Phone Homer’s Classic(al) Power Relations for the Internet Age

Michelle Ellsworth’s 2012 “On the Boards” Seattle production of her solo performance piece, Phone Homer, traces a contemporary Clytemnestra’s increasingly tragic response to the Trojan War’s horrors - as mediated through her online browsing, web shopping, and video chats - in order to ask questions about the relationship between canonical textual narrative (including the power relations it encodes) and contemporary consumer-driven online consciousness. The production, viewed here as a video recording of a live “On the Boards” production, is marked by larger than life computer screens and video calls with other characters such as: Agamemnon, Aegisthus, and Helen.