‘Sesame Street’ After Dark

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By Emma Gaskill

Red Bull New York’s first home game after the World Cup on Saturday was supposed to be a welcoming, kid-friendly environment because of its “Sesame Street” theme, but rowdy adults got in the way.

New York fans were excited to finally see their team back in action as red and yellow filled the stadium. Red Bull’s mascot, Redd, was even celebrating his second birthday with fellow sports mascots from around the country, and special guest Elmo.

Although the night was meant to be special, New York fans were quickly disappointed as Charlotte scored two quick goals before the tenth minute. Naturally, the adults in the stadium became angry with the performance of their team. 

Not everyone felt the same amount of anger. A few rows into section 225, there were kids no older than ten or eleven enjoying their night. But the emotions of frustrated grown-up fans caused those kids to move seats, leaving the yelling adults behind. 

 This highlighted a key divide between fans in this game: Kids versus adults.

Both groups handled Saturday’s game differently, specifically the losing, and their reactions weren’t necessarily mixing. 

In a game centered around kids, there were adults who clearly disregarded the audience around them. They shouted at refs about calls, or the lack thereof, that they didn’t agree with. For instance, they shouted when Adri Mehmeti was sent off with a red card. The general play by the athletes also caused an uproar among fans. 

In the same 225 section, a little kid that was no older than eight or nine was simply cheering for New York, hoping that they would score goals and win the game. 

New York’s Emil Forsberg, the team captain, talked about how he liked the energy of the fans and how it brought a good feeling to the team. That same energy didn’t have a similar impact on the children in the crowd. Parents of those children now have to think about the environment they are putting their kids into at Red Bulls games. Sports games are fun, but parents also have a responsibility to their children.

Adults are going to get angry when their teams lose a game and kids are always going to be at sports games. Should these adults have reigned in their vulgarities at a game specifically marketed to kids? Maybe. But should parents know that their kids might hear some bad words at a Red Bull game? 

Definitely.

Teresa’s is a Well-Olive-Oiled Machine

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By Andres Martinez

Pizza ovens rumble and servers haul orders back and forth while a cloud of whole-wheat flour engulfs the tables, staining employees’ and customers’ clothes with a chalky finish. Hidden in busy Palmer Square, Teresa’s sits in an alcove that draws in consumers with its quaint patio area and hospitable service, emanating a simplicity so often forgotten in today’s dining and food culture.

Teresa Azario and her husband Raul Momo’s desire for a romantic and practical cafe led to Teresa’s inception. Teresa’s serves as an intimate space for their customers and a bridge to share their culinary vision of fresh Mediterranean dishes. Teresa’s has been serving the Princeton community since 1987, opening first on Nassau Street before relocating to its current home in Palmer Square.

In the present day, Azario’s grandson, Luke Momo, has taken up the mantle of the Theresa’s brand. The restaurant operates as a subsidiary of the Terra Momo Restaurant Group, an organization founded by the family that owns several other restaurants, including Mediterra, Eno Terra and the Terra Momo Bread Company. 

Momo stresses that Teresa’s love for ambiance and giving guests a great meal helps them “build those meaningful life moments.” He emphasizes the efforts put into maintaining a cordial, welcoming ecosystem and a high standard of etiquette among all staff. The clean, modern pizzeria aesthetic is dressed up in a slightly chic style with 1960s Hollywood actresses lining the walls, their faces ranging from stoic to playful. Sparse, art new deco Italian graphic advertisements compete for the space as well, but cannot outshine the sheer radiance of Sophia Loren’s glistening cheekbones. Though the shoddy, plastic tomatoes that lined the table are a bit tacky, the overall ambiance (supported by the gentle sounds of salsa music like El Gran Combo de Puerto Rico and Marc Anthony) kept visitor expectations as optimistic as can be.

Being an Italian restaurant, Teresa’s is cursed with the affliction of the mandatory margherita pizza, a fixture on the menu of any successful Italian red-sauce joint. Yet servers delivered a dish that was earthy and fresh, as if each ingredient was grown in fertile volcanic soil, bringing its petrichor with it. Also fresh were the restaurant’s two celebrated pasta dishes: balsamico and lumache alla vodka. The former is a fusion of grilled chicken, balsamic vinegar and rigatoni, the product of a chef’s experiments, while the latter consists of the pancetta, lumache and melty grana that make up Teresa’s unique take on vodka sauce. 

The service and hospitality, though not tailored to any single customer’s specifications, had the warmth of a mom-and-pop restaurant with a staff dynamic pulled from sitcoms, featuring chatty, bright-eyed servers and a resolute executive chef barking orders. This dynamic is crucial to keeping Teresa’s running. 

“You actually want to serve everyone on your crew so they feel like you’re not telling them what to do,” Momo said. “You want to be in there with them and have a lot of empathy for their situation.” Though not revolutionary, it is an effective strategy, delivered with enough sincerity and commitment over the years to grow this once small family-owned pizzeria into a Princetonian staple, employing and keeping far more staff than Teresa could ever have imagined. 

In an increasingly trend-focused dining culture, Teresa’s is a local legend. Its simplicity comes with trade-offs: It doesn’t try to innovate in the ways of HeyTea or La La Land Café, but by veering away from the latest niche pick and refining its widely loved classics, the restaurant permits chefs to dabble in Mediterranean twists. 

Resisting the temptation to trendiness is a highlight of Teresa’s. It demonstrates cognizance of their brand and customer base. Their reach is primarily local, and they understand their position in the Princeton dining ecosystem. Teresa’s is a local centerpiece, stringent not about presentation, speediness or exquisite cuisine, but rather the beauty of their craft, inside and outside the kitchen.

At Teresa’s, the Tomato Doesn’t Fall Far From the Vine

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By Aeryn Bautista

Tale padre, tale figlio.

This is Italy’s version of “like father, like son,” a saying that Luke Momo lives by. As the leader of Teresa’s Pizza and Wine Bar, a trattoria nestled in the heart of Princeton, New Jersey, Momo carries on his grandmother’s legacy of serving Italian cuisine at a place that welcomes newcomers and keeps regulars coming back. 

“It is definitely an honor and a privilege, something I enjoy a lot,” Momo said. “I’m so grateful for the staff — incredible staff — we have to execute this vision.”

In the mid 1970s, Teresa Azario and her husband, Raul Momo, established the first Teresa’s Caffé in New York. Their children Raoul, Carlo, Anthony, Caroline and Venanzio, who represent the five spoons in the business logo, expanded it in the following decades to locations throughout New Jersey. 

Luke, Raoul’s son, grew up eating his grandmother’s traditional Italian dishes and visiting diverse eateries alongside his father. These experiences became second nature to him. “It’s sort of like… how the goldfish doesn’t know that they’re in water,” he said, referring to his relationship with food. “It was just so saturated within my experience.”

Teresa’s serves beloved entrées, including margherita pizza, balsamico pasta and shell-shaped lumache alla vodka. At the Palmer Square location, photos of Italian celebrities, such as actress Sophia Loren and director Federico Fellini, line the cool white walls. 

Teresa’s black and white portrait joins them, greeting customers as soon as they enter.

“She has a very big personality,” Momo said. “So we thought it would be a funny joke to put her with all these other movie stars.”

Momo speaks as fondly about his grandmother as he does the trattoria he leads. Although he once pursued filmmaking, he ultimately took up the family restaurant mantle.

Luke shares his grandmother’s dedication to delivering exceptional service to his community and beyond. He encourages his management team to read Danny Meyer’s Setting the Table, a book that emphasizes how cordiality gives way to a thriving restaurant.

“Hospitality is the feeling that you have — a warm and welcome feeling in a restaurant,” he said. “This is the experience we try to give people from the time they walk in to the time that they leave.”

Along with marketing, monitoring customer preferences through food-tasting events and keeping track of finances, Momo is responsible for conducting the “orchestra” of customers and staff in his diner, ensuring that “everyone’s on the same note at the same moment.”

He takes his position as seriously as the king of Ithaca did in The Odyssey.

“The whole thing that Odysseus goes through — I was like, that’s actually somewhat like being a leader,” he said. “Like [director Christopher Nolan] actually accurately showed you really care about all the people who work for you and you’re trying to make sure they’re all doing well.”

Momo’s privy to movies like Nolan’s every day, he argues. They happen “here in this space.” 

“Teresa’s is a great spot for the communal aspect,” he said. “We have the bar — people can come to socialize there, they come to the tables, they bring their friends and family and there’s this magic moment that happens when you seek the whole dining room and you see all these little worlds. They are all little islands unto themselves.”

The kitchen tells its own tale. At its head is Terrance Strong, Teresa’s executive chef. 

“It doesn’t have to be glamorous, but whatever it is, it needs to be consistent,” Strong said. “Because that’s what people are coming here for. They’re coming here for the food.”

Strong conducts a different song than Momo’s, adjusting the tune depending on his staff’s needs. Having worked at Teresa’s for almost three decades, he considers the team a second family.

“You know the old story of [how] you’ve never worked a day in your life, right?” he said, reminiscing on his 28-year career. 

Strong puts honesty, accountability and flexibility at the forefront of his work. From clocking in at 7 a.m. to check equipment and start the dough — the “lifeblood” of the pizzas — to clocking out after a long day of cooking, Strong fosters a positive environment for his junior chefs and customers.

“We’re always trying to put our footprint or fingerprint on the restaurant that we’re currently in,” Strong said. “And we’re always trying to make it better.”

Teresa’s encourages the community to continue enjoying its Italian cuisine while creating their own stories — spending time with lovers, strangers and everyone in between.

“We can’t be great without the greatness of others,” Momo said. “I really think the love and care that our people show for each other, hopefully that speaks to itself and the love that Teresa herself has for giving people good food and a place to enjoy themselves and have a nice time and build those meaningful life moments, meaningful memories.”

DataOne Cools the Servers, but Heats the Debate

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By Audrey Gao

As artificial intelligence (AI) spreads into daily life, so do the buildings that make it possible. 

One of those buildings is DataOne in Vineland, New Jersey. It is currently under construction, set for completion and on track for delivery in December 2026. However, the center is facing backlash over issues such as excessive utility usage. 

Data centers are the industrial backbone of AI. They are facilities packed with servers that store, process and transfer the data behind everything from chatbots to cloud storage. Building one at this large scale means large amounts of electricity, large amounts of water for cooling and, increasingly, large amounts of local pushback. Around 80 data centers across at least 27 municipalities are either operational or soon will be across the state. 

Matt Williams, chairman of a grassroots nonprofit group called Sustain SJ (South Jersey), has spent the past year trying to get straight answers from DataOne, the data center sitting on a 109-acre plot in Cumberland County. 

In the summer of 2025, Williams heard people “talking and murmuring.” “I was a little upset about hearing news of the data center then,” he said. “It was being built at that time already.” 

Since then, the group has grown from a handful of residents in a diner to, by Williams’ count, close to 13,000 followers on Instagram and Facebook combined. “What the group looks like now looks a lot different than what it was then,” said Williams. “We met in a diner, and it was a group of residents, and we were honestly just kind of discussing and learning everything that we’ve learned about the development.”

Williams’ concerns start with the ground underneath the site. The city of Vineland draws its drinking water from the Kirkwood-Cohansey Aquifer and the DataOne site sits inside a Wellhead Protected Area that shields it. “Any contamination that hits the ground is now our drinking water,” Williams said. 

His second concern is the facility’s power source. Reporting from WHYY shows that the plant is designed to generate 85 percent of its own energy on site, using natural gas piped in from an existing line, with the rest supplied by Vineland Municipal Utilities and Atlantic City Electric. Accounts of the facility’s total output varies: WHYY has described it as a 350-megawatt “hyperscale” facility while the New Jersey Globe reported construction of a 300-megawatt center. Either way, Williams said it dwarfs the city’s own municipal capacity.

DataOne, for its part, presents a different picture of the project. Its Linkedin page describes its technology as “designed to operate in harmony with local environmental and social ecosystems” with “net-zero consumption across water, energy, and air emissions.” DataOne’s CEO, Charles-Antoine Beyney, has made similar arguments to New Jersey reporters, comparing the facility’s emissions to “200 cows” or a “small logistic center from Amazon with 150 trucks” and calling the project “something that is not creating that much disturbance.” He has also said the center plans to pull moisture from the air using waste heat, drawing 20 million gallons a year without touching the aquifer. 

Williams said that kind of reassurance is exactly what Sustain SJ has struggled to get written in stone. “We asked them for two weeks straight, ‘How is the water treated, where is it discharged?’” he said. The response, he said, was never more specific than “we will follow all regulations.” “It’s not an answer in our opinion,” Williams said. “We need a more direct answer.”

He also pointed to a similar pattern in how the project’s power ambitions grew. Beyney told the New Jersey Globe, “The original plan for this AI factory was to build a 50-megawatt one and get the power from the grid. However, as the project got larger, so did our ambitions and we opted for a ‘behind the meter’ strategy, based on gas for a 300-plus megawatt infrastructure.” The sixfold jump from the original pitch is the abrupt pattern Williams said has defined the whole project. 

Sustain SJ has since built a coalition that includes the New Jersey Environmental Justice Alliance, Food & Water Watch and the Pinelands Alliance, along with organizers in Marana, Arizona, who are fighting data centers in a similar capacity. 

Vineland’s planning board is expected to revisit DataOne’s approval on Aug. 5, 2026, the next test of whether a year of organizing changes the outcome. Williams is direct about what he thinks the fight has already accomplished, even if it doesn’t stop the project’s construction. 

“It would have been operational in a more disastrous way,” he said. “Now it’s just less disastrous.”

Can Vineland Advocates Flip the Switch on DataOne?

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By Michael Suman

On the south side of Vineland, New Jersey, the skeleton of a building rises over the aquifer that the city’s 61,000 residents drink from. When it’s finished, it will demand up to 350 megawatts of power. The city that surrounds it has a capacity of 133. 

Once the site of ballfields and a nine-hole golf course, the land was leveled for the construction of DataOne, a 2.6-million-square-foot A.I. data center campus backed by the Amsterdam-based Nebius Group under a $17.4 billion contract to supply computing power to Microsoft. The center is approved, but the conversation is far from over. Vineland resident Matt Williams is working to shut it down. 

One year ago, Williams wouldn’t have known where to start. The chair of Sustain South Jersey, an organization dedicated to responsible development, accountability in local government and environmental stewardship, Williams had previously never read a municipal agenda. Now, he refreshes the Vineland City Council website every morning.

When Williams and his neighbors first saw the construction site, some of them mistook it for a new golf clubhouse. “At one point, it was a golf course that had one event on the property, and then they just leveled it and started building this thing,” Williams said. “They thought it was the start of a clubhouse or something.”

It was not a clubhouse. It was a hyperscale data center, sited on a wellhead protection area above the Kirkwood-Cohansey aquifer, the groundwater Vineland drinks. “It’s our groundwater. It’s our drinking water,” Williams said. Anything that reaches the ground there, he argues, reaches the water. 

When he and his neighbors brought their questions to a city council meeting in November 2025, they were told they were too late and that they did not understand how government worked. 

In one narrow sense, the council was right. The planning board had signed off on the campus more than a year earlier, and steel was already going up. The group learned the hard way that an agenda item posted one day could disappear the next. 

In December, an item surfaced that was not an approval of anything. It was a $6.2 million loan from the city to the developer, drawn from Vineland’s Urban Enterprise Zone revolving fund to help pay for two cranes that were already standing on the lot. The vote, first set for December 9, was postponed to December 23. 

The delay was meant to cool things off. It did the opposite. “That just gave us two more weeks to get more people,” Williams said. On December 23, the chamber hit fire capacity. The council approved the loan anyway. (The loan offer was later rescinded.)

As time went on, Williams learned just how much the city had invested in the project. More items followed on the agendas: requests for tax abatements, permits, and underneath all of it, the redevelopment overlay that had made the site possible in the first place. 

The overlay, Williams said, let the developer avoid Vineland’s zoning map, clearing a 2.6-million-square-foot campus without the scrutiny that a heavy-industrial site would ordinarily draw. Williams thinks a data center belongs in heavy industry and only as a conditional use, “so people don’t feel like they’re caught off guard.” 

Exhausted by his dealings with the Vineland City Council, Williams turned to other elected officials for help. He emailed Congressman Jeff Van Drew, who had helped stop offshore wind turbines when residents objected. He tried the state legislature and his own mayor as well. 

What he wanted from them was simple: answers about the water.

Last October, the project’s engineers filed a plan to draw up to two million gallons of water a day. Pressed, the developer called it a worst case scenario and said that water would be recycled. New Jersey is under a statewide drought warning. 

DataOne was scheduled to be interviewed for this article but withdrew two days beforehand and declined to comment.

Williams’ work has come at a personal cost. At the same time he was challenging the data center, he was laid off. He knows that he has given his all to a fight he may not win. “It’s a difficult job,” he said. “Weighing the balance of my sense of justice and my sense of responsibility.”

The building stands today, mostly finished, on the south side of town, and the city still hasn’t cast its final vote. A planning board meeting is set for August 5. 

Williams puts his odds at one percent. It’s still higher than zero.

True West Explores the Strengths and Weaknesses of Brotherhood

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By Asmaa Mohamed

True West, a play by Sam Shepard showing at the Princeton Summer Theater, draws in audiences by portraying the reality of a dark, atypical relationship between two brothers. Heavily influenced by Shepard’s life story, the play explores how addiction can destroy a family, framing it as a genetic trait that cannot be escaped. This cycle is hammered into the plot. 

The complex dynamic between brothers Austin and Lee is fueled by jealousy. One brother, Austin, has an Ivy League degree and a big job as a screenwriter; the other, Lee, is struggling with homelessness and lives in the desert. Their tense dynamic is shown by how the brothers react to one another. An envious Lee becomes triggered by Austin’s success and begins to show abusive tendencies. Yet the play is unique in how it depicts the brothers as having a relationship that cannot be understood by others. They have their own little bubble — even if it’s rough, it’s what their comfort space is. 

By focusing on the dynamic between Austin and Lee, True West is subverting the stereotype of the typical suburban American family. Shepard does this by showing what it’s like to see the brothers behind closed doors and how they act towards one another within the safety of their home.

Notably, the events of the play take place in Austin and Lee’s childhood home, playing on the audience’s expectations of comfort and nostalgia. The dim lighting in the house creates an eerie and unsettling mood. The music parallels the evolution of the brothers’ dynamic. It’s quiet and settled in the beginning, then progresses into sharp, loud and tense sounds when the brothers are arguing or yelling. 

In a talkback, Princeton professor R.N. Sandberg told the audience that Austin’s car (which Lee keeps borrowing without permission) is symbolic of the freedom that both characters are chasing. They ultimately don’t experience that freedom, since Austin eventually kills Lee. When Lee comes back and the pair begin fighting, we don’t know if it’s actually Lee, his ghost or Austin’s coping mechanism after he strangled his brother. It’s a losing fight that they are both stuck in, like staring into your reflection and wanting to be that version of yourself that’s just out of reach.

For me, the play expressed the real, raw experience of what it’s like to have a sibling. It’s beautiful to have the possibility of friendship, but it’s hard to grow up with them, too — especially because mental illness, trauma and addiction can make that sibling bond either grow stronger or break. Yet the play missed an opportunity to go deeper. While it hints at the brothers’ trauma because of their father, the beginning of their lives is not shown. Nor does it include much about their father. While Shepard’s goal is to capture the tense bond of the brothers, the play fails to fully depict to the audience why they are the way they are. 

The Odyssey: A Case Study in Male Ingenuity

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By Mohamed Omer

From the mind that brought you the genre-bending Inception, existentially terrifying Interstellar, and cult classic The Dark Knight, director, writer, and producer Christopher Nolan spearheads a feature film reimagination of a centuries-old tale: The Odyssey. The movie’s main cast includes Tom Holland as Telemachus, son of Odysseus; Robert Pattinson as Antinous, a hard-headed suitor looking to challenge the throne; and Oscar winners Anne Hathaway and Matt Damon as Penelope and Odysseus, Queen and King of Ithaca, respectively. 

In his undertaking of The Odyssey — a Greek epic that is notoriously controversial to translate and adapt — Nolan forgoes consistency and character development to devote ample screentime to Odysseus’ voyage, producing a movie that fails the Bechdel test with flying colors.

Nolan’s Odyssey begins: A bard, played by Travis Scott, delivers an ambiguous warning about a man, a king, a son, a war. Penelope reveals that her husband Odysseus has been missing since his army ambushed the kingdom of Troy. In his absence, her suitors have made themselves comfortable in the castle’s basement, feasting ceaselessly on her food. However, the introduction to this movie is littered with mismatched cuts, unconvincing fight scenes, and dispassionate line delivery. The film spends its first act fighting against immersion — until Odysseus embarks on his journey. 

Suddenly, Nolan can do nuanced cinematography. He is thorough in following the all-male crew led by Odysseus and the details of the trials they endure. The B plot follows Telemachus as he reckons with the absence of his father, but unfortunately, Telemachus comes off less as a hopeful son and more as a rookie broadcaster reading off a teleprompter. Despite this fact, the Ithaca storyline centers him and resigns Penelope to the C plot, where her entire arc is built upon her suffering.

Penelope spends twenty years loyal to the King while he rampages land, gods and myth. Her characterization is not historical accuracy as much as it is objectification. She does not live outside of being an accessory to the suitors, to Telemachus, to Odysseus. Her personhood is acknowledged briefly by Antinous, when he reveals to the viewer that Penelope weaves thread in the morning and unravels it at night, so as to delay her marriage to a suitor. 

Here is her savior! Nolan couldn’t sacrifice thirty extra seconds of screentime for the cause of showing Penelope’s nightly unraveling, but he had time to write up a monologue for Pattinson to deliver. A similar phenomena occurs with Circe, a witch who transforms Odysseus’ men into pigs; her story is told to her by Odysseus, in a moment meant to display infinite male wisdom.

The Odyssey gives its male characters the privilege of intelligence, delegating their female counterparts the roles of damsel, villain or servant. There is no instance — save for one contested dialogue between Penelope and Melantho — where the women in this film conversate without centering men. In spinning The Odyssey for modern times, Nolan neglects the fact that women are people, insteading pushing Odysseus’ story to the forefront — making what could’ve been a great film a disappointment.

The Odyssey: An Epic Journey

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By Kaelyn Tan

I go into every Christopher Nolan movie wondering what new precedent he will set for cinema. Nolan’s brave undertaking of Homer’s classic epic, The Odyssey, is no different. Nolan’s retelling of the story was phenomenal, but not over-the-top. Even so, the characters were diluted and lacked depth.

The Odyssey is the movie of the summer, garnering widespread online attention and a historic box-office run, grossing an estimated $652 million in its first ten days of release. The film follows Odysseus (Matt Damon) as he navigates the waters and land to return home to his wife, Penelope (Anne Hathaway). He encounters monsters, witches and the dead in the years following the Trojan War. While there were some parts of the story that only Greek mythology enthusiasts could fully appreciate on first watch, Nolan masterfully tells a complex story that appeals to a general audience.

The movie particularly excelled at exploring themes of trauma, grief and war through a nonlinear structure, slowly revealing pieces of Odysseus’ complete journey. As the story unfolded, it was as if we were also experiencing the shock, depression and remorse along with Odysseus during his return home. In one scene, he travels to the border of the underworld, where he speaks with the dead souls who perished in the Trojan War. Odysseus learns harsh truths about the fallen heroes and is haunted by deep emotional grief — and the violence he perpetuated. 

In addition to their view into Odysseus’ internal world, the audience can also see the impact of the story’s events on Odysseus’ loved ones, especially Penelope. Upon Odysseus’ disappearance, Penelope is bombarded by over 100 aggressive suitors who assume Odysseus has died. She is essentially left alone to fortify the kingdom by stalling the suitors for twenty years and protecting her son Telemachus (Tom Holland) from external threats. (The suitors also planned to murder him.) Scenes between Penelope and Telemachus are mainly arguments about Telemachus’ immaturity and their approach to the aggressive suitors. 

As much as I loved the movie, most of the characters, especially Odysseus and Penelope, were two-dimensional and stiff. Matt Damon’s Odysseus is flattened into a conventional good character, rather than preserving the cunning, sometimes merciless personality that shines through in Homer’s epic. He is portrayed as a guilt-ridden man who struggles to lead his crew and make executive decisions, thereby watering down Odysseus’ original, colorful traits. Penelope’s character growth and influence were largely stunted. The movie largely neglects Penelope’s active strategic plots and only focuses on her role as Odysseus’ loyal wife at home,  as if Penelope’s sole purpose is to function as a thematic checkpoint rather than showing her as an individual. The film could have included more scenes that demonstrated Penelope’s resilience and decision-making. 

While the characters were sanitized, Nolan has successfully delivered a massive story on a massive scale to the audience, making The Odyssey the latest in a line of movies by the director that have raised expectations for the cinematic world. 

The Oddity of the Odyssey: Polyphemus

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By Dakshina Lazo-Escobar

Peculiar yet surreal, the 2026 film adaptation of The Odyssey, directed by Christopher Nolan, was a surprise in its own right. By utilizing motifs like the melodic strum of the bow and the rush of a fight, Nolan manages to condense twelve thousand lines of plot into an unbelievable three-hour movie. Yet nothing could have prepared viewers for Polyphemus, aka the Cyclops (Bill Irwin).

The audience’s first glance at Polyphemus is during the first trial of The Odyssey. Following his victory in the Trojan War, Odysseus (Matt Damon) changes course to journey home, where his wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) and his son Telemachus (Tom Holland) await his return. However, as his ship touches the ocean and his crew sets out on their expedition home, they quickly realize that the brutalities of the war they incited are not unpunishable.

This harsh awakening arrives when they unknowingly make their way into Polyphemus’ cave, where they soon become his prey. Polyphemus is a beast. He is not crafted like a Greek god, nor is he as cute as his sheep; rather, he fully resembles an alien-like entity intentionally meant to disturb watchers. Nonetheless, his horror-like design makes him very appealing.

Before settling on a visual concept, Nolan and his team mulled over various depictions of cyclopes. Specifically, they turned their attention towards the imbalance of their facial features in other forms of media — a characteristic they desperately wanted to change. After much back and forth, the team settled on rotating his face sideways, ultimately focusing on the lopsidedness to make it uncanny. 

What makes Polyphemus such an effective character, though, is the fact that he is designed after Spanish painter Francisco Goya’s artwork Saturn Devouring His Son. Goya’s piece depicts the Roman god Saturn after a prophecy predicts that one of his children will steal the throne from him. Frightened and outraged, Saturn prompts his wife, Cybelle, to bring him every child she has, then eats them to prevent the premonition from coming true. When Polyphemus consumes one of Odysseus’ men, he crouches down into the same stance Saturn takes, echoing the painting in how he bites down on the man’s flesh.

Nolan implemented the atmospheric horror found in that artwork into the character of Polyphemus, but managed to add more. The tale bleeds into the epic, a foreboding technique which says more about the story without the need for more details. By doing so, Nolan further explores themes of time, death, destiny, and human cruelty — all aspects that are critical to The Odyssey. These messages are all tethered to Odysseus: He loses twenty years of his life out at sea, witnesses the deaths of thousands of his men, resists a forced destiny by confronting god-like trials and faces the consequences of his brutality.

Polyphemus is more than a trial. Nolan’s stylistic choices make him an unspoken prophecy. In his design of the cyclops, Nolan unfolds the future tension of The Odyssey.

True West: A Burden on Stage

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By Ariana Estrada

The play True West, by playwright Sam Shepard, is situated twenty miles from Los Angeles and San Gabriel, California. In it, brothers Austin (Jordan Rashdan) and Lee (Joseph McLean) are trying to navigate who they are while caught between alcoholism and a bad family dynamic. Yet this play goes beyond the two brothers, hinting at the idea that there are multiple identities hidden within us. The play is driven by humorous lines and the characters exhibiting emotional switches when exploring their identities; but suffers by promoting the unrealistic idea that every household needs a woman to maintain the home.

The Princeton Summer Theater’s production of True West, directed by Wasif Sami, begins with Austin typing on his typewriter in a room filled with yellow, dimmed lighting. Suddenly Lee bursts into the kitchen after coming back from his home in the desert, causing a commotion. He grabs a beer from the fridge and makes himself at home. This distracts Austin from the script he is writing, and Lee scares Austin into writing a Wild West script for him after throwing beer cans across the kitchen and screaming in Austin’s face. As Lee bangs on counters and backs his brother into a corner, the audience becomes similarly fearful, practically jumping out of their sets. Lee creates a sense of suspense about what is going to happen next — will he act with his anger and become violent? 

Later, the brothers create a mess, spreading papers all over the floor, spilling beer and scattering cans all around the kitchen. According to the director, the mess in the kitchen was meant to represent a home without a mother present. However, not every household has a mother, and many parents do not raise irresponsible men. The irresponsibility is not because households do not have a woman present, but rather because of the incapabilities of some parents who raise kids. Shepard was raised in an unstable household and struggled with alcoholism, the same as his father. Shepard’s mother and father were present in his childhood and he still went down a difficult path. Whether or not you have certain parents in your life, it is unrealistic to blame them for your actions. I believe that the director should have recontextualized the play in order to accommodate modern times and realities. 

As the play continues, the brothers switch their goals. Lee is attempting to create a Western script while Austin wants to explore the desert, steals toasters and operates chaotically. It fits in with the constant theme of the brothers attempting to conquer each other’s lives. The actors embody Shepard’s play by successfully etching self-identity as a deeper theme of the play. Yet the ideas behind the set, and ideas of household as espoused by the director, are outdated and could be offensive to viewers.