracial identity. Her Peabody award-winning documentary Mei Mei, a Daughter’s Song is a harrowing account of her mother’s childhood in Taiwan during WWII. She adapted this radio documentary into a film. She won a second Peabody-award for her eight-hour Crossing East documentary, the first Asian American history series on public radio. She received the Dr. Suzanne Ahn Civil Rights and Social Justice award from the Asian American Journalists Association and was selected as a United States Artists (USA) Fellow. Her stage plays and essays have been published in numerous publications. She published her memoir The Letting Go Trilogies: Stories of a Mixed-Race Family in 2016. As a theatre artist, she has won two Drammys, one for her acting and one for her play Picasso In The Back Seat which also won the Oregon Book Award. Her plays have been produced in Portland, Seattle, Los Angeles, NYC and Florida. Roberts is the executive producer of MediaRites, a nonprofit multicultural production organization and co-founder of Theatre Diaspora, an Asian American/Pacific Islander non-profit theatre that started as a project of MediaRites. She created the Crossing East Archive of more than 200 hours of broadcast-quality, pan-AAPI interviews and oral histories. For 23 years, Roberts volunteered to host and produce Stage & Studio live on KBOO radio. In 2009, she started the podcast on StagenStudio.com, which continues at ArtsWatch.
