FROM THE ARTISTIC DIRECTOR
WELCOME TO THE ODYSSEY OF PROFESSOR BLUME!
I’m so excited for you to experience our most recent project for Alley@Home just in time to prepare you for our production of Derek Walcott’s The Odyssey. After the success of our digital season in 2020-21, we wanted to figure out how to keep our filmed projects alive even while we went back to being fully onstage on our Hubbard and Neuhaus stages.
Charles Krohn has been a beloved member of the Resident Acting Company (now Emeritus) for decades. At the bottom of this webpage is a link to my interview with Charles which gives a great sense of his career, his incredible mind, and delightful sense of humor. For much of Charles’s acting career, he has also taught at the University of St. Thomas and one of his favorite works to teach is Homer’s Odyssey. During the darkest days of the pandemic, my heart was warmed by a photo Charles’s daughter Julia Krohn (currently playing Kathy in our production of Cowboy Bob) took of Charles teaching The Odyssey to his students over Zoom. There was something so compelling and heartening about a 91-year old professor making the pivot to online teaching during the height of the lockdown to teach the poem that he is most passionate about: the over 2500 year old poem The Odyssey. For me, it symbolized how the stories we tell each other endure even in the most challenging circumstances. This poem has endured the burning of the library of Alexandria, the dark ages, plagues, and now a global pandemic. Julia’s photo went viral on the internet and then was featured on Good Morning America.
I commissioned my longtime collaborator and friend Trevor Allen (The Creature, Chain Reactions, Tenders in the Fog) to write a play for Charles to be filmed for our Alley@Home program. The idea was that the play would be about a professor teaching The Odyssey online during the pandemic, but like Chekhov’s short play On the Harmfulness of Tobacco the idea is that through the lectures we actually learn as much about the teacher himself as we do the course he is teaching. Now Charles is not Professor Blume of course, but the story that Trevor weaves in with his analysis of The Odyssey is equally compelling. What excites me the most, however, is that it serves as the perfect companion piece to Derek Walcott’s The Odyssey and can either be watched before you see the play to prepare or after you see the play as a way of getting more deeply into it.
Like Charles, The Odyssey has been an important part of my life since I first read it when I was in my twenties. It is something I keep coming back to and I even learned Ancient Greek so that I could read it in the original. It is endlessly fascinating and for every moment I spend getting to know it better, I feel I’m rewarded a thousandfold. We are getting ready to announce our Alley All New Festival and I don’t want to scoop myself, but I will give the hint that we are doing a reading of a new play that has yet another intriguing Odyssey tie-in.
I hope you enjoy the time you spend online with Professor Blume and find it as richly rewarding as I do.
Rob Melrose
Written by
Trevor Allen
Directed and Costume Design by
Laura Moreno
Starring
Charles Krohn
Cinematography and Editing
Victoria Beauray Sagady
