Artist Date: Penelope, The Documentary

Artist Date | September 11, 2024

School has started and I am already in the middle of teaching The Odyssey to high school juniors and seniors. We’ve been reading great Odyssey-inspired poems– Alexander Pope’s “Argus,” Margaret Atwood’s “Siren’s Song,” Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “An Ancient Gesture.” We even watched an episode of The Simpsons with Homer as Odysseus, lured to sirens who end up being hideous. I could easily never return from a deep dive into all the art (and parody) that has been inspired by this 2000-year-old story.

A friend recently introduced me to Penelope: The Documentary (2014, 371 Productions), and it’s by far been my favorite deep dive into Odyssey-inspired themes. The documentary follows a theater company in Wisconsin – Sojourn Theater – as they bring their troupe to Luther Manor Retirement Community to put on a play with the residents called “Finding Penelope.” It’s a year-long process that involves discussing The Odyssey in book groups, playing theater games with the residents, and finally, rehearsing and performing the play.

The opening scene of the documentary depicts life at Luther Manor before the theater troupe ever arrives. Silent residents are in the activity room playing video game bowling, led by an overly enthusiastic staff member. The film then cuts to the health center, where residents are watching a video. Four women in a row have nodded off in their wheelchairs, heads bent in uncomfortable contortions.

When the Sojourn Theater team arrives in the film – and the residents’ lives – it’s during a snowstorm. On the car ride there, director Maureen Towey expresses, “What we’re here to debunk in a way is that people here are just waiting to die.” She then pauses and adds, “But maybe some of them are.”

The juxtaposition of these two scenes – the residents’ nodding off in their wheelchairs and the theater troupe crossing the threshold in a snowstorm – underscores the theatrical odyssey that they (and we) are about to embark on.

Many of the residents have dementia and severe physical limitations; they are at the end of their life journeys. Sojourn Theater designed this theater experience, so that the place has everything to do with the story. They picked Penelope’s story because they were drawn to how she waits and ages. Director Towey says to the residents, “Everyone has waited, everyone has loved, everyone’s had to be the hero in their own lives.”  One of the residents agrees and expresses how all of them at Luther Manor simply “wait for the next day.”

How does one make meaning of life with all that waiting? When I asked my high school students, which character had more perseverance – Penelope who waited for 20 years for Odysseus to return, not knowing if he was even alive -or- Odysseus with all his dangerous adventuring, trying to return to her – my class was split 50-50. Waiting is hard. I have always found Penelope more impressive.

One part of the documentary that really got to me, was how the theatre troupe played with the metaphor of weaving that is present in The Odyssey. Throughout the epic, Penelope weaves a shroud for her father-in-law by day, and by night she unravels it, because she has told the suitors she will marry one of them when she completes the shroud. It’s a delay tactic, and she keeps at it for years. She doesn’t want to marry a suitor. She is waiting for her husband to return.

In “Finding Penelope,” the blanket she knits represents the narrative of her life, and the unraveling represents the unraveling of her memory and, with it, her life story. One of the activities the theatre troupe has the residents do is get together and weave – weaving in community as an act of not forgetting.

Another particular scene I was struck by was when Lenny Cruz, a dancer hired to engage with the residents, teaches them hand gestures from Hawaii. His messages are full of love, life, and joy.

My eyes, they sparkle like stars.

I’m calling you.

Smiling.

He gets down on his knees to help the most physically disabled do these simple hand gestures, making physical contact with her—a woman with such limited mobility, her head is contorted to the side.

My heart.

I want to share with you.

You can almost see a smile in the corner of her mouth as he helps her hands deliver this message. I was struck by how comfortable he was connecting with her.

Director Towey questions why whenever she enters a retirement community, she braces herself. She wonders if it is because it’s a reminder of her own mortality.

As someone who spent a lot of time being dragged by my mom when I was a kid to visit older relatives in retirement communities, I think that “bracing” has very much to do with our discomfort in how society sets aside those in the last stage of life. They are literally separated out from society, and put into places where everyone around them, including themselves, is waiting to die. My mom took us to such places, so that we could make our older relatives’ final time on this earth more enjoyable, and so they knew they weren’t forgotten. Because forgetting is a large part of the end of our lives.

In the final scene of “Finding Penelope,” Penelope finally recognizes her daughter and they are reunited after many years. Upstage from this dramatic moment, the residents perform a call-and-response of movements and lines – a kind of choral performance.

The camera pans to show how moved many audience members are – both staff and family members. The theatre troupe is moved, too.

The film made me think of my father who lived in a similar community in his final years. He had his own apartment, and he ate in the dining hall with friends, and enjoyed activities like watercolor painting and play reading. He often talked about his death in those years, and perhaps that inspired him to engage even more with his community, either to distract himself or imbue meaning into his days. My dad passed away before he ever developed dementia, but he was physically limited due to breathing difficulties from COPD. He was in the stage of life where that would only worsen and soon memory would fade, too. On that precipice, I witnessed him choose to make meaning of his life every day, though it had to have been a struggle.

In Penelope: The Documentary, I loved watching how theatre was used as a tool to make meaning in the residents’ lives. After the final performance, the producer and writer, Anne Basting, says teary-eyed, “I know a lot of the people in the play are going to pass away, and I’m happy they got to have this experience as part of their lives.”

You can buy or rent Penelope: The Documentary (2014) directly from 371 Productions.