THE ODYSSEY, IN ASHES AND UPHOLSTERY

The chair will not move. That is how we begin. In Anna Ziegler‘s The Janeiad, now in a quietly astonishing production at the Old Globe, which produced Ziegler’s The Last Match in 2016, a woman sits in a green armchair and does not get up. Not because of laziness. Not because she is grieving in a way that invites recognition. She stays seated because she cannot leave. The chair is where her husband kissed her for the last time. It is where the towers fell. It is where time stopped following the rules.

Her name is Jane. She lives in Brooklyn. Her husband Gabe died in the South Tower on September 11. These facts are offered plainly. Ziegler is not interested in surprise. Her focus is on what comes after: the quiet, recursive life built inside an open wound.

Michaela Watkins portrays Jane with a blend of warmth, intelligence, and authenticity that never draws attention to itself. Her detachment feels like survival rather than aloofness. There is nothing decorative in the performance. Even in stillness, Watkins carries a whole world of thought, fatigue, and stubborn resolve.

Jane’s book club has, inexplicably, chosen Homer’s The Odyssey, which she begins rereading. In the epic poem, Odysseus, after ten years fighting at Troy and another ten trying to get home, returns to Ithaca disguised as a beggar to find his palace overrun with suitors vying for his wife Penelope. Penelope, who has kept the suitors at bay with cunning tricks and quiet endurance, finally tests the beggar with a secret only Odysseus would know—and confirms he’s truly returned.

Michaela Watkins as Jane and Nadine Malouf as Penelope

Soon Penelope materializes. At first she might be a dream. Then a housekeeper. A sister. A therapist. A neighbor. Eventually she is just Penelope again. A woman who waited twenty years for her husband’s return, who weaved a shroud by day and unraveled it at night to delay moving on. The question is whether Jane has summoned her or been claimed by her.

This haunting finds its perfect vessel in Nadine Malouf, whose masterful clarity allows each incarnation of Penelope to emerge fully formed. Her control of expression, posture, and accent creates distinct characters: the aloof mother, the no-nonsense sister, the softly-spoken therapist, the yoga instructor who speaks in airy clichés. None feel like sketches. Each embodies the same pressure to remain patient, to wait, to fold yourself into someone else’s story.

Memory brings Gabe back too, though only in fragments. Ryan Vasquez gives a performance that rests on contradiction. He is at once gentle and evasive, present and distant. Sweetness and cruelty arrive in his voice simultaneously. He seems to belong to her and to no one at all. Vasquez captures a character whose truth flickers and fractures under the strain of grief and misremembering.

Traditional trauma narratives rely on familiar gestures. Ziegler avoids them all. There are no flashbacks, no patriotic arias, no funerals staged for release. Instead, we see a woman who simply cannot leave the morning before–who lives inside the space between disaster and routine. Her grief is not loud. It is stubborn, private, composed entirely of habits that no longer serve her.

Michaela Watkins as Jane, Nadine Malouf as Penelope, and Ryan Vasquez as Gabe

The Janeiad finds Ziegler returning to territory she has mapped before, though never with such quiet precision. Her previous work has consistently examined the weight of waiting and the cost of fidelity. In The Wanderers, she explored how two marriages strain against the boundaries of duty and desire. In Photograph 51, she traced the isolation of a brilliant female scientist whose discoveries were claimed by others. In Actually, she dissected the aftermath of a one-night stand that refuses to resolve into simple truth. But where those plays wrestled with motion, with the push and pull of ambition, the forward momentum of discovery, the urgent need to assign meaning to catastrophe, The Janeiad achieves something more unsettling. It presents a woman who has stopped moving entirely and asks whether that stillness is prison or sanctuary. Ziegler has always understood that her characters’ greatest struggles happen in the spaces between action and inaction, between what is said and what remains unspoken. Here, she has created a play that exists almost entirely in that liminal space, where time itself becomes unreliable.

Nadine Malouf as Penelope, Michaela Watkins as Jane, and Ryan Vasquez as Gabe

The script gathers power through rhythm, metaphor, and repetition rather than following conventional dramatic arcs. Maggie Burrows directs with a style that favors fluidity over realism. Her choices highlight the central tension of the play, which lives in contradiction. This is a story where myth becomes mundane, where wit lives inside paralysis, where the act of sitting becomes both faithful and paralyzing. Burrows resists sentimentality while giving the story space to breathe without letting it off the hook.

Tim Mackabee‘s design creates a book-filled Brooklyn living room staged in the round. The space is cluttered but intentional, suspended in a moment that will not pass. The green chair transcends furniture to become monument. David I. Reynoso‘s costumes blend contemporary silhouettes with classical references, as though history itself has intruded into Jane’s apartment.

Ziegler allows the national to seep into the domestic through careful accumulation of detail. There are casseroles. Neighbors. Jokes about yoga. A child who flinches at the sky. There is no sermon here. Just the ache of trying to maintain a life when the past keeps inserting itself into the everyday.

Ziegler navigates the ethical minefield of dramatizing September 11 by refusing to exploit the tragedy for easy emotion. Instead, she understands that classical mythology offers a framework for processing contemporary trauma without trivializing it. The ancient stories become a lens through which modern grief can be examined safely, allowing distance and dignity to coexist with raw pain.

Michaela Watkins as Jane and Ryan Vasquez as Gabe

Penelope’s presence becomes both model and trap. She does not simply offer endurance as example. She forces Jane to question whether she has chosen this form of survival or simply inherited it. Whether Penelope was ever free. Whether Odysseus wanted to return. Whether faithfulness is virtue or holding pattern.

These questions arrive quietly, embedded in the repetition of days. In the way Jane holds her book as though it were a map. The story does not build to crisis but deepens into discomfort. Jane begins to sense that her grief is not hers alone, that it has been shaped by stories written long before she lost anything.

Time moves forward while nothing changes. Dates are announced through NPR news bulletins: September 11, September 12, May 17, September 11 again. The world insists on chronology. Jane keeps reliving the same moment. The Odyssey does not lead Jane home but leads her in circles.

The play asks whether survival requires meaning, or whether meaning is something we impose so we can keep going. It wonders if patience is choice or just another way to stay still. If myths help us move on, or if they keep us exactly where they found us. When the lights went down, I did not know whether I had witnessed a healing or a haunting.

A rolling world premiere staged by the Alley Theatre in Houston in 2024, The Janeiad stayed with me in a way that few plays do. It lingers in the questions it refuses to answer. It sits beside you, like Jane in her chair. And it does not let go.

Nadine Malouf as Penelope and Michaela Watkins as Jane

photos by Rich Soublet II
poster artwork by Ben Wiseman

The Janeiad
The Old Globe’s Sheryl and Harvey White Theatre
1363 Old Globe Way in Balboa Park
Tues and Wed at 7; Thurs and Fri at 8; Sat at 2 & 8; Sun at 2 & 7
1 hour, 35 minutes, no intermission
ends on July 13, 2025
for tickets, call 619.437.6000 or visit The Old Globe