Enda Walsh's "Penelope' in Brooklyn

Bookended by Homer--what a week! First An Iliad at McCarter in Princeton, then Penelope at St. Ann's Warehouse in New York. Both terrific as theater, smart and imaginative as adaptations, and painfully, pointedly relevant to life at this minute. The older it is, the newer it can seem.

This new play by the powerhouse young Irishman Enda Walsh took highest honors at the Edinburgh Festival; Inis Nua Theatre Co. gave Philadelphia audiences a commanding production of Walsh's play, Bedbound. (If you missed it, pause a moment to gnash your teeth). This American premiere of Penelope arrives from the famed Druid Theatre in Galway, its remarkable cast of major Irish actors intact. It's a tragic burlesque: funny and appalling and profound.

Walsh takes up The Odyssey at the moment just before Odysseus returns home from the Trojan War, while the suitors are still carousing in his dining hall, still hoping Penelope will choose one of them. Queen Penelope (Olga Wehrly) patiently (or impatiently— who knows?) awaits her husband's return after 20 years— ten in the war, and ten engaging in the wild adventures that comprise the second Homeric epic.

One last chance

In Penelope only four of the queen's many suitors remain: ludicrous, mean-spirited men, stuck for years in a drained, abandoned swimming pool with a huge broken barbecue grill. All of them wear not Beckettian bowlers but Speedos (what courage these out-of-shape actors have!). They hate each other as rivals, but try to unite in a final campaign to woo the silent queen because, having each had the same terrible dream the previous night, they understand the portent: Odysseus is nearly home and will kill them all.

Penelope appears behind a glass wall— beautiful, still young, just as she must be in Odysseus's memory, and frozen in time by myth. Each man gets his chance to speak to her one last time.

Jiggling his paunch, decked out in a leopard skin beach robe, Dunne (Denis Conway) fails first in a rambling elegy to nature, already defeated before he starts.

Niall Buggy plays Fitz, the oldest suitor, who is rereading Homer in his lounge chair; he's suddenly inspired to deliver a superbly whispered ode to stillness, with "no itchy wants throwing me into the next thing, the next page, the next piece of noise."

From Napoleon to Jackie O

The most obnoxious of the quartet is Quinn (Karl Shiels), who provides an astonishing and hilarious quick-change costume pageant of lovers (from Napoleon to Jackie Kennedy). He's the most murderous, the most Darwinian of the four, a chest-thumper who understands that competition is everything. In a throwaway Cartesian moment, he tells them, "The day the head and the body part company is a tragic day for the self."

Burns (Tadhg Murphy), the last suitor, is the youngest, heartbroken by the death of his friend Murray (whose blood streaks the pool's tile). His wooing acknowledges that by Odysseus's return to reunite with Penelope, "Love is saved," as it could not be if any of the suitors had won. His monologue concludes the play with a plea for simplicity, a pleasure in being alive.

Trapped outside time

The suitors having been trapped outside time, in the legend that defines them, Walsh redefines them in this existential vaudeville. These are the minor, vile characters Homer never named, the ones we never even think about. This is about as far as you can get from Joyce's Ulysses, whose last chapter begins and ends with Molly's "Yes."

St. Ann's Warehouse is a spectacularly vast space in a very cool area of Brooklyn called DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass). If you go, and the weather's fine, you can walk to the theater across the Brooklyn Bridge— crowded with worldwide tourists, local bicycles and one picture-postcard view after another. Yes.