Margaret Atwood is the writer most aligned with the current cultural zeitgeist in the United States because her 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale has so many disturbing parallels with the nascent religious autocracy dead set on retaking patriarchal control of women’s bodies after half a century of feminist progress. But if her chronicle of a dystopian future feels alarmingly current, Atwood shows in The Penelopiad, now onstage at the Goodman Theatre in a gripping, revelatory production, that the distant past is also prologue when it comes to male domination of women.
It’s tempting to say the timing could not be better for new Goodman artistic director Susan V. Booth to choose The Penelopiad as her directing debut here. But the truth is, the central messages of this searing story are depressingly evergreen. As the titular character, Penelope, notes up top, men long have wielded her story as a cudgel to beat women into subservience. After all, if she could remain steadfast in her commitment to Odysseus as he galavanted around antiquity for two decades bedding every Circe and Calypso he encountered, it should be child’s play for other women to embrace monogamy come Hades or high water.
Tammy Wynette’s “Stand By Your Man” has nothing on Penelope’s long-suffering refusal to move on from Odysseus, which culminates in a, dare I use the word, epic tragedy relegated to a few tossed-off lines at the end of The Odyssey. There is music in this show, too, though it’s not quite a musical and not quite a tragic drama. As Atwood has described her 2007 stage adaptation of her 2005 novella, “The best word I could come up with was a ‘cabaret’… in which there’s talking and then there’s musical numbers” in the style of Brecht and Weill. Whatever it is, exactly, it works wonderfully well in this staging.
As the Trojan War rages, Penelope finds herself running Ithaca after her husband leaves and her in-laws die. The ultimate stranger in a strange land, she is the daughter of Spartan king Icarius and the nymph Periboea, who entreats her always to embody the qualities of water, both in terms of going with the flow and posing no resistance, but also in being able to destroy any obstacle over time, drop by drop.
Thus Penelope, embodied here by Jennifer Morrison in an emotionally complex and deeply moving performance, concocts scheme after scheme to keep her boorish suitors at bay. She finally strikes upon the con of all cons–she must finish weaving a funeral shroud for her late father-in-law before choosing a suitor who will rule over Ithaca (none of them care a whit about Penelope herself, finding her too old for their tastes), but she and her 12 most loyal maids return to the loom every night to secretly undo that day’s work. The dangerous stratagem does save Penelope, but it consigns the maids themselves to death by hanging at the hand of her son Telemachus under orders from Odysseus, who doesn’t bother getting the facts straight with Penelope before cleaning house upon his not-so-triumphant return.
Every time Penelope casts herself as the lone heroine of the tale, the ever-circling maids shake their heads in disgust or flat-out remind her they were key to executing the plan, and they were the ones executed as a result. Penelope feels the weight of this guilt, but even after a long after-life in Hades (long enough that she can perceive the dangers besetting our modern world), she can’t quite understand why their spirits won’t finally forgive her and Odysseus, whom she still loves despite it all.
Penelope deserves admiration and empathy, yes, but she also sometimes comes across as the latte-sipping one-percenter giving her tennis pals a tour of her opulent estate and taking credit for every highlight even as the gardeners and other domestic staffers toil anonymously to make it all happen just out of frame.
That’s nothing compared to Eurycleia, nursemaid first to Odysseus and then Telemachus, who drinks so deeply from the chalice of patriarchy that she’s eager to destroy the maids who helped Penelope fend off the suitors for so many years and styles herself as the one true keeper of the flame. Like Sam Jackson’s character in Django Unchained, she’s the most repulsive villain of the piece, but they are both mere cracked-mirror instruments of the true monsters who run their worlds via brutal subjugation. Don’t hate the players, hate the nefarious game.
The maids are played by an impressive cast of local actors, who also take on the roles of Odysseus, Telemachus, the suitors and the royals of both Sparta and Ithaca, not to mention Helen of Troy, the twisted beauty who survives by manipulating every man she encounters while denigrating the women. It’s another tried-and-true strategy, but only for a chosen few women. Bringing this all to stirring life alongside Morrison are Aja Alcazar, Demetra Dee, Maya Lou Hlava, Noelle Kayser, Elizabeth Laidlaw, Helen Joo Lee (who’s also hilarious as Helen), Tyler Meredith (a fine Odysseus, fleet of mind and foot), Ericka Ratcliff (a chilling Eurycleia to boot), Andrea San Miguel, Laura Savage, Allison Sill and Hannah Whitley.
Neil Patel’s deceptively simple set features semicircular stairs ringed by a curtain of strings, representing both the physical and psychological weaving Penelope undertakes. The maids later perform aerial silks routines against the backdrop of a giant loom that descends from on high. There are thicker ropes, as well, some for skipping and some for stringing up women in punishment for their supposed sins. The visuals are arresting, as are many of the dance numbers choreographed by JoAnn M. Hunter throughout.
Odysseus, like Mark Ruffalo’s character in Poor Things (a movie which imagines one viable solution to patriarchal subjugation: be a brilliant woman, inherit a fortune and then find a man enlightened enough to let you wear the pants), seems to want a free-spirited intellectual and emotional equal, but only for short periods and only to a point. Men are the Poor Things in the movie, and they’re clearly the main problem in The Penelopiad (and, yes, beyond), but there’s plenty of survivor’s guilt to go around among the women, too.
This is a triumphant Goodman directing debut for Booth, establishing her as a potent creative voice in Chicago and perhaps acting as something of a cri de coeur presaging similarly powerful productions to come. May she continue to run that stage like she owns it.
(Disclosure: My wife is a member of the Goodman’s leadership team.)
The Penelopiad runs through March 31 at the Goodman Theatre.
For a full roundup of reviews of this show, visit Theatre in Chicago.
Photo by Liz Lauren
