A new musical-comedy retelling of “The Odyssey” from the York Theater Company tries to center a powerful woman but feels like a show about and for men.
For 20 long years, Penelope has waited for her husband, Odysseus, to sail home to Ithaca from the Trojan War. He was forced to go in the first place, but now the fighting has been finished for a decade and still he stays away — a king seemingly forsaking his kingdom and his queen.
The mob of creeps who began sniffing around seven years ago, salivating at the prospect of the cushy life that marriage to Penelope would bring, think it is well past time for her to choose one of them as her new husband. And, hey, who wouldn’t be drawn to these guys, really, what with their demonstrated ability to show up where they aren’t wanted, become live-in guests and spend lazy days consuming copious amounts of their hostess’s food and drink.
Also, they sing a cappella harmonies together. Relentlessly.
Penelope would like them gone, but in the meantime, she has to stave off any trip to the altar. And in “Penelope, or How the Odyssey Was Really Written,” Peter Kellogg and Stephen Weiner’s new musical-comedy retelling of the epic poem traditionally credited to Homer, she does so by concocting letters from her husband.
In them, Odysseus recounts the misadventures that delay him: a Cyclops, a shipwreck, the wrath of Poseidon — the usual spousal excuses. She reads these gripping inventions aloud to her freeloading suitors as proof that her king is en route.
“Hope to see you soon,” she has him sign off, affectionately. “Your Odysseus.”
Directed by Emily Maltby for the York Theater Company, with music direction and orchestrations by David Hancock Turner, “Penelope” paints its title character as the author of “The Odyssey.” It’s a promising twist, and it builds on an established idea that “The Odyssey,” a work abundant with substantial female characters — Penelope, Athena, Calypso, Circe, even the sea monsters Scylla and Charybdis — is not a male creation.
The novelist and critic Samuel Butler, in the 1890s, theorized that a woman must have written it. The classicist Robert Graves — whose Butler-inspired 1955 novel, “Homer’s Daughter,” imagines a Sicilian princess as the author of “The Odyssey” — called it “a poem about and for women,” its hero notwithstanding.
“Penelope,” at the Theater at St. Jean’s on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, feels like a musical about and for men. In its cast of 10, there are just three women, including Britney Nicole Simpson, who makes a lovely Off Broadway debut in the title role. It is not through any shortcoming of hers that this ostensibly “female-centric” show, as a program note puts it, is so enamored of its male characters: the five tiresome suitors; Penelope and Odysseus’s son, Telemachus; and especially Odysseus. “Penelope” snaps into focus only in Act 2, when the wandering king returns and takes over a plot that had always been about his absence anyway.
If you are looking for a vividly written Penelope, you would do better with Madeline Miller’s 2018 novel “Circe,” in which Penelope is indelible, and surprising, in a small supporting role. Here, though, the story that Kellogg (book and lyrics) and Weiner (music) tell suffers from a failure of imagination, as if making her a weaver of tales rather than of cloth gives her definition enough. (In “The Odyssey,” she promises to wed as soon as she finishes a weaving project, then unravels her work each night.) She does have Odysseus’s nurse, Eurycleia (an expert Leah Hocking), to conspire with, but where’s the rest of her orbit?
If, on the other hand, you are looking for an old-fashioned, comfort-food kind of musical with goofball humor, unpretentious songs and a heroine who is just fine with the world never knowing that she wrote one of its classics (I, for one, had trouble swallowing that concession), “Penelope” may be a good fit.
Ben Jacoby makes a likable Odysseus, who enjoys a sweet reunion with Telemachus (a charming Philippe Arroyo, in his Off Broadway debut), and has instant sexual chemistry with Penelope — a shock to her chaste system that Simpson conveys with tender, comic nuance. Maria Wirries is also funny as Daphne, Telemachus’s cleareyed, pig-slaughtering love interest.
This is the kind of show, though, that gestures toward open-mindedness by having the women explain to the men that they must abandon some of their entitled ways.
“I’ll adapt,” Odysseus vows.
But “Penelope” itself? It’s a bit of a throwback, in the guise of change.
Penelope, or How the Odyssey Was Really Written
Through April 24 at the Theater at St. Jean’s, Manhattan; yorktheatre.org. Running time: 2 hours.
Source: Theater - nytimes.com
