Goodman Theatre's masterful 'Penelopiad' gives powerful voice to the women of 'The Odyssey'

Near the end of Homer’s “The Odyssey,” Ithacan King/Trojan War hero Odysseus comes home some 20 years after the war has ended. Among his first official acts: Ordering the execution of 12 of his wife Penelope’s youngest “maids” (each one enslaved to the royal couple) for the crime of treachery. The nameless maids are innocent. Homer barely gives the episode a paragraph.

Penelope, on the other hand, is effusively praised as the model of womanhood: Chaste, quiet, modest, and clever enough to ward off the glut of men eager to rape and pillage their way to Ithaca’s crown in her husband’s absence.

In 2005, author Margaret Atwood (“The Handmaid’s Tale”) published “The Penelopiad,” a verse-interspersed novella which gives voice to Penelope and the young women hung with one rope from the beam of a ship.

With Goodman Theatre’s staging of Atwood’s stage adaptation of “The Penelopiad,” artistic director Susan V. Booth shapes a production of furious impact and impeccable ensemble work from the all-female, 13-strong cast. With the exception of Jennifer Morrison’s Penelope, the ensemble plays numerous characters in addition to the maids, Odysseus among them. Infused with bewitching music and dance sequences, the brutality of the narrative comes studded with shards of wit as sharp as the arrows that pierce the throats of the “suitors” determined to take Penelope, the maids, and everything else Odysseus left behind during his lengthy absence from Ithaca.

It is also devastatingly of-the-moment. As a long-dead Penelope ruminates from Hades, the world today is even more dangerous than it was in her time. When the maids howl for justice, they evoke the screams of a thousand contemporary protests from Iran to India to Mexico to the Washington Mall.

Yet “The Penelopiad” is neither grim or lecturing. It’s brutal all right, but it is also two hours of ferociously fine storytelling.

We know the maids are going to die from the start. Penelope opens with that, as she narrates from the underworld. The maids enter, playing jump rope and singing about dancing on air, until you realize “dancing on air” describes the final movements of the lynched, and those jump ropes aren’t just toys, they’re foreshadowing.

What’s wondrous about the production is that despite their fate, “The Penelopiad” is not a story of passive victimhood but one of uprising. Penelope is as wily as her much-praised husband. The maids find joy within their camaraderie and, for a while, in joining Penelope in outwitting the suitors’ endless savageries.

Liz Lauren

In Penelope, Morrison (of TV’s “House” and “Once Upon a Time”) creates a demi-goddess of all-too human failing. Her resilience is forged when her father throws her into the sea as an infant. Her mother, a minor water goddess, was as chilly and elusive as the ocean deeps. Penelope is married off at 15 and nominally happy for a time.

But then her husband Odysseus leaves to fight the Trojan War, instigated when Penelope’s cousin Helen (Helen Joo Lee, hilarious as an ancient Grecian Regina George) leaves her husband for a prettyboy Trojan prince.

Without Odysseus (who has not returned from a seemingly endless journey home, leaving his wife at the mercy of a group of rapacious men who threaten to take over the kingdom by force if she doesn’t voluntarily choose one as her new husband), Penelope and her maids must spin a ruse to prevent the marauding suitors from overcoming them. So Penelope announces she will choose a new husband when she finishes weaving a shroud for her father-in-law. By day, she weaves. At night, she and the maids pick the shroud apart so it’s never completed. They form a slumber party sisterhood, feasting as they share songs and stories, giggling at their collective ability to deceive the suitors.

Samuel Davis’ music brings the verses in Atwood’s play to vivid life in a dazzle of varying styles. There are jazzy, Andrews Sisters-like harmonies in the hook “Daddy Went to Troy,” rollicking sea chanteys about Odysseus’ adventures with Circe, Calypso and the Cyclops. There are sorrow-laden ballads as they imagine a life where they glide on golden boats, rape never a threat, the labor they do of their own choosing.

JoAnn M. Hunter’s choreography is stirring and expressive, from the carnage unleashed in Troy to the ethereal, aerial dances the maids perform on the dangling swaths of silk that are integrated into Penelope’s massive loom.

Kara Harmon’s costumes are rich in subtle detail: The suitors wear grotesque muscle suits, complete with pimples and belly hair. Helen swishes about in a hot-pink waist cincher and jeweled sandals. The maids wear gray aprons embroidered with asphodel — the flowers that cover the fields of Hades. Penelope is draped in azure, the color of a summer Mediterranean.

As for the maids, their voices are eventually heard, but not in time to save their lives.