Conor McPherson and Martin McDonagh enjoy higher profiles, but Irish playwright Enda Walsh feels much closer to the spirit of Joyce and Beckett than either of his better-known contemporaries, who generally hew fairly close to the dictates of realism. Like Joyce, Walsh delights in wordplay and allusion, and like Beckett, his plays evoke closed environments where meaning, such as it is, comes from the repetition of stories and actions. In Bedbound (not yet produced in Chicago), a father and daughter deliver a series of voluble and recriminatory monologues from a filthy bedroom. In The New Electric Ballroom (presented by A Red Orchid Theatre earlier this year), three sisters in a small Irish cottage obsessively revisit an incident from the past.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
In Penelope, Walsh has found classical stand-ins for his brand of stunted and perhaps delusional souls—the suitors who wait outside Odysseus’s house, drinking, bickering, needling each other, and hoping to win the hand of the warrior’s famously faithful wife. The four gents who hang out in the drained swimming pool before Penelope’s door day after day provide the missing link between Greek epic and reality competition shows like The Bachelorette—the latter notion reinforced by Penelope watching the four on closed-circuit television from her white-walled home above the pool.
When the four discover that they all had the same horrifying dream—Odysseus returns and barbecues them on the grill that has long since ceased to work—they decide that it’s an omen. They must abandon their competitive urges and work together to get Penelope to marry one of them and save them all from the vengeful clutches of her warrior husband. Yes, it’s an insane idea, but apparently too much time spent overindulging at the bottom of a drained pool leads to such madness. (See, for example, Edie Sedgwick in Ciao! Manhattan.)
Through 2/5: Tue-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat-Sun 3 and 8 PM, check with theater for exceptions, Steppenwolf Theatre Company, Downstairs Theater, 1650 N. Halsted, 312-335-1650, steppenwolf.org, $20-$78.
