The Janeiad extends and deepens The Old Globe’s already rich relationship with playwright Anna Ziegler. We are proud to be an artistic home for this wonderful writer, whose plays The Last Match and The Wanderers premiered here before going on to further successes in New York City and around the world. Ongoing relationships between theatre companies and playwrights are crucial to the health of our artform and central to the identities of great theatres. Think of the Berliner Ensemble and you think of Bertolt Brecht; of the Comedie Francaise and it’s Moliere; of the Globe (the London one, not this) and Shakespeare. When I think of my dozen years at our Globe, I think not only about Anna but also about Steve Martin, Kemp Powers, Michael John LaChiusa, Karen Zacarias, Melinda Lopez, Gordon Greenberg, and Steve Rosen: a core group of astonishing writers whose output is in a very real sense this theatre’s artistic legacy. They are the house playwrights of The Old Globe.

Anna enjoys pride of place on that august list because there’s something so unique and powerful about her voice. There’s a strong line of lyricism in the way she puts sentences together, a deep structure of poeticism in the very sound of her words in the mouths of actors. There’s also a unique sense of dramatic structure, particularly with regard to how her plays reckon with time. Time bends in Anna’s hands, collapsing at one moment and telescoping the next. Her plays are smart and her characters are highly articulate: her dialogue is rich in literary allusion and her subject matter and themes are ambitious and capacious. Anna’s work has an enormous heart—she is capable of irony and ferocity, to be sure, but fundamentally there’s a sincerity to her plays that lends them an uncommon emotional power. And in all of Anna’s plays, even the one we produced about a pair of male tennis champions, there’s an immense compassion for and sympathy with the lives of women, and their friendships and family relationships. All of these hallmarks of the Ziegler canon are present in The Janeiad, and that’s why it’s on our stage.

But beyond its writerly virtues, there are two aspects to this play that I find particularly arresting and worthwhile. First, it’s in conversation with no less a work than The Odyssey, a foundational text of western civilization. Homer’s great epic of a man trying to get home, and the woman who’s there awaiting his return, is having a moment right now. Just a few weeks ago the author and scholar Daniel Mendelsohn wrote an op-ed in The New York Times arguing that “the world that [The Odyssey] paints—with its anxieties about gender and power, exile and belonging, narrative and identity—is one we know well.” Anna’s play seconds his motion. As Jane fixates on Odysseus’s wife Penelope and comes to see herself as an icon of patient devotion, we experience what’s almost a literary magic trick: a Brooklyn apartment in the 2000s merges imaginatively with Penelope’s home in ancient Ithaka. We witness time wrapping around itself as a wife’s heartbreak transcends the specific to become eternal, universal.

Jane’s heart, though, is sundered not by the wars of Greece but by the defining act of violence of our own era: the 9/11 terror attacks. That’s the second reason I’ve come to embrace this play. I lived in New York City on that terrible September morning, and images from that day, and the suffocating grief I so vividly recall, have been with me ever since. I’ve wondered when the theatre would find a way to respond. My artform is bad at current events—theatre needs time to digest things, time to think, time to summon metaphor. Anna’s done it. Indeed, I think that The Janeiad is the first real 9/11 play I know. It captures the enormity of that event and the endless echoes of its aftermath, but it also manages to compress what was incomprehensible about its scale into a small, human story that every one of us can empathize with. I boggle at Anna’s achievement here, and I’m greatly honored to bring it to this theatre and our audience.

I thank Anna for once again entrusting her work to the Globe, and for her faith in our theatre as a custodian of her vision. I thank the wonderful Maggie Burrows, too, who is making her Globe debut with an especially assured and moving production. She and her collaborators, including a truly exceptional group of three simply stunning actors, are doing something special here. They are championing an extraordinary new work for the stage even as they make a case for theatre’s necessary humanity. I’m humbled by it.

Thanks for coming. Enjoy the show.

Barry Edelstein is the Erna Finci Viterbi Artistic Director of The Old Globe.
Any feedback on tonight’s show or any of the Globe’s work?
Email Barry at HiBarry@TheOldGlobe.org and he’ll get back to you!