In the depths of the pandemic, at a time when the world was in upheaval, writer and composer Alex Bechtel stumbled upon Penelope, the steadfast wife of Odysseus in Homer’s Greek epic “The Odyssey.” He wasn’t searching for her, but Penelope, who never gives up on Odysseus returning from war, materialized for him in a moment when uncertainty, anxiety, and isolation defined so many of our lives. Holed up in Philadelphia, far away from his girlfriend in Boston, Bechtel turned to his guitar and piano for solace. What poured out of him were yearning folk and pop ballads and melancholic orchestral pieces that captured his deep sense of longing and loneliness.
“I was going through this really intense, painful, and strange human experience of missing the person I love and also missing the world I love,” Bechtel says. “I was missing theater and live performance and things that I didn’t know if I was ever going to get back to again.”
Eventually, he turned those haunting songs into “Penelope,” a solo cabaret-style musical, centered on the character sharing her tale of love, loneliness, grief, and finding her inner resolve. The show, which premiered in 2023, features a five-piece chamber orchestra performing Bechtel’s score, which he describes as “Joni Mitchell meets Philip Glass.” Now, the Lyric Stage Company is mounting “Penelope,” starring Boston favorite Aimee Doherty as the title character, from Feb. 6 through March 1.
When Bechtel first began composing the songs, the name Penelope surfaced, “unbidden in my imagination,” as he wrote a vocal melody on top of a piano part. He thought of the character, who dutifully waits for the king of Ithaca to come back from the seemingly endless Trojan War, fending off a swarm of suitors and weaving a massive tapestry. The wondering and worrying and the isolation and determination of Penelope all resonated for Bechtel, and he began writing from her point of view.
“The metaphor of this character was just there within an arm’s reach, and so I started to more intentionally write into Penelope’s story from the myth,” he says. “That’s how the piece grew out of this very personal and emotional activity to try and process what I was going through.”
When his relationship hit a rocky patch, “I was finding comfort in writing into the journey of this character,” he says. Later, when he and his girlfriend broke up, “more songs and more music was showing up because my processing of that relationship wasn’t over. And as anyone who’s ever gone through a breakup or lost someone they’ve loved [knows], you don’t get to choose when you’re done being heartbroken or when the grief of that loss is done visiting you.”
A concept album that Bechtel put on Bandcamp and Spotify came first. But in 2021, he began collaborating with a director and friend, Eva Steinmetz, and the actress and writer Grace McLean (“Suffs”) to turn the material into a chamber-size musical.
“Penelope” arrives at the Lyric Stage at a time when Homer’s saga is having something of a moment. This summer, Oscar-winning director Christopher Nolan (“Oppenheimer”) will unveil his highly-anticipated epic film version of “The Odyssey,” starring Matt Damon as Odysseus and Anne Hathaway as Penelope. Last winter, playwright Kate Hamill’s stage adaptation of “The Odyssey,” told through a contemporary feminist perspective with a renewed focus on the character of Penelope, premiered at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge.
“I’ve found that in difficult times we turn to these things that live in the bookshelf of our hearts to try and make sense of them, and times are really difficult right now,” Bechtel says. “So many artists and human beings are stepping back and going, ‘What’s happening right now in the world?’ And it’s moments like these when the echoes of these ancient stories tend to show up for us and help us understand.”
Courtney O’Connor, the Lyric Stage producing artistic director who’s helming this production, believes that “Penelope” resonates right now because the world feels unsettled and turbulent. “Like all of us, she is watching people tear down the world around her, and she doesn’t want that to happen, and so she is using her power where she can to find her way back to the world that she wants to see,” O’Connor says. “So she is both thousands of years old and of this moment immediately.”
While her husband has been away fighting the Trojan War, fending off sea monsters, and dallying with an enchanting goddess-witch, Penelope is left in charge and has been “running the place behind the scenes for 20 years,” Doherty says.
With Odysseus presumed by many to be dead, Penelope must contend with a group of boorish suitors, all competing for her hand in marriage. To keep the unruly throng at bay, she tells them she will choose one of them after she finishes weaving a funeral shroud to honor her husband. But every night, with the hope that Odysseus is still alive, she unravels the work she’s done, ingeniously stalling for time and maintaining control of her fate.
“She thinks she’s at the mercy of the gods, at the mercy of the men downstairs, at the mercy of her sex, and during the show, she realizes that she’s not a victim, that she’s a survivor and the master of her own destiny,” Doherty says. “I see her as a woman who is surprising herself with her own power and rage.”
Unlike the sprawling source material or the upcoming Christopher Nolan epic with its reported $250 million budget, Lyric Stage’s “Penelope” will be an intimate affair. The five-person band — including a pianist, three string players, and a percussionist — share the stage and even interact with Penelope at times as a kind of Greek chorus. For the staging, O’Connor and scenic designer Janie E. Howland imagined Penelope sitting on her terrace, sipping from a glass of bourbon.
“It’s like she’s invited some friends over and is like, ‘Well, let me tell you a little bit about what’s been going on with me,’” O’Connor says. “Our idea is that you are a guest hanging out with her on her patio. She lets her guard down. And that’s what ultimately allows her to explore her story in a deeper way than she has in the past and to make some of the choices and realizations that she does in the piece.”
This Penelope is so “vibrant and relatable,” O’Connor says, because traumatic changes are thrust upon her and she’s forced to adapt. “This is not a play about the Trojan War or Odysseus. This is a piece about when life says to you, ‘You can’t have that future that you hoped for, that you planned on and worked for. I’m throwing something different at you.’ So what do you do in that moment? How do you find that strength within yourself to move forward and to choose life and to choose putting one foot in front of the other?”
After 20 years of separation, Doherty says that Penelope wonders if she and Odysseus will still be drawn to each other the way they once were. “At a certain point, I think she’s like, ‘What am I even waiting for? Like, who is he going to be? And who am I going to be when we meet up again?’ Instead of one person standing still, and the other person having this 20-year adventure, hopefully we find that they’ve both grown in their power.”