Cymopoleia
Cymopoleia, a daughter of Poseidon and Amphitrite, was a sea-nymph associated with violent waves. Her name, appropriately, means “wave-roaming.” She married the hundred-handed giant Briareos, god of sea storms, with whom she had a daughter, Oiolyke. While there is little mythology surrounding Cymopoleia herself, it’s safe to say that she and her husband were not deities the seafaring ancient Greeks would have wanted to displease.
Bridgette Dutta Portman (whose favorite book is Moby Dick) finds something both terrifying and inspiring about the impersonal destructive power of the ocean. Her play centers around a woman who lost her young daughter to a sneaker wave and has returned one year later to the site of the tragic incident. Encountering Cymopoleia, personification of the waves, the woman has the opportunity to confront her child’s killer and demand an apology. But how does one elicit remorse from a force of nature indifferent to human suffering?
CYMOPOLEIA by Bridgette Dutta Portman
Directed by Stuart Bousel
Staged Reading on November 5, 2015
Bridgette Dutta Portman is excited to be returning for a fourth year with the SF Olympians festival. Her play commissioned for 2012, “Caenis and Poseidon,” was a finalist in Pride Films and Plays’ 2013 Women’s Work contest and in the Arch and Bruce Brown Foundation’s 2013 playwriting competition. Her short plays have been produced in the San Francisco Bay Area as well as across the country and overseas. She is a board member of the Playwrights’ Center of San Francisco and a member of the Pear Avenue Theatre Playwrights’ Guild and the City Light Source playwrights’ group. Her day job is a political science lecturer at Santa Clara University.