SF Olympians

Charon was the grim, unkempt, fiery-eyed old boatman who ferried souls across the River Acheron (Styx in some accounts) to the Underworld. He was a son of Nyx and Erebos and one of the siblings of Thanatos (Death). He was portrayed as pitiless and inflexible: he would not allow souls to cross the river without paying the fare (one has to wonder what he did with all those coins), nor — with a few notable exceptions, all against his will — would he allow living people to cross the river.

In Bridgette Dutta Portman’s play, Charon is a morgue director at a hospital, grim, no-nonsense, and inured to death. When a young woman comes to him claiming to be dead and requesting a spot in the morgue, Charon turns her away, believing her to be insane. Doctors in the hospital’s psychiatric ward diagnose the young woman with Cotard Delusion, or Walking Corpse Syndrome, a rare disorder in which a person becomes convinced that he or she is dead. But as the girl continues to insist that she belongs in the morgue, Charon begins to wonder whether there may be more to her bizarre claims, and finds himself grappling with his own buried past.

CHARON by Bridgette Dutta Portman
Staged Reading on October 14, 2016

This will be Bridgette Dutta Portman’s fifth year with the SF Olympians Festival. Cymopoleia, her short piece from last year, will be produced by the Pear Theatre in Mountain View in May 2016. Caenis and Poseidon, her 2012 entry, was a finalist in Pride Films and Plays’ 2013 Women’s Work contest and in the Arch and Bruce Brown Foundation’s 2014 new play contest. Bridgette is president of the Playwrights’ Center of San Francisco, an associate artist with Wily West Productions, a founding member of Ex Nihilo Theatre, and a member of the Pear Playwrights’ Guild. Her day job is a political science lecturer at Santa Clara University.