Penelope
Ellen McLaughlin (Text); Sarah Kirkland Snider (Music)
The Pear Theatre in a co-production with Bootstrap Theater Foundation
Twenty years after divorcing a man who constantly lied to her, she opens her front door to find a nurse with someone she is told is her husband, someone she does not recognize just as he does not know who she is. He is returning from an unnamed war with shrapnel embedded in his brain, suffering from severe PTSD. He seems to have no where else to go except to a home that somewhere deep in his cluttered memory he somehow remembers. As he sits day after day with a blank stare looking out to the nearby sea, she begins to read to him The Odyssey, hoping like Homer’s Ulysses, he will eventually find his way back home.
Accompanied by a string quartet and music composed by Sarah Kirkland Snider, Ellen McLaughlin launches into an ancient, epic story with inserted, modern edits of this unnamed woman and her much-damaged, also nameless ex-husband, a work she created in 2008 for the Getty Museum entitled Penelope. With sea waves and a boat’s sails at her back, she sails into a journey where he becomes the wandering and lost Ulysses; and she, his faithful wife, Penelope, waiting for his return from years away from home.
In the intimate setting of The Pear Theatre in the company’s co-production with Bootstrap Theater Foundation, award-winning playwright and acclaimed on-and-off-Broadway actor, Ellen McLaughlin, astounds a near-breathless audience with a ninety-minute performance that is engrossing and enchanting, heart-breaking and heart-warming.
Please proceed to Talkin’Broadway for the remainder of my review.
Rating: 5 E
Penelope continues through March 30, 2025 in a ninety-minute (no intermission) co-production by The Pear Theatre and Bootstrap Theater Foundation at The Pear, 1110 La Avenida, Suite A, Mountain View, CA. Tickets are available at https://www.thepear.org/.
Photo Credits: Sinjin Jones
