Nereids
Who doesn’t love Nereids, the nymphs of the sea? If you don’t, don’t get too proud about it, lest they go ahead and make you love them. Mind you, these aren’t the seductive sirens, their near neighbors, but these sea spirits, the fifty daughters of Nereus, are often helpful to sailors and sometimes the mothers of heroes such as the warrior Achilles. Heck, the nymph Calypso was helpful to shipwrecked Odysseus, at least at first, but then she kept him on her island for seven years, torturing him with delicious foods and lots of sex until the god Hermes was sent by Zeus to tell her to knock it off already and let the poor guy go home to his wife.
Sam Hurwitt is totally fascinated with the women of the Odyssey and is working on a short play about them that will ultimately feed into a full-length play sometime in the not-so-distant future. After his previous 20-year absence, what happens when Odysseus goes a-voyaging again and his legendarily faithful wife Penelope, not content to sit and wait any longer while he goes catting around, goes looking for him, facing down his gals in every port? And how much of this interventionist crap is Calypso going to put up with on her island? Sam aims to find out in a bite-sized play with bite, for and about three formidable women.
NEREIDS or THE WEAVERS by Sam Hurwitt
Directed by Scott Baker
Staged Reading on November 5, 2014
Xanadu Bruggers (Calypso)
Fatima Zahra El Filali (Circe)
Teri Whipple (Penelope)
Sam Hurwitt is the editor-in-chief of Theatre Bay Area magazine and theater critic for the Marin Independent Journal, KQED Arts, and his own blog, The Idiolect. Born and bred in Berkeley, Sam has at various points been the arts editor for the East Bay Express, film editor for Kitchen Sink magazine, and a busy freelance arts journalist for the San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Examiner, Salon, Variety, Budapest Sun, Pacific Sun, Austin Chronicle and many other publications. He also writes fiction on the sly, some of which has been published in Fourteen Hills, Defunkt, The Misfit Library and the Doubleday anthology Voices of the Xiled. Sam unveiled his very first play in the 2013 SF Olympians Festival, the Helen of Troy update Ellen’s Undone, and somehow he hasn’t learned his lesson and is back for more. When he’s through writing plays about the unsung heroines of the Homeric epics, he wants to get started on a play about the lost women of (but not in) Shakespeare’s plays.
The image of the Nereids was created by Cody A. Rishell. You can see more of his work at here and here.