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    Reeling From Heartbreak, and Then ‘Penelope’ Showed Up

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    Alex Bechtel’s new musical, sort of “a pandemic parable,” gives voice to a mythical character in “The Odyssey.”The composer and lyricist Alex Bechtel didn’t go looking for Penelope, the mythical character in “The Odyssey” famed for her clever weaving and steadfast endurance of long abandonment.At a low moment in Bechtel’s romantic life, Penelope came to him, inspiring music that developed into a concept album. A breakup album, really, begun in 2020 during the early months of the coronavirus pandemic. Bechtel was at home in Philadelphia, far from his partner in Boston, as their relationship fell apart — and as he wondered, with the nation’s stages shuttered, whether he would ever be able to work in theater again.The music, then, was also fed by what he called his “terror and confusion and grief and longing for this thing that I have chosen to do with my life.”“I started writing songs from the point of view of Penelope,” he said. “I never sat down to say, ‘Wouldn’t it be interesting to do an adaptation of “The Odyssey” from her point of view?’ It’s just, I was going through this large experience, and that character was within arm’s reach.”For the next couple of weeks, on a sandy-floored stage in Garrison, N.Y., she will blossom into three dimensions. “Penelope,” the delicate, contemporary, unconventional musical that evolved from Bechtel’s aching album of the same name, has a preview on Saturday and opens Sunday at Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival. With five musicians — pianist, percussionist and strings — who function at times as a chorus in the ancient Greek sense, the show has a cast of one, Tatiana Wechsler, who plays Penelope.“It’s kind of like if she were putting on her own cabaret act,” Wechsler said, “but then she gets stuck in the imaginings.”Directed in its world premiere by Eva Steinmetz, “Penelope” has a size well suited to the American theater’s lately straitened economics.That’s coincidental, though. While Bechtel joked that it’s lucky he “didn’t come out of the pandemic with a 45-person musical,” a solo piece simply seemed right for expressing Penelope’s isolation and loneliness as she waits for her adventuring husband, Odysseus, to return.“It needed to just be her,” Bechtel said on a cool and rainy August afternoon, fresh from playing the keyboard at a rehearsal down the road from the festival’s tented stage.Wechsler and Bechtel at a rehearsal for the musical, which grew out of an album project that was released digitally on Bandcamp.Tony Cenicola/The New York Times‘Sort of dream time’When Bechtel and Steinmetz talk about the project’s origins, a slight but unmistakable haze of nostalgia sometimes softens their recollections.“He and I were having what we called weekly office hours,” Steinmetz said, “which was sitting on my porch drinking wine and eating pizza and talking about life and love and politics and art and grief. It was really sweet.”“Part of that for me,” he said, “processing this thing I was moving through, was asking her opinion on this music that I was trying to construct into an album that had a narrative and a shape and was theatrical in its sort of construct. A lot of the ways that that album moves are because of things she was whispering in my ear.”“As it grew,” she said, “and we realized that there really was a character here and this really was a story, then office hours became the sort of dream time when we imagined what it would be like to live in a world where we could do live theater again, and where we could turn it into a show, but kind of couldn’t imagine what that world would look like.”The phrase that Bechtel uses to describe music appearing unbidden in his mind is “showing up,” which is how the album project had begun. What surprised him, after he had sent the tracks into the world, releasing them digitally on Bandcamp, was that new “Penelope” music kept showing up.“Partly,” he said, “that was the cyclical, unpredicted and nonlinear nature of healing. Like, you can’t just decide you’re done healing from a heartbreak. That’s not how the heart works.”But hope was also in the mix. As the reopening of theaters started to seem possible, Bechtel had reason to keep writing. He and Steinmetz started shaping the songs into a musical.To workshop the show, they asked the actor and writer Grace McLean — of “Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812,” and more recently of “Bad Cinderella” — to play Penelope.McLean was already a fan of “The Appointment,” the critically embraced Off Broadway abortion musical that Steinmetz and Bechtel made with Alice Yorke and the company Lightning Rod Special. But that show, which juxtaposes the lurid absurdism of imaginary fetuses singing for their lives with the stark realism of pregnant women seeking abortions, would seem to have little overlap with “Penelope.”Yet Steinmetz sees a common thread in each musical’s effort to “take a wild and often monstrous myth and expose the everyday humanity at the center of it. In both stories, there’s a person on the periphery, enduring consequences of the myth.”With “Penelope,” running through Sept. 17 at Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, Bechtel said he wanted his character to say “the stuff that she didn’t get to say in that poem.”Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesPenelope’s voiceBechtel’s long-ago first exposure to “The Odyssey” was an episode of “Wishbone,” the 1990s PBS children’s series where, he explained helpfully, “a dog becomes the lead character of classic tales of literature.” Penelope, however, “was a human woman, as I recall.”An inauspicious introduction? Maybe. Now, though, he has a long list of volumes that he considers the “works consulted” in the making of “Penelope.” Emily Wilson’s translation of “The Odyssey” is on it, as well as Margaret Atwood’s “The Penelopiad,” Mary Oliver’s “Devotions: Collected Poems,” and Annie-B Parson’s “The Choreography of Everyday Life,” a pandemic meditation that considers “The Odyssey.”The book that spoke powerfully to McLean was Madeline Miller’s novel “Circe,” in which Penelope and her loom figure vividly. McLean borrowed Bechtel’s copy — “He tends to carry all of his little source material books around,” she said by phone — and in it she “saw the influence of this strong, witchy woman that they wanted to invoke in their Penelope.”If the character was Bechtel and Steinmetz’s when they brought her on, the three of them tailored it to fit McLean, who ultimately wrote the musical’s book with them. Through improvisation, they found what she called “the connective tissue” between the songs. Then professional and personal scheduling conflicts kept her from taking on the role at Hudson Valley Shakespeare.“But what I’m hearing from Alex and Eva,” McLean said, “is that it’s not necessarily just bespoke to Grace McLean — that it’s translating to Tatiana as well. That makes me feel like we hopefully tapped into something that sounds like Penelope’s voice, not just Grace’s or Alex’s or Eva’s.”The sound of Penelope’s voice, of course, is open to invention. “The Odyssey,” for one, isn’t much interested in her.Bechtel, though, was drawn to that empty space where her voice might have been: “The stuff that she didn’t get to say in that poem, and the stuff that she didn’t get to experience in that poem.”This “Penelope” is all her story — and what he calls “a pandemic parable,” too. She is a woman trapped at home, suffused with longing, and taking the same nature walk too many times a day.Remember that? More

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      ‘Suffs’ Review: Young, Scrappy and Hungry for the Right to Vote

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      Shaina Taub’s new musical at the Public Theater tells the story of the women’s suffrage movement in the years leading up to the passage of the 19th Amendment.I don’t remember my grade school history books dedicating more than a few sentences to the women’s suffrage movement. The nearly 100-year history of women fighting for the right to vote is often trimmed down to two main talking points — Susan B. Anthony and the 19th Amendment — and some dismissed the suffragists as self-serious rabble-rousers.In an effort to counter those notions of these revolutionary women and their fight, the new musical “Suffs” begins with the satirical vaudeville-inspired “Watch Out for the Suffragette!,” sung by the ensemble, made up of female and nonbinary actors. (The show was scheduled to open Wednesday at the Public Theater, but canceled because of positive coronavirus tests.) They’re dressed in drag — even mustaches — caricaturing their male detractors. We’re in for a tedious history lesson, these hypothetical skeptics predict in song; a dreaded feminist is “planning to scold you for three hours straight.”My first thought: Dear God, I hope not.“Suffs” has a hefty two-hour-and-45-minute running time, after all, and though the musical isn’t guilty of scolding, it is guilty of stifling an impressive — though exhausting — breadth of U.S. history through its contemporary lens.Shaina Taub, the Public Theater’s playwright in residence and creator of the musical, stars as Alice Paul, the headstrong young suffragist who assembles a group of women who lead protests, suffer abuse and incarceration, and march on Washington for their right to access the ballot box.Taub gives a steely performance as Paul, though her standby (Holly Gould) has stepped into the role, as Taub tested positive for the coronavirus just before the production’s scheduled opening.Hannah Cruz, center, in the satirical vaudeville-inspired number “Watch Out for the Suffragette!” in the show.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesPaul is joined in the metaphorical barracks by Lucy Burns (played by an understated Ally Bonino), her friend and fellow suffragist who helped Paul form the National Woman’s Party. There’s also Doris Stevens (Nadia Dandashi, teeming with earnestness), an eager young student and writer from Ohio, and Ruza Wenclawska (a droll Hannah Cruz), the tough-as-nails Polish American factory worker and union organizer. Inez Milholland (Phillipa Soo), a labor lawyer and chic socialite, is their public face; as Inez, Soo, the beloved “Hamilton” alum, brings sugar, sass and style to the group, marching with a cocktail in one hand and a cigarette in the other.In the seven years that are covered in the musical — 1913 to 1920, when the 19th Amendment was finally ratified — Paul butts heads with her sisters in the fight. She has a yearslong dispute with Carrie Chapman Catt (Jenn Colella), who, as the head of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, thinks Paul’s moves are too radical. And there’s the journalist and suffragist Ida B. Wells (Nikki M. James), who unsuccessfully tries to bring race into the movement, challenging Paul’s myopic vision for change.But her actual opponent is the president, Woodrow Wilson (Grace McLean), who noodles around the stage, step-kicking down stairs with a top hat and a cane while gaily singing misogynistic lyrics like “Men make the money/Ladies make the bread/Men make the rules/Ladies make the bed.” McLean’s jaunty performance introduces some of the few moments of levity in the musical; otherwise a general stiffness pervades the production.Nikki M. James, center, as Ida B. Wells and Cassondra James, right, as Mary Church Terrell in a subplot highlighting the tensions between two suffragists with differing ideas about how to elevate race in the movement.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMaybe that’s because the whole production feels so attuned to the gender politics and protests of today, so aware of possible critiques that it takes on its subject with an overabundance of caution. So a mere 20 minutes into the show, “Suffs” makes it clear it’s not framing Paul as the perfect warrior-saint of the movement. When Paul is dismissive of Wells she responds with the song “Wait My Turn” (“Do you not realize you’re not free until I’m free./Or do you refuse to see?”), establishing her role as the racial conscience of the musical, popping up every once in a while as a reminder of the pitfalls of white feminism. And all these women and stories of their activism are uncomfortably stuffed into a show too scared to miss anything that it becomes bloated with information.In many ways “Suffs” lands like a clunky heir of the Public’s other big historical musical, “Hamilton,” borrowing some of its approaches to structure while trying to avoid the criticisms about its politics around women and slavery. But that’s the risk that comes with recasting history with today’s sensibilities in mind. Even this feminist tale occasionally serves retorts to those funky founding fathers who met in “the room where it happens”; our suffragists sing about how no women got to witness the signing of the 19th Amendment themselves because “a man signed the paper behind a closed door in a room somewhere.”But the musical doesn’t need to try so hard to defend itself or prove its relevance, say, by showing the threats and taunts of men interjected into songs like “The March.” Neither does it need to fall back on preciousness, like when a Tennessee state senator’s mother, an “old farmer’s widow,” sings a banjo-heavy song pleading with her son to vote for suffrage with a promise of his favorite meatloaf in return. Or the pat pairing of some couples in the end, and the heavy-handed finale, “Never Over,” about the continuous march toward progress.The direction, by Leigh Silverman, feels as methodical as the text; the pacing is speedy, and the songs are dense with exposition like those of “Hamilton.” But “Suffs” turns out to be all work and mostly no play, and when it comes to the music itself nothing really pops. There are a few dry touches of vaudeville, and pop and some sugary songs like “If We Were Married,” a number that feels like a contemporary stab at Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers’s 1937 rendition of “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off.” It’s a parody of such cutesy courtship numbers yet it delivers just that.Taub, left, as Alice Paul and Jenn Colella as Carrie Chapman Catt, who thinks Paul’s moves are too radical.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe music is most interesting when it sheds the exposition and allows the characters space to express their hopes, frustrations and desires. Colella slays her performance in one such song, the prickly “This Girl.” Colella clips her words and sharpens her gestures, hitting her notes with the punch of a boxer in the ring. The harmonies, too, like those in the ensemble number “How Long,” which shifts from a tone of despair to one of resilience, also provide the music with much-needed dimension.The choreographer Raja Feather Kelly’s typically transgressive style (exhibited in shows like “A Strange Loop” and “Fairview”) feels defanged, ball-and-chained to its very literal interpretation of the material; there’s much marching and posing, syncopated stepping. Mimi Lien brings a similar austerity to her set design — the stately steps and columns of Congress, perhaps, or some institutional building — but the simplicity here works, allowing “Suffs” to focus on its diverse cast of history-makers. In the costume design, Toni-Leslie James strikes a satisfying balance between formal high-waisted skirts and black lace-up boots, and the splashy wide-brimmed hats have enough ribbons and feathers to make a Southern churchgoer swoon.“Suffs” ends with a passing of the torch from one generation of change-makers to the next, revisiting the latest clash of new politics versus old politics: What was once revolutionary becomes out of date. For all the work this show does to illuminate the successes — and failures — of the women’s rights movement, and the constantly evolving nature of our politics, it focuses so much energy on seeming as timely as possible. But, as the suffs learn, movements transform; our government leaders change, as do the demands of the people on the picket line. It’s a lesson the musical should take to heart: You can’t live in the past, present and future of our nation’s politics all at once — at least not without losing your way.SuffsThrough May 15 at the Public Theater, Manhattan; publictheater.org. Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes. More

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      in Theater

      Williamstown Theater Festival Tries to Weather the Storms

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      The annual summer festival in Massachusetts has tried to adapt amid the pandemic and calls for more diversity onstage.I hate getting caught in the rain. But lately, with the mercurial weather and my new dog-walking schedule, I’ve found myself caught in bright sun showers, swampy mists and downright tempests. In my humble opinion, rain is nothing to sing about — Gene Kelly be damned.After a sunny bus ride to Williamstown, Mass., walking with a pup, a tote and a backpack, I was caught again — soaked down to the soles of my Converse. Roughly 15 minutes later the skies settled as suddenly as they had erupted. It’s a problem the Williamstown Theater Festival, which I was attending for the first time, has had to contend with all summer. Because of the coronavirus pandemic, the usually indoor festival has tried to adapt with three outdoor productions. But the area has received an above-average amount of rainfall this season, disrupting these plans and leading the festival not to open its shows for reviews from critics.Adaptation, how the festival has successfully or unsuccessfully readjusted to the climate and the politico-cultural climate (namely the pandemic and the protests), was the theme of my weekend.One of the first sights I saw on my damp walk from the bus to the hotel was of a Black woman on a stage: delightful. This was an outdoor rehearsal for one of three 30-minute plays curated by the playwright-director Robert O’Hara for “Celebrating the Black Radical Imagination: Nine Solo Plays.” In “The Master’s Tools,” cleverly written by Zora Howard (“Stew”), a Black enslaved woman named Tituba (a wonderfully devilish Rosalyn Coleman), like the victimized slave from Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible,” recounts a treacherous storm that led to her mother’s decapitation. A storm is a “great equalizer,” she says, describing how nature howls “like it’s in heat” and how the trees shake “as though possessed.”It made me glance up to the sky again from my seat on the front lawn of the ’62 Center for Theater and Dance, where the production was presented. A clamshell arched over the stage where Tituba told her story. Just a few minutes before she stepped onstage, ushers had handed out rain ponchos to the audience; the forecast had predicted afternoon rain.Rosalyn Coleman in Zora Howard’s “The Master’s Tools.”Joseph O’Malley and R. Masseo DavisThe rain never came. But by that point the audience, who sat on the lawn without any covering, had already been exposed to the vicious midday sun for an hour while watching the two other short solos, all directed by Candis C. Jones, that were being featured in the last week of the anthology production’s run: “Mark It Down” by Charly Evon Simpson, and “The Last……(A Work in Progress),” by Ngozi Anyanwu.In “The Last,” a queer Black man (Ronald Peet) reflects on a relationship, reeling from his isolation — a literal quarantine — and sense of loss. And in “Mark It Down,” a Black woman (Naomi Lorrain) takes account of her grief over her grandmother’s death during the pandemic.These works by Black playwrights were another way the festival reacted to the moment — not to the coronavirus, but to the recent calls for more diversity onstage. But when the plays were taken within the context of the community where they were being staged, there was a disconnect. My mother, who had joined me, and I barely saw any Black people in town all weekend, with the exception of the festival’s Black cast members. What’s the point of producing new work about Blackness in America if there’s not a more concerted effort to attract Black audiences to receive it?I asked the same question when I attended the experimental “Alien/Nation,” from the director Michael Arden and his company, the Forest of Arden. An immersive experience, “Alien/Nation,” written and devised by Eric Berryman and Jen Silverman, begins as a walking tour through the Williams College campus. (There’s also a version by car.) The audience is split into groups of about eight, and each group is led, via an app, along a path dotted with performers who act out bite-size, dance-heavy scenes about real events that happened in Western Massachusetts and beyond in 1969.Not only does this first act — mostly about Black student protests at Williams College — ring out as particularly relevant right now, but so does the second, which takes place at a Covid-19 vaccination center. The third, which includes an odd but beautiful reproduction of the moon landing and a planetary fashion show, makes a sloppy effort to tie the ending back into the racial themes of the beginning.“Alien/Nation” is an immersive theatrical experience that takes audiences on a walking tour through Williamstown, Mass.Joseph O’Malley and R. Masseo DavisWhile some parts of the production connect (the site-specific format, the wondrously fluid synchronized choreography of Jeff Kuperman and Eamon Foley), others show how the festival’s attempts to adjust to an innovative, pandemic-friendly experience failed. The complicated tech — audience members need to download an app, and must forfeit their driver’s licenses in exchange for earbuds — was prohibitive to many, myself included. The app didn’t work well, the tour ate up more than half my data, and my audio kept going in and out. And the first part of the lengthy production, which one of the company members described, understatedly, as “a little bit of a walk,” wasn’t very accessible, especially given the ample hills of the Williams campus. (“This is too much for someone my age,” my 56-year-old mother testily complained to a company member. “Especially for someone who had a hip replacement.”)And, again, when looking at the makeup of the audience, my mother and I appeared to be the only Black people attending a play about Black civil rights and political action.It was my final show of the weekend, however, that best captured the festival’s attempts to adapt theater in unpredictable circumstances. With a book by Daniel Goldstein and music and lyrics by Dawn Landes, “Row,” directed by Tyne Rafaeli, is staged on wooden platforms in the beautiful reflecting pool at the Clark Art Institute.This musical was inspired by Tori Murden McClure’s memoir “A Pearl in the Storm,” about her effort to become the first woman to row solo across the Atlantic. By presenting “Row” outside at the Clark, the festival uses a local setting (the gorgeous views) to present a tale of resiliency. Led by Grace McLean as Tori with a soaring voice (best showcased in the cascading bellows of the classic-rock-inspired “Drowning”), the show intercuts Tori’s narrative account of her journey with scenes from her past. Her story — acting out, growing up in a difficult home, then finding herself in a fight against nature — hits many familiar notes but is still novel, if only for the site-specific setup and the fact that her quest really happened a mere 22 years ago.Grace McLean as the first woman to row solo across the Atlantic in “Row” at the Clark Art Institute.Joseph O’Malley and R. Masseo DavisBut the show has also been plagued by the poor weather, and some of the sound crew walked off the job one night, complaining of unsafe and unsatisfactory working conditions in the rain. In switching gears to deliver outdoor theater, the festival has been able to step up during a challenging time for the performing arts, but it has struggled to manage the logistics.“Bad weather’s on the way,” Tori says at one point in the show. During her long, treacherous time at sea, she constantly has to acclimate to the conditions in order to survive.The same could be said of theater during the pandemic; easier said than done.The morning after I returned from Williamstown, I got caught in the rain yet again. I’ve started wearing my rain boots, I just got a new raincoat, and at Williamstown I bought a blue rain poncho just in case. I’d rather be prepared for any bad weather on the way — not just run for cover.RowThrough Aug. 15 at the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Mass.; 413-458-3253, wtfestival.org. Running time: 2 hours.Alien/NationThrough Aug. 15 in Williamstown, Mass; 413-458-3253, wtfestival.org. Running time: 2 hours and 25 minutes. More