"Gibson has turned the tables in this modern-day treatment by sending Odysseus' wife, Pen (Christina Kirk), on the 20-year adventure while long-suffering husband Od remains at home to raise a young daughter. The woman is a war photographer assigned to cover the battle of Troy. En route home, she is captured and imprisoned on a far-away isle while Od's urban condo is invaded by a trio of marauding documentary filmmakers.....An extremely inventive Gibson ("[sic]") toys with the saga and its predicaments while laying out a bittersweet tale of love and loneliness as the small family counts the days of separation."

A Current Nobody With a Mythic Past
Modern Epic Sends Penelope on The Odyssey Melissa James Gibson, the Obie-winning playwright of Current Nobody, retells Homer's epic with a modern-day heroine.
By Jane Horwitz
Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Why not take The Odyssey and turn it into a contemporary saga in which Odysseus stays home and his wife goes a-wandering? Obie-winning playwright Melissa James Gibson ("[sic]," "Suitcase," "Brooklyn Bridge") did just that, creating "Current Nobody".......

Gibson explains that Odysseus's mythic adventure during his much-delayed return from the Trojan War (to wife Penelope and son Telemachus) is "just huge, but at the same time it has this wonderful intimacy about it." Odysseus, she says, "was at war for 10 years, but he spent a second 10 years trying to get home. In the course of that 20 years, he lost who he was. . . . We are all defined both by what we do [and] also by who we love, and when we become separated from those anchors, one's sense of self is affected." Hence the title, "Current Nobody."

In her play, the modern Odysseus (called Od) stays home, spinning yarn and pining for absent wife Pen, who has gone off to be a war photographer, leaving him and baby daughter Tel.
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Gibson seems to argue the case both ways when asked about her portrait of an absentee, career-focused mother. Pen's lost sense of self is "not because she's a woman"; after all, Odysseus went through the same thing, the playwright maintains. Yet she concedes that "in terms of the absence from the family, society puts a different pressure on women."

Gibson, who has two young kids with her lighting-designer husband, works full time as a high school counselor in Brooklyn and writes plays, observes that "it's incredibly hard to feel that you're meeting your children's needs at the same time you're meeting your own."

Occasional quotes from Richmond Lattimore's classic translation of The Odyssey, much beloved by Gibson, pop up in Current Nobody. Her own punctuation-free dialogue also looks like verse on the page, but she says her choice to go sans commas and full stops is not "anything highfalutin"; it's intended to give the cast and director (Daniel Aukin, former artistic director of Soho Rep in New York and a frequent Gibson collaborator) a freer interpretive rein.

"Punctuation doesn't have a place in my plays," Gibson says, "because for me that's not how most people express themselves." Period.

 

Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Interview with Melissa James Gibson
The Playwrights Foundation

Jonathan Spector speaks with Melissa about the play and her process.

Jonathan Spector: You have a very idiosyncratic way of writing dialogue, which seems to both mimicking the rhythms of actual human speech while creating a very specific kind of heightened language. Can you talk about how you evolve this style of writing?

Melissa James Gibson: It's really just an effort to capture the way I hear things, the way peoples' thought processes are reflected in the way they speak--all the self-edits, misfires, revisions and pauses that surround and inform, and sometimes form, human expression.

JS: In so many ways this piece appears at first glance to be an extremely loose adaptation, yet on the plot points and structure it’s actually very faithful to the original. How did the process of adaptation differ for you from writing an original work?

MJG: Well, it's both thrilling and daunting to be grappling with source material of genius. My hope was to honor that material by turning it on its head, while also retaining its heart. At the same time, I've dispensed with many elements that didn't feel germane to my particular take (and, of course, plays and epic poems are different beasts).

JS: Current Nobody is a project that had a somewhat lengthy development process. So much of the play deeply integrates the dialogue with the physical action and design in such a way that it’s all completely interdependent. How much of the physical action of a piece do you conceive in the writing, and how much do you typically develop while working on it with actors and a director?

MJG: The short answer to the two parts of the question is A, lots, and B, lots. I think about the architecture of my play worlds carefully, and in ambitious and sometimes unrealizable terms--the Brooklyn bridge is assembled before our eyes, for example--and then rely on the visions of talented designers and directors to imagine ways of elegantly executing these notions in three dimensions. The actors we work with in first productions play an important investigatory role, as well.

JS: What's up next for you?

MJG: I'm working on commissions for playwrights horizons and the Atlantic Theater company; a musical with composer Michael Friedman and director Mark Brokaw for Center Theatre group; and a film for a small independent company.