What's It About? 

Playwright, nerd, and aging hip-hop enthusiast Barrett Ryder has 99 problems, and a script is one.​

 

Twenty years ago, Ryder wrote an exuberant hip-hop Odyssey as a vehicle for wife Cally. Now that Cally is ill and needs Ryder by her side, the show is finally getting its big shot... but everything about it seems cursed.

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Ryder must leave Cally daily and face the crazy demands of the show, made crazier by backstage drama among the cast. A director constantly reminds Ryder that he is out of time, a venal producer​ mis-casts a new leading lady to put posteriors in seats, and new scenes and songs are constantly inserted.

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Themes of memory, storytelling, and identity are woven together, picked apart, and woven together again, as Ryder’s grasp on reality begins to slip. The show within the show examines the power of the storyteller... whether rapper, epic hero, or populist politician... and the self-serving dark side of that power.

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Parallels abound. Two competing actors playing Penelope stand in for Cally in youth and middle age. Ryder parallels both Odysseus and a young suitor, Eurymachus.

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And that's just the beginning of a house of mirrors that evolves as the show does, ​until finally, Ryder's journey of love and loss ends in a powerful bedrock resolution that cannot be narrated away.​​​​

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