CAROLINE MICHELE UY: So The Penelopiad will be your directing debut in this new phase of the Goodman and you. What’s been on your mind lately, as you prep for it?
SUSAN V. BOOTH: I was in a museum in Aberdeen, and I found this painting by John William Waterhouse from 1912 called Penelope and the Suitors. The plaque next to it read:
“As wife to the long absent Odysseus, Penelope vowed she would not remarry until her weaving was finished, so she unraveled her work every night, stayed faithful. Some Aberdonians criticize the painting for…a theme irrelevant to the general public.”
I was fascinated because we have the idea of the hero’s journey as a completely elastic notion that encompasses all people. We say, “ah, that’s a universal canonical work.” But as soon as it’s Penelope, it’s “not relevant.” Those questions are always interesting to me. Who gets to say what and who determines who’s a minor character in a story and who’s a major character story. There’s an implication when you say, “This is a Classic. This is the way this story is told. This is what theater is.” That’s a really violent decision.
CMU: It’s fascinating to investigate traditional absolutes.
SVB: And it’s tricky. I mean our societal mores have purpose and efficacy. They connect us, they help us. They tether us to an origin story. Sometimes they are what we can hold on to when the seas get rough. I’m not a “do away with it all” kind of person, but I also think they ossify super-fast. I’m interested in this space between a brand-new and a “let it ever be thus idea.” That space in between is where interesting stuff happens.
CMU: What are you most excited, as you gear up for rehearsals?
SVB: I like theater that doesn’t give you many guardrails. In the published edition of the play, Margaret Atwood gives great latitude to directors. She wrote this story, but we can tell it the way we want to. That kind of work is always really appealing to me as a director. I do naturalism – everybody does – but there’s something about creating an ensemble of performers and a performative language. One of the things that is really interesting to me was the fact that the author gives the director latitude to cast however she might choose to. The play has upwards of 30 roles. We’re doing it with Penelope and 12 maids. The deliciousness of that is to be able to say to those actresses, “OK, you’re playing a suitor, but you’re playing a suitor as seen by a maid who fended that suitor off.” I’m going to be asking these actresses to deeply invest in their role in their primary role in this household and then to take that construct further and ask, “As that woman, who was Telemachus to you? Who was Odysseus to you? How did you see that person? Show me. Show me how he moved. Let me hear how his voice sounded to you.” It gives those twelve women an agency.
CMU: It highlights that split and overlap between truth and fact – the maids’ truth doesn’t necessarily align with the “fact” of the story as we accept it, but it enhances it in different ways.
SVB: I think a lot about the moment that we’re in right now and how that continuum of fact and truth and perception and reality, and how completely fuzzy it has all become. It’s only going to get more so. The notion that there’s a singular source for truth – that is external, that we can all soak in… What would that source be? One can hide in one’s basement and speak only to the people on you know your particular social media feed, and call that truth. Or you can sort of lean into that and say, “I have to take in multiple viewpoints. And then I have to decide what is true for me. What else can I do?” Hopefully folks find that world is much wider and much brighter when you do that.
Finding out what’s true doesn’t stand in opposition to curiosity; it’s a virtue if you are deeply committed to outward bound inquiry.
Caroline Michele Uy is a Chicago-based freelance writer, arts administrator, dramaturg and stage manager.
