Ellen McLaughlin and members of the Ives Collective Photo by Sinjin Jones

Accompanied by a string quartet and music composed by Sarah Kirkland Snider, Ellen McLaughlin launches into Penelope, an ancient, epic story (with some modern edits) of this unnamed woman and her damaged, also nameless ex-husband, a work she created in 2008 for the Getty Museum. With sea waves and a boat's sails at her back, she sails into a journey where he becomes the wandering and lost Ulysses and she, his faithful wife Penelope, awaits his return from years away from home.

In the intimate setting of The Pear Theatre's co-production with Bootstrap Theater Foundation, award-winning playwright and acclaimed on-and-off-Broadway actor Ellen McLaughlin astounds the audience with a ninety-minute performance that is engrossing and enchanting, heartbreaking and heartwarming.

As she looks at a blank chair where we are told sits a man who now appears like "a starved animal who's finally found his sanctuary," she notes with a far away and almost vacant voice, "We are waiting for him to arrive, both of us ... to come home ... days, weeks, months." As will be the case as she both reads and relates in her own words the story of Ulysses, the man in the room and the man in the book in her hand become interchangeable as their stories intermingle in details, time and geography.

After hearing from her friends who wonder why she is harboring him–a man who was such a liar and bastard those many years ago–she half-talks, half-sings, "I'd give a lot to hear him tell me lies like that again." As her voice suddenly rises in volume and register, she implores him, "Try to remember." And as she relates the story of Ulysses–a story "I do make up ... [to] make it mine, to make it his"–she achingly admits, "I miss him so much ... I think we both miss him."

She seems to sense that there are horrible reasons why he is so adrift, unable to come home yet. She sings in soft, hypnotic lines–all the time accompanied by the beautiful strings of the Ives Collective–that, like Ulysses, "The world wants her travelers to stay lost ...no, no, you can't go home ... the world is never done with you." There are prices to pay for deeds done. Jumping on the empty chair as she attempts to enter the mind of the man sitting there, she describes with gnashing tones the terrible slaughter of Troy by Ulysses, hoping to stir memories of what she suspects is "the terrible business of his own story."

Mixing the translated words of Homer, her own imaginations of likened events that happened for this man during his time at war, and songs that reflect and expand on both, she leads him through an odyssey and stops with the pleasure-producing Lotus Eaters, with the sorceress and goddess (and lover) Cerce, and with the nymph Calypso who reads his fortune after he selects the Hangman card from a Tarot deck of cards. There is also a side trip into the Underworld, where she sings in a ghostly voice, "Dead friends, forget me ... I've forgotten you," as both the Ulysses of old and the Ulysses sitting in his chair are clearly haunted by the men they left behind dead on the fields of battle.

And while Ulysses has his stopovers, our unseen ex-husband, ex-soldier has experiences hitchhiking, wandering around in silk pajamas, and being rescued by a small girl on a soccer field. Or at least he has these and other adventures as imagined by his ex, the storyteller trying to help him recreate the path that got him to the house they once shared.

As her story progresses and switches between a book's pages and her images of this silent man's story, lines both sung and spoken illustrating both stories are emotionally stirring and plaintive–lines like "Just take my hand, I will lead you home" and "Why should I have been saved for this?"

Adding to the feelings of any one song or story is the score, which is beautifully played by the string quartet, there often being much like a Greek chorus reflecting in notes things that words alone cannot adequately communicate. Not only do Susan Freier and Kay Stern on violin, Jill Van Gee on viola, and Stephen Harrison on cello mesmerize the audience with their music, they each become sources of an entire soundtrack of special effects through strings picked, bows rubbed on music stand, hands slid across the wood of an instrument, and more. The result is that we hear sails unfurled, birds singing, and wind whispering.

While the stage just a few feet from the audience is mostly blank, the set designed by Giulio Perrone is nonetheless powerful in providing a setting where Lisa Rothe can nimbly, sensitively, and powerfully direct the sole actor to capture our every minute of rapt attention. A single lantern lights the way for both stories being told as lacy curtains unfurl to become sails or to become a remembered mother's shawl. The sea's ever-presence of waves under a night's sky of shooting stars become a landscape for imagination and escape as created in video by Sinjin Jones, who also has designed a lighting scheme that seamlessly and wonderfully shifts moods, locations, and our focus to add more meaning to the words we are hearing.

As Ulysses reaches his final destination where he can at last seek forgiveness for all his past atrocities, we learn where this journey has taken both the man and the woman in front of us–one seen, one not. What is clear, they–like us–are not quite the same as any of us was in the story's onset. For our part, we now have new memories that will stay with us for a long time of a stunning performance by both actor and musicians in a co-production by The Pear Theatre and Bootstrap Theater Foundation, a Penelope whose four scheduled stagings are much too few.

Penelope, a co-production with Bootstrap Theater Foundation, runs through March 30, 2025, at The Pear Theatre, 1110 La Avenida, Suite A, Mountain View CA. For tickets and information, please visit www.thepear.org.