What's It About? 

Playwright, nerd, and aging hip-hop enthusiast Ryder Dyson 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 the show is finally getting its big shot, Cally is chronically ill.

 

To Ryder, the show is a way to make money to fight Cally's illness. For Cally, the show just gets in the way of having him by her side. For both of them, the show seems cursed.

A director constantly reminds Ryder that he is out of time. A venal producer​ mis-casts a new leading lady to fill seats. New scenes and songs are constantly inserted up to the very last minute. And on top of that (or as a result,) Ryder's health is failing as well. ​​​

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Ryder compulsively re-writes the show even as his grasp on reality slips. As in the Odyssey itself, themes of memory, storytelling, and identity are woven together, picked apart, and woven together again. 

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Two competing actors who are vying for the role of Penelope, also stand in for Cally in her youth and in her middle age.  Ryder parallels both Odysseus and a young suitor, Eurymachus, and is confronted by the self-serving dark side of the power of the storyteller within himself. The show within the show examines the power of the storyteller... whether playwright, rap star, epic hero, or populist politician... undermining our trust in the narrator, in keeping with the Odyssey's lessons. 

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And when the house of mirrors finally collapses, the audience is left examining ways we all fulfill -- and write -- our roles.​​​​​​​