The Penelope Project: An Arts-Based Odyssey to Change Elder Care ed. by Anne Basting, Maureen Towey, and Ellie Rose (review)

Like Penelope herself, who fends off a house full of suitors by daily weaving and nightly unraveling a funeral shroud, The Penelope Project is wisely deceptive. Its accessible language and seemingly conventional dramaturgy of process, even its use of weaving as a structural and thematic trope, conceals layers of un-doing: of assumptions about aging, temporality, dramaturgy, and the space of performance. Thus, like Penelope, this multi-vocal anthology, centered on a long-term performance project, both weaves and undoes.

Editors Anne Basting, Maureen Towey, and Ellie Rose index the distinct yet overlapping disciplinary perspectives that structure the book. The Penelope project brought together university students, professional theatre artists, staff, and residents at the Luther Manor elder care facility in Milwaukee for a two-year collaboration that included storytelling workshops, proliferating art projects, and a site-specific immersive performance, Finding Penelope (2011). Basting, a theatre professor and 2016 MacArthur “genius,” served as project visionary and playwright. As well as these contributions, Basting oversees chapters in the anthology that discuss associated University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee theatre courses—in which students conducted research on Penelope and created a performance piece based on stories shared by Luther Manor residents—and a chapter on evaluative mechanisms that assessed the project as a whole. Towey, a member of the Portland-based Sojourn Theatre company, renowned for its publicly engaged performances, directed Finding Penelope and curates chapters from participating artists (including Luther Manor residents). Rose, a visual artist working with Luther Manor, brings together voices from this institutional strand of the project, focused on the shifting culture of patient-centered elder care.

Both Finding Penelope and The Penelope Project are structured as double weaves housed in distinctive frames. The anthology interlaces dramatic text and images from the project within a five-part structure that loosely maps onto Richard Schechner’s dramaturgical model of the performance process—with sections on institutional frames, building partnerships, challenges, rewards, and impacts. This structure is bookended by two forewords, an appendix (including course syllabi, funding partners, and evaluative survey questions), and an index. Chronologically progressive, yet interrupted by interstitials, this organizational structure also interweaves conventional academic and theatrical frames while undoing both. For example, the first foreword situates The Penelope Project within the University of Iowa Press series Humanities as Public Life, an endeavor figured as a “third space” of collaborative scholarship (xi) that does something visible in civic life while undoing disciplinary and academic divisions. Thus, academic scholarship is both marked and queried. A second foreword does similar work for the project as performance—accounted for as striking beyond “a mere theatrical experience” (xix). Drama scholar and witness Elinor Fuchs struggles with words to account for her experience noting, “We had been through something together” (xix).

The journey that Fuchs alludes to occurs in three overlapping realms: the Finding Penelope playscript (which we, as readers, access through excerpted scenes), the site-specific processional performance (that readers can conjure up through testimonies, maps, and photos), and the journey of aging itself—which the anthology, play, and production all work to illuminate and deconstruct. This undoing of assumptions about aging and its complement, memory, emerges in part through a feminist dramaturgy focused on the act and art of waiting and of what it means to make a home.

The dramaturgical structure of Finding Penelope complements The Penelope Project’s organization and thematics. The play interweaves the story of Penelope’s 20 years of waiting for Odysseus with that of a “bad daughter” who has neglected to visit her mother for as long a time. While Odysseus’s journey is figured as that of a mythic male hero, “driven time and again off course,” the Nurse in Basting’s play sings also of Penelope, the woman, “driven time and again to forget the forward movement of time” (7...