Jay Hopkins and John Hunter’s The Iliad, The Odyssey, And All of Greek Mythology in 99 Minutes or Less (IOGM from here on out) has to be an incredibly taxing play to perform, as each of the five actors plays a multitude of roles, each demanding its own character. The actor with the fewest number of distinct characters plays seventeen, while the top two play thirty characters each. The actors in the State College Community Theatre (SCCT) production, directed by Tom McClary, met this challenge exceedingly well, putting on an incredibly funny show that moved—as it says on the tin—through Homer’s epic poems and through much of Greek mythology.

The content of the play is reasonably straightforward given the name. The show opens with one of the actors setting a timer, to the chagrin of the rest, who protest that they’re still rehearsing and haven’t even learned all their lines yet. But the timer has begun. Act I and II each begin with various mythological stories told through a series of styles—talk shows, game shows, dating shows, etc. before moving to the major Homeric works: The Iliad in Act I and The Odyssey in Act II. The performance moves at a breakneck pace, hitting the key info from each mythological element and putting a humorous spin on it, often through word association, caricature, or situational irony. Each of the characters is brought to life through the small five-person cast, playing between them a total of 130 different characters.

For the SCCT production, important or recurring characters had distinctive props or catchphrases to help distinguish them. For instance, when Rob Arnold played Zeus, he wore a crown of gold leaves, and when he played Achilles, he carried a Greek soldier’s helmet. When Heidi Cole played Aphrodite, she wore a red feather boa. Andy Ogrinc probably had the most notable catchphrases, between Hermes’ “That’s how I roll” and Diomedes’ “Diomedes rules!” With such a whirlwind of characters, these recurring elements helped audiences keep some of the characters straight.

However, there were also individual characters that stood out in particular, such as Margaret Higgins’ Semele, lover of Zeus and mother (partially) of Dionysus. When Hera (Ian Dargitz)—whose prop cycled through several household cleaning implements—convinced Semele to demand Zeus show himself in his true godly form, she got an elaborate death scene, which Zeus urged her to perform so well it would be mentioned in the reviews (goal: achieved). The beauty of this scene was the build-up by Zeus, seating the confused looking Semele in a chair centerstage and gathering the rest of the cast around, before her (purposefully) somewhat awkward death scene.

While most of the characters kaleidoscoped back and forth, either appearing only for very short periods or returning for repeated short bits, the one lengthy amount of time spent with a single character was during Act II’s telling of The Odyssey, when Dargitz spent much of that section in character as Odysseus. The performances were just as solid and hilarious as they were in Act I, but the shift from continually shifting character focuses to an extended focus on a single character slowed down the pace of the IOGM as a whole. This is, of course, a pretty accurate reflection of the difference between The Iliad and The Odyssey, as the latter is much more singularly focused on Odysseus. But that singular focus meant the production didn’t feel like it had the frenetic energy during the Odyssey portion, which had contributed so much to the humor and power of the first Act.