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Record W4379532188 · doi:10.1353/tj.2010.a413942

The Penelopiad (review)

2010· article· en· W4379532188 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

aboutThe title or abstract carries a Canadian signal from the geographic lexicon.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenueTheatre Journal · 2010
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicThemes in Literature Analysis
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsWifeMythologyLegendArtHistoryPerformance artLiteratureArt historyTheologyPhilosophy

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Reviewed by: The Penelopiad Tina Lambert The Penelopiad. By Margaret Atwood. Directed by Vanessa Porteous. Martha Cohen Theatre, Alberta Theatre Projects, Calgary, Alberta. 28 September 2010. Wading through the crunching leaves of a windy Calgary autumn triggered an atypical sentiment following Alberta Theatre Projects' (ATP) production of Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad; far from the comforting nostalgia of autumns past, the scratching leaves in the whistling gale echoed the urgent petition of Penelope and her twelve ill-fated maids, their whispers from Hades mistaken by our living ears "for breezes rustling the dry reeds, for bats at twilight, for bad dreams." These are the voices of the twelve maids ordered to death by Odysseus upon his return to Ithaca after a twenty-year absence during which his wife Penelope dissuaded a multitude of suitors threatening to take the kingdom by force. The maids were silenced, hanged by their necks in a row, deemed polluted for their involvement with the suitors. In Atwood's play, adapted from her 2005 novel The Penelopiad, the maids call for justice, refusing to remain footnotes to the myth as recounted in Homer's Odyssey; and Penelope will no longer allow herself to be part of an "edifying legend," "a stick to beat other women with," instead urging her audience, "Don't follow my example." Penelope's actions, however noble in intention, resulted in the death of the maids who were her confidantes and eyes among the suitors and who sacrificed their bodies to protect the house of Odysseus. At a time of global volatility, The Penelopiad explores themes of enormous relevance: who will speak for those considered collateral damage in a war; who will accept personal responsibility for what they endured; what unchallenged myths allow this dynamic to persist? Beyond these weighty themes and the wry prose of one of Canada's most iconic writers, what was most momentous about this production was the fact that the actors—eleven in number—were all women. It is rare for women to be represented onstage to this magnitude. The Penelopiad was the opening production of the inaugural season under the leadership of newly appointed artistic director Vanessa Porteous—the first woman to hold this position in ATP's thirty-eight-year history—and she described this production as a "huge coup" due to its enormity. Porteous launched a fundraising campaign called The Penelopiad Circle, imploring women to champion the production financially, stating that this campaign was about "women supporting women in a show about strength and resourcefulness," two characteristics that inspired each scene of Porteous's production. At the start of the show, ATP's thrust stage, configured to amplify the exchange between audience and actor, was scattered with designer Terry Gunvordahl's white and blue lights, pulsing and shifting subtly, conveying images of water churning and the blossoms of white asphodel rippling in a breeze, and setting the stage for kinesis and transition. Penelope, played by the captivating Meg Roe, revealed that we were with her in Hades, a place of "bonelessness, liplessness, breastlessness," and also timelessness, as her conversation is far more contemporary than the Homeric verse from which she is emancipating herself; her message, accordingly, gains urgency. Hanging above the bare thrust stage, and at greater lengths within the proscenium, where they nearly touched the ground, were rows of thick ropes, creating depth and catching light as the actors meandered through them. The ropes suggested the voyages of ships, the threads Penelope weaves and unweaves each night, and the nooses that await the maids. The world of the play fluidly Click for larger view View full resolution Jamie Konchak as Odysseus and Meg Roe as Penelope in The Penelopiad. (Photo: Trudie Lee Photography.) [End Page 673] Click for larger view View full resolution Kathryn Kerbes, Esther Purves-Smith, Vanessa Sabourin, Jamie Konchak, Elinor Holt, Meg Roe, Adrienne Smook, Janelle Cooper, Lindsay Mullan, Allison Lynch, and Denise Clarke (left to right) in The Penelopiad. (Photo: Trudie Lee Photography.) transformed between locations, and the ropes lent an ethereal fog to the world as each movement by an actor caused a ripple effect. Atwood subverts the authority of the myth and reclaims Penelope's legend as contemporary...

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Other · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.830
Threshold uncertainty score0.993

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0010.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0080.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.009
GPT teacher head0.233
Teacher spread0.224 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it