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"Go Back To Your Loom Dad": Weaving Nostos In The Twenty-First Century, Corinne Ondine Pache

Corinne Pache

For centuries writers and artists have adapted and transformed Homer's Odyssey in endlessly inventive and surprising ways. Yet the disposition of genders in the poem is seldom altered from its ancient pattern: a man leaves, a woman stays at home and waits until he returns. In her 2007 play, Current Nobody, Melissa Gibson departs from this conventional fidelity to the ancient narrative by rewriting the Odyssey as a twenty-first century family story with a wandering wife and a husband who is left behind. In Gibson's playful tragicomedy, Pen, a female war photographer, leaves her husband, Od, and daughter Tel …