‘Penelope’ falls short of its epic aspirations

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Updated: January 16, 2012 10:09AM

Odysseus, that larger-than-life King of Ithaca, spent 10 years fighting the Trojan War, and another 10 years in a state of serious distraction as he attempted to sail home to his wife, Penelope.

As for the beautiful Penelope, she remained ever faithful to her husband, fending off marriage proposals from more than a hundred suitors. Or so the story goes according to Homer, that seminal poet and storyteller of ancient Greece who spun the tale in his enduring epic, “The Odyssey.”

Now, in “Penelope,” Enda Walsh, the Irish playwright with an oddly eccentric imagination, has seized hold of Homer’s classic and given us a decidedly off-center view of the tale. He has homed in on the queen’s four remaining suitors — men of varying ages and personalities who have been camped out for years in her drained swimming pool, which sits just beneath her palace window on the Ionian Sea. The four sense their fate — that the heroic Odysseus will ultimately return and make them even more irrelevant than they already are. But Walsh catches them in their endgame, and tries to evoke the wistful, bittersweet, tragicomic nature of their futile quest for love and meaning in life.

The Steppenwolf Theatre production of this 90-minute drama, directed by ensemble member Amy Morton, features four intensely engaged actors — Scott Jaeck, Yasen Peyankov, Tracy Letts and Ian Barford. But try as they might, they can’t make Walsh’s play seem like anything more than a literate sitcom with existential overtones. As for Penelope (Logan Vaughn, luminous and graceful), the unattainable object of their attention, she is an enigmatic beauty who never speaks, but only floats into view from time to time to listen to the men’s last gasp pleas of adoration ­on her flat screen television video hook-up. She is above it all, yet not deaf to her suitors’ words, even if they are pathetic men locked in delusion and despair and lost lives.

All this might sound better than it is. For far too much of the play these men simply get on each other’s nerves as they cohabit and compete in their man cave — a messy place filled with plastic beach chairs and a large gas grill that serves as something of an oracle. The laughs often come at the expense of their bodies, which are in various stages of fitness and decay as unforgivingly revealed by their Speedo swim trunks. (“Somewhere on life’s journey the body goes its separate way,” quips one of them.) None of them is psychologically fit, either.

Jaeck (as Dunne), embraces his enormous belly and waxes poetic about “the long walk towards death.” Letts (as Fitz), the most cynical and bookish of the group, is clearly burnt out on the pursuit. Peyankov (as Quinn), who prides himself on his fitness, whips through a series of rapidfire, amazingly executed changes of costume (designed by Ana Kuzmanic), though the meaning of this sequence eluded me. The youngest of the quartet, Barford (as Burns), is in many ways the angriest and most depressed.

Walt Spangler’s ingenious set — a vast turquoise-walled enclosure topped by a curving white stucco palace wall embedded with sparkling mosaic tiles ­— is a marvel.

While “Penelope” might easily be taken as a metaphor for contemporary Greece (or Walsh’s native Ireland), among the current poster children for economic decline, the playwright clearly has larger thoughts in mind. After all, he has given us a dry swimming pool in which four men, unable to swim, are thwarted in their every effort. But if Walsh has Beckettlike aspirations, the best that can be said is that the spirit behind his play might be willing, but its flesh is flaccid.