By Alex Bechtel
In the summer of 2020, I was doing something pretty similar to what I imagine you were doing— staying indoors and trying not to catch Covid. And—probably not similar to you—I was writing music about Penelope from The Odyssey.
I never expected to create a musical adaptation of The Odyssey. I never set out to do so. Before this, I couldn’t have told you the last time I’d thought about Homer’s epic tale of Odysseus’ journey from the Trojan War back home to Ithaca. But in a time of need, I reached for something to help process my feelings, and there was The Odyssey. More to the point, there was Penelope.
Three days before the pandemic hit, I got on a nearly empty plane from Boston to Philadelphia after visiting my romantic partner. She was going to grad school in Boston, and I was making theatre in Philly. When Covid hit, we talked a lot about whether we should quarantine together. Ultimately, she chose to stay in Boston. And suddenly, we were quarantining in separate cities, while the world outside tried to decide if it was ending with an upper- or lower-case E.
Meanwhile, holed up in a house in South Philly, I sat at the piano every day—and these songs began showing up…Some had words, some didn’t. All were from Penelope’s point of view—the woman left behind as Odysseus sailed off to war, waiting twenty years for his return.
I didn’t plot what to write next—the music just kept coming. In hindsight, it was a useful container to put my curiosity and fear. So much of what I loved felt far away.
Two loomed especially large:
- I didn’t know if live theatre, the artform which I’d dedicated my life, would ever return.
- My partner and I were growing distant, our communication strained and infrequent, and our future had never felt less certain or clear.
Time passed, and things changed. Slowly, the world started to reopen; slowly, the wheel of American theatre began to turn again. My partner and I broke up over the phone—the day I stepped on that empty plane in Boston would be the last timewe saw each other. And the Penelope project became a concept album: eleven songs, four with words and seven instrumental, mixed and released in November 2020. I thought that was the end of it.
Then more songs started showing up. I didn’t know why, but it was clear they were Penelope’s. Turns out you don’t get to decide when a work of art is done being made—or when you’re done being heartbroken.
Luckily, I’d developed a tradition of going to my dear friend and close collaborator Eva Steinmetz’s home, having wine and pizza on her porch after our respective Zoom workdays. Since theatre seemed likely to return, and I couldn’t stop writing this music, Eva and I decided to expand the album into a show.
In summer 2021, we joined a Zoom workshop with The Orchard Project, diving deeper into the source material and the wealth of contemporary takes on Penelope—from Margaret Atwood to Madeline Miller. We created a concert-theatre piece set in a liminal space: Penelope, with an onstage band, sings about a day in her life waiting for Odysseus to return from war. I expanded the score to a musical’s worth of songs, hoping to do a concert version in NYC.
We invited actor and songwriter Grace McLean to play Penelope and scheduled a concert for January 2022, but when Omicron hit we had to cancel—then rescheduled for May, only to cancel again just days before when Grace contracted Covid. Somehow, we re-rescheduled for August. Between May and August, The Orchard Project offered us a two-week in-person residency in Saratoga, culminating in performances at the famed folk music venue Caffè Lena. We realized it was the perfect chance to write the dialogue that could connect the songs, so Grace, Eva, and I spent two weeks in upstate NY co-creating the book of the musical.
Sometimes what feels like a setback turns out to be the very thing needed for a happy ending. When we finally hit the stage—first at Caffè Lena, then at our twice-rescheduled concert at Rockwood Music Hall—Penelope was fuller, further along, and more itself than it ever could have been in May or January. And a good thing, too: in the Rockwood audience that night was Davis McCallum, Artistic Director of Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival. The next day, he offered us our world premiere.
I wish I had smart things to say about adapting a Homeric epic into a contemporary musical. I don’t. I wish I had pithy parallels between the Trojan War and our current socio-political circumstances. I really don’t.
Here’s what I have: A few years ago, during a difficult time, I reached out for comfort—and Penelope was there. That’s what the classics are for. The only hope for immortality in art is for the work to keep sailing the seas of the human condition. We don’t read Homer because it’s historic—we read it because it still shakes our souls. Shakespeare isn’t performed because it’s a relic—we perform it because we still see ourselves in his plays.
For me, the PSF production of Penelope is particularly significant for two reasons:
1) Rachel Camp, one of my favorite actors in the Philly theatre community, returns to the musical theatre stage after far too long with this performance as Penelope. There is no one more generous, truthful, dynamic, or worthy of the role.
2) I wrote several of these songs on DeSales’ practice room pianos in the summer of 2021, while working on PSF’s outdoor Midsummer. After a long wait, the music has come home.
Two things well worth waiting for.
While the lockdown may feel like a distant dream, the experience still echoes in our everyday lives. It’s difficult when the thing—or person—you love is far away. Difficult not knowing when (or if) you’ll be together again. Difficult to resist the seduction of surrender, to keep fighting, to choose hope instead. Very difficult. Very noble. And ultimately, what we all do—every day.
And while we do, there’s laughter and tears, beauty and banality, sorrow, rage, and contentment. It’s all there. Then the sun goes down—and unless you have a tapestry to unweave—you sleep.
And then, if you’re really lucky, you wake up in the morning…and do it all again.