Playwright Anna Ziegler’s love of Greek mythology and of the stories that would later come to inform some of her own work began in second grade with her big yellow copy of the illustrated children’s classic “D’Aulaire’s Book of Greek Myths.”
“It was quite foundational for me,” Ziegler said. “I became obsessed with Greek myths and memorized all those stories. It’s no mistake that I have a bunch of plays that are entangled with those stories.”
The first of that bunch, “The Minotaur,” premiered at Synchronicity Theatre in Atlanta in 2012. Another, “Antigone (This Play I Read in High School),” will have its world premiere at the Public Theater in New York next winter.
A third, Ziegler’s “The Janeiad,” like the other two a melding of ancient and contemporary, debuted last fall from Houston’s Alley Theatre company and now comes to the Old Globe under the direction of Maggie Burrows.
The Globe is a familiar landing spot for the New York-based Ziegler, whose “The Last Match” and “The Wanderers” both premiered there. “The Janeiad,” like her play “The Great Moment,” was workshopped at the Old Globe’s Powers New Voices Festivals.
“The Janeiad” grew out of a commission from Manhattan Theatre Club.
“There was a 9/11 widow who had approached them,” Ziegler said. “She was interested in a play about her husband coming home for a night, and that was the concept that they approached me with. She and I ended up meeting a few times and I took on the project.”
The play is set 20 years after 9/11. Just as Odysseus’ wife, Penelope, awaited her husband’s return from the Trojan War after 20 years, so does Jane, a mother of two in Brooklyn, wait for her spouse who left for work on Sept. 11, 2001, and never returned.
Without giving too much away, Ziegler explains that Penelope “is helpful to Jane in some ways at the beginning of her brief journey because she gives her hope and she lets her be in a kind of denial that allows her to function in her life. But then she becomes a much less healthy crutch for the main character.”
“The rest of the play is about Jane finding a way to sever herself from Penelope and Penelope’s story and to find a way to move on.”
“The Janeiad” is also an exploration of grief.
“There’s something beautiful about theater in that it’s a coming together,” said Ziegler. “It allows us to process things collectively in a way that other art forms don’t. This play also harkens back to ancient Greek stories, and I think there’s a reason for that because those are the stories we’ve turned to to comfort and give us explanations for things that didn’t have explanations for thousands of years.”
Ziegler found her meetings with that 9/11 widow to be her “way into this play — looking at this one person’s experience of (grief) and thinking about in a very personal way in the hopes that the personal becomes universal.”
She remembers her own experience on Sept. 11, 2001.
“I was at home in Brooklyn Heights,” she said. “Not far away. I had just graduated from college a few months earlier. I knew a lot of people who worked in those buildings and knew a few people who didn’t survive. We are all profoundly changed by that day and that moment.”
The Globe’s production of “The Janeiad,” which begins previews on Saturday, stars Nadine Malouf as Penelope and Michaela Watkins as Jane. Ryan Vasquez completes the cast as Jane’s husband Gabe.
Meanwhile, Ziegler remains drawn to mythological texts.
“I feel,” she said, “like I continue to read whatever I can that appears and I certainly will see any play that has to do with Greek myth.”
The myth of the goddess Eurydice, in Greek mythology the wife of Orpheus, is a compelling one for Ziegler. She cited fellow playwright Sarah Ruhl’s “Eurydice” as “a really important play for me when it first came out (in 2003).”
She spoke of her excitement at having tickets to see the current revival of Ruhl’s play at the Pershing Square Signature Theatre and of a new translation of “The Odyssey” by essayist Daniel Mendelsohn.
“I do try to absorb the ways that other people are absorbing Greek myth around me,” she said.
‘The Janeiad’
When: Previews, Saturday through June 25. Opens June 26 and runs through July 13. 7 p.m. Tuesdays through Thursdays; 8 p.m. Fridays; 2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays; 2 and 7 p.m. Sundays
Where: Old Globe Theatre’s Sheryl and Harvey White Theatre, Balboa Park
Tickets: $38 and up
Phone: 619-234-5623
Online: theoldglobe.org
