Name: PENELOPE
Start: 2026-03-17T19:00:00-04:00
Location: Oglebay Institute's Towngate Theatre & Cinema

The WSO is pleased to announce this special companion performance to our Masterworks concert, Her Voice. Featuring guest artist Shara Nova alongside a small WSO ensemble, PENELOPE is a retelling of the Odyssey from Penelope’s perspective. This performance will be held at Towngate Theatre near Centre Market, Wheeling.
Inspired by Homer’s epic poem, the Odyssey, PENELOPE is a meditation on memory, identity, and what it means to come home.
This unique piece is unlike anything you’ve seen before at the WSO. Suspended somewhere between art song, indie rock, and chamber folk, the music of PENELOPE moves organically from moments of elegiac strings-and-harp reflection to dusky post-rock textures with drums, guitars and electronics, all directed by a strong sense of melody and a craftsman’s approach to songwriting.
In the work, a woman’s husband appears at her door after an absence of twenty years, suffering from brain damage. A veteran of an unnamed war, he doesn’t know who he is and she doesn’t know who he’s become. While they wait together for his return to himself, she reads him the Odyssey, and in the journey of that book, she finds a way into her former husband’s memory and the terror and trauma of war.