STAGE WEST: "The Janeiad" at the Old Globe

Michaela Watkins (left) and Nadine Malouf in "The Janeiad."                                Photo by Rich Soublet II

            The definitive play about waiting, Samuel Beckett’s endlessly analyzed tragicomedy about Pozzo, Lucky and someone/something named  Godot, is at its core existentialist thought. The same could be said of a new play about waiting, Anna Ziegler’s “The Janeiad,” which opened its world-premiere engagement at the Old Globe on Thursday.
            Jointly inspired by Greek mythology, namely “The Odyssey,” and by Ziegler’s interview with a 9/11 widow, “The Janeiad” contemplates existence – and non-existence – from the standpoint of “the unknowable.” Its inquiries, posed over the course of 90 minutes: Who am I? Why am I here? Why were you here and now you’re gone? Why did you go? Where do you go when you die? What does it feel like when you die?
            Questions that would daunt Homer himself.
          Jane (Michaela Watkins), a Brooklynite wife and mother, has seen her husband Gabe (Ryan Vasquez) off to work one particular Sept. 11 morning, then fallen asleep in her favorite blue chair while reading “The Odyssey.” (Even she acknowledges it’s an ambitious, OK strange, choice for the book club she’s in.) Soon she’s roused from slumber by alarming phone calls, including one from Gabe, who’s in dire danger. But she’s also awakened to the presence of a stranger in the room: Penelope (Nadine Malouf), the wife of Odysseus.
           It didn’t occur to me at the time – though it crossed my mind later in the storytelling -- but was this possibly a dream? I credit Ziegler with too much creative deft and intellectual savvy to have employed the “It was all a dream” trope here, so let’s dismiss that. So who is Penelope, this Trojan War widow who, she tells Jane, waited 20 years for Odysseus to return to her -- which he did?
            More of the unknowable.
           You will wait, too, Jane is told, for Gabe to return to you, and this also will require 20 years of patience and trust.
          It seemed to me that Jane, a pragmatic sort with, as we’re told several times, a Harvard education, buys into this scenario without much doubt or resistance. Nor does she react with enough incredulity that her waiting will consume two decades.
           Penelope, meanwhile, circles the Tim Mackabee-designed living-room set in the Globe’s White Theatre making ponderous observations and pronouncements. Here, as is the case throughout much of “The Janeiad,” Ziegler’s eloquent word craft feels better suited for the reading than for the dramatizing.
            The versatile and expressive Malouf, who reigns over this production, is gifted with many opportunities to do more than observe and pronounce as Penelope. She’ll slip into the characters of Jane’s clinical-sounding therapist, her caustic sister, her domineering mother, her housekeeper and even her rabbi during the elapsing 20 years onstage. It’s from these characterizations that the lightness of an otherwise weighty affair directed by Maggie Burrows stems.
          Watkins, in the meantime, inhabits a Jane who is either stoical or is simply feeling hassled by these other people in her isolated, quietly grieving life. The two children are heard only in recordings and Jane apparently pays them little attention. In short, everyone gets under Jane’s skin, including Penelope, while she waits … and waits.
           The passage of time is conveyed using blackout pauses and recurring radio recordings of NPR intros from “Morning Edition” or “All Things Considered” dated beginning on Sept. 11, 2001, and continuing right up until Jane’s big moment – the 20th anniversary of Gabe’s disappearance. (His body, we are told, was never recovered from among the remains of the WTC towers.)
          The passing years and cameo characters within them smack of contrivances more than narrative developments; there’s a sense that we, like Jane, are being played with. This includes the arrival of a visitor at the door 20 years to the day that Gabe died. Just who is the Greenpeace guy in the COVID-era mask? It can’t just be a Greenpeace guy in a mask. If Penelope’s prophecy is true then is Jane’s waiting being rewarded?
           Whether or not Ziegler intended the line between reality and call-it-hallucination to be razor thin here, the story she is telling dwells in the margins. Since grief is what consumes Jane the most and grief itself is incalculable in duration and comprehension, who’s to really say what’s going on in that Brooklyn living room?
         It may be viewed by some as such, but I don’t think “The Janeaid” is a “9/11 play.” Ziegler’s conversation with that widow, aforementioned, may have been the catalyst for the project but this a reflection on grief and processing it. Sept. 11 compelled so many people to that process and still resides in our collective soul. As “The Janeaid” suggests, so does the global pandemic we all went through. So does the grief we are confronted with day to day, life to life, passing to passing.
          Jane is unknowable to herself, though a closing monologue implies that she has seen a light, of some kind. That light we all wait for.
         “The Janeiad” runs through July 13 at the Old Globe’s Sheryl and Harvey White Theatre in Balboa Park.