In the classroom theater...

... you might consider taking a much more dramatic approach to covering that text...

ADDED: This is the set of the play we saw last night, "An Iliad." Here's the text of the play, which I just bought for myself, because I want to go over it again.  As for this wonderful production, which some of the commenters on this post have seen and are talking about, here's the description at the American Players Theater website:

This is a story you may think you know; a grand classic born on the backs of gods and warriors. But... Homer’s epic is razed and reborn through the heart of a war-weary poet (Jim DeVita, at his best both in this place and in this role). Bathed in bravery, blood and the heat of battle, the telling ravages our Poet every time. But there’s a reason he’s got the job. He may be able to make us understand. Maybe make us stop. History’s greatest battle whetted to a razor-sharp edge in a stunning night of theater....

Run time: 1 hour and 50 minutes. An Iliad will be performed without an intermission.

The actor's sheer endurance was impressive, and there was no loss of energy at any point. Using the smallness of the classroom — and its tiny props — to represent the arena of the Trojan War by some miracle created the sense that this war was all wars and one death (Hector's) was all deaths. Little things became big. A postcard burnt with a lighter became the burning of Alexandria. (I had to restrain myself from shouting "Fire!" — truthfully — in a crowded theater.) I am, you may know, drawn to the mysteries of relative size — here's my "big and small" tag — and I cannot, after 64 years of life, really get my mind around largeness. So it was extremely significant to me to see the large things explained in tininess, such as sand poured on a small tabletop to represent the final encounter between Hector and Achilles, played out in wiggling fingers.