The New Yorker:

At six o’clock on a warm Sunday morning, Joseph Medeiros, an actor from Queens with a few Broadway credits, 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 watermelon, 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 performance of Book II of the Odyssey, set to begin at six-thirty. A few years ago, Medeiros decided that he would memorize 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 always 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 project’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 recommended 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 performing near the East River, in the morning sun.

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