The composer and lyricist Alex Bechtel didn\u2019t go looking for Penelope, the mythical character in \u201cThe Odyssey\u201d famed for her clever weaving and steadfast endurance of long abandonment.<\/p>\n
At a low moment in Bechtel\u2019s 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 \u2014 and as he wondered, with the nation\u2019s stages shuttered, whether he would ever be able to work in theater again.<\/p>\n
The music, then, was also fed by what he called his \u201cterror and confusion and grief and longing for this thing that I have chosen to do with my life.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI started writing songs from the point of view of Penelope,\u201d he said. \u201cI never sat down to say, \u2018Wouldn\u2019t it be interesting to do an adaptation of \u201cThe Odyssey\u201d from her point of view?\u2019 It\u2019s just, I was going through this large experience, and that character was within arm\u2019s reach.\u201d<\/p>\n
For the next couple of weeks, on a sandy-floored stage in Garrison, N.Y., she will blossom into three dimensions. \u201cPenelope,\u201d the delicate, contemporary, unconventional musical that evolved from Bechtel\u2019s aching album of the same name, has a preview on Saturday and opens Sunday at Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival. With five musicians \u2014 pianist, percussionist and strings \u2014 who function at times as a chorus in the ancient Greek sense, the show has a cast of one, Tatiana Wechsler, who plays Penelope.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s kind of like if she were putting on her own cabaret act,\u201d Wechsler said, \u201cbut then she gets stuck in the imaginings.\u201d<\/p>\n
Directed in its world premiere by Eva Steinmetz, \u201cPenelope\u201d has a size well suited to the American theater\u2019s lately straitened economics.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s coincidental, though. While Bechtel joked that it\u2019s lucky he \u201cdidn\u2019t come out of the pandemic with a 45-person musical,\u201d a solo piece simply seemed right for expressing Penelope\u2019s isolation and loneliness as she waits for her adventuring husband, Odysseus, to return.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt needed to just be her,\u201d Bechtel said on a cool and rainy August afternoon, fresh from playing the keyboard at a rehearsal down the road from the festival\u2019s tented stage.<\/p>\n
When Bechtel and Steinmetz talk about the project\u2019s origins, a slight but unmistakable haze of nostalgia sometimes softens their recollections.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe and I were having what we called weekly office hours,\u201d Steinmetz said, \u201cwhich 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cPart of that for me,\u201d he said, \u201cprocessing 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAs it grew,\u201d she said, \u201cand 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\u2019t imagine what that world would look like.\u201d<\/p>\n
The phrase that Bechtel uses to describe music appearing unbidden in his mind is \u201cshowing up,\u201d 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 \u201cPenelope\u201d music kept showing up.<\/p>\n
\u201cPartly,\u201d he said, \u201cthat was the cyclical, unpredicted and nonlinear nature of healing. Like, you can\u2019t just decide you\u2019re done healing from a heartbreak. That\u2019s not how the heart works.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
To workshop the show, they asked the actor and writer Grace McLean \u2014 of \u201cNatasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812,\u201d and more recently of \u201cBad Cinderella\u201d \u2014 to play Penelope.<\/p>\n
McLean was already a fan of \u201cThe Appointment,\u201d 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 \u201cPenelope.\u201d<\/p>\n
Yet Steinmetz sees a common thread in each musical\u2019s effort to \u201ctake a wild and often monstrous myth and expose the everyday humanity at the center of it. In both stories, there\u2019s a person on the periphery, enduring consequences of the myth.\u201d<\/p>\n
Bechtel\u2019s long-ago first exposure to \u201cThe Odyssey\u201d was an episode of \u201cWishbone,\u201d the 1990s PBS children\u2019s series where, he explained helpfully, \u201ca dog becomes the lead character of classic tales of literature.\u201d Penelope, however, \u201cwas a human woman, as I recall.\u201d<\/p>\n
An inauspicious introduction? Maybe. Now, though, he has a long list of volumes that he considers the \u201cworks consulted\u201d in the making of \u201cPenelope.\u201d Emily Wilson\u2019s translation of \u201cThe Odyssey\u201d is on it, as well as Margaret Atwood\u2019s \u201cThe Penelopiad,\u201d Mary Oliver\u2019s \u201cDevotions: Collected Poems,\u201d and Annie-B Parson\u2019s \u201cThe Choreography of Everyday Life,\u201d a pandemic meditation that considers \u201cThe Odyssey.\u201d<\/p>\n
The book that spoke powerfully to McLean was Madeline Miller\u2019s novel \u201cCirce,\u201d in which Penelope and her loom figure vividly. McLean borrowed Bechtel\u2019s copy \u2014 \u201cHe tends to carry all of his little source material books around,\u201d she said by phone \u2014 and in it she \u201csaw the influence of this strong, witchy woman that they wanted to invoke in their Penelope.\u201d<\/p>\n
If the character was Bechtel and Steinmetz\u2019s when they brought her on, the three of them tailored it to fit McLean, who ultimately wrote the musical\u2019s book with them. Through improvisation, they found what she called \u201cthe connective tissue\u201d between the songs. Then professional and personal scheduling conflicts kept her from taking on the role at Hudson Valley Shakespeare.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut what I\u2019m hearing from Alex and Eva,\u201d McLean said, \u201cis that it\u2019s not necessarily just bespoke to Grace McLean \u2014 that it\u2019s translating to Tatiana as well. That makes me feel like we hopefully tapped into something that sounds like Penelope\u2019s voice, not just Grace\u2019s or Alex\u2019s or Eva\u2019s.\u201d<\/p>\n
The sound of Penelope\u2019s voice, of course, is open to invention. \u201cThe Odyssey,\u201d for one, isn\u2019t much interested in her.<\/p>\n
Bechtel, though, was drawn to that empty space where her voice might have been: \u201cThe stuff that she didn\u2019t get to say in that poem, and the stuff that she didn\u2019t get to experience in that poem.\u201d<\/p>\n
This \u201cPenelope\u201d is all her story \u2014 and what he calls \u201ca pandemic parable,\u201d too. She is a woman trapped at home, suffused with longing, and taking the same nature walk too many times a day.<\/p>\n
Remember that?<\/p>\n