Reading: Four Riffs for a Sailor

by Breann | Apr 26, 2024

The Odyssey without Odysseus? Four Riffs for a Sailor is play that retells the story of The Odyssey through the interlocking monologues (and sometimes dialogues) of four women in it–Calypso, Nausicaa, Circe and Penelope–with no Odysseus, at least not onstage, though of course he gets talked about. Playwright Monica Raymond arrived at this residency with about 2/3 of the script written and spent the first three weeks writing the final third, and then playing with the pieces, cutting and pasting, and finding the right order. She spent the week before this event with four local actors rehearsing and exploring the text to be shared with you in its first voyage-this staged reading.

Calypso is the “whore of peace,” the goddess who heals men from the psychic wounds of war enough so that they’re fit–well, fit enough, anyway–to return to the civilian world. Nausicaa is a child, just over the edge of puberty, seduced by Odysseus’s stories and adventures. Circe is the self-contained artist who nonetheless finds herself vulnerable to Odysseus. And Penelope, whose story we think we know the best of all of these, her fidelity, her efforts to stave off the suitors, her blessed reunion with Odysseus at the end– here turns out to be quite different.

Local author, screenwriter, and Surel’s Place panelist Samantha Silva responded to Monica’s residency application by writing “Raymond’s CV is dizzyingly extensive and impressive. I wanted to like the writing so much…….And I LOVED the writing. It’s crisp, poetic, contemporary. Such a brilliant idea for a play. I had tears in my eyes at the end of Calypso’s last monologue.”

Casting by Buffie Main, Artistic Director of Alley Repertory Theater
Alley Rep is delighted to incubate and support Surel’s Place artists

Biography:

Monica Raymond (Massachusetts) is a poet, playwright, lyricist and librettist. Primarily a poet for the first half of her life, she began auditing courses in performance art while teaching writing and interdisciplinary arts at the Boston Museum School. While she still makes the occasional solo performance piece for herself, she soon realized that she prefers to write scripts for other people. Her first full-length script, FASTER, about the death of a teenage anorexic, got her admitted to Smith College’s under-the-radar MFA program, from which she graduated in 2000. Since then she’s had close to ninety performances or staged readings of her work in the US and Canada. This is her first residency.
“My work, particularly in theater, usually addresses some thorny knot of a world problem for which I do not have a solution, only many questions and a whorl of feelings and sensations,” Monica elaborates. “Creating strong, complex women characters is central.” Her multiple prize-winning full-length The Owl Girl was an extended meditation on the situation in Israel/Palestine. Another play, A to Z, looks at the 1968 murder of a Black male activist through the stories of his girlfriend, sister and first grade teacher. Monica’s work often has a magical, spiritual aspect, stretching from the mundane into mystery.