Penelope
Music by Sarah Kirkland Snyder
Lyrics by Ellen McLaughlin
Directed by Eva Wolfson
Featuring Sara Stebbins
Penelope is a 60-minute song cycle for female voice, chamber orchestra, and electronics, based on texts by playwright Ellen McLaughlin. It loosely tells a story in which a woman’s husband appears at her door after an absence of 20 years, suffering from brain damage. A veteran of a modern war, he doesn’t know who he is and she doesn’t know who he’s become. While they wait together for his return to himself, she reads him the Odyssey, and in the journey of that book, she finds a way into her former husband’s memory.
Penelope was produced at Williams College in 2023.