The Odyssey: A Two-Person Play WITH POORNIMA KIRBY & STEPHEN COLLINS
2026-05-24 15:00 - 16:00 (America/New_York) | Follen Church, 755 Mass. Ave., Lexington, MA
What is the cost of our choices? Can love sustain across time, war, and distance? Can you ever really find your way home?
Join actors Stephen Collins and Poornima Kirby as they take on this three-thousand-year-old epic about the adventures of a wily and complicated traveler. This two-person, one-hour adaptation draws from multiple translations, punctuated with poetry and sea-chanties to connect this age-old epic to our modern time. Told as a marital squabble between Odysseus and his wife, Penelope, the story weaves through Odysseus’ travels and to his arrival in Ithaca to face the fall-out of his absence, and find out if he can really come home. With Stephen Collins as the funny, damaged, scheming Odysseus and Poornima flowing nimbly between Penelope, Calypso, Circe, the Cyclops and many more characters – this artistic, playful, searching adaptation explores the universal human needs that run through this ancient poem – from the desire to belong to the hunger for vengeance to the hope of a second chance.
Stephen Collins is an accomplished actor and literature professor, with over 20 years experience performing solo theatre pieces and literature lectures across New England. Originally from Cambridge, Ma, Stephen studied English at UMass Boston and pursued a career in sales, before returning to what he truly loves; performing and teaching. His solo shows include presentations on the life and writings of Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, William Shakespeare, Robert Frost, the theater of the 40s and 50s, Irish Poets and more. His work with actress Poornima Kirby through New Muse Productions has reconnected him to the joy of collaborative theater. http://unlaunchedvoices.com/
Poornima Kirby is a classically trained actress, writer and director, based in Boston, Ma, specializing in classical and poetic texts, as well as co-created theater. She studied drama at Vassar College, and trained in acting and Shakespeare performance at Shakespeare & Co. and London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts. She has performed regionally at the A.R.T.,
Actors Shakespeare Project, Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater, and Bay Colony Shakespeare. She has also appeared in several independent films, commercials, industrials and voice-overs, and has worked as a teaching artist in the Boston Public Schools, Tufts Medical Center and Berklee College of Music. She is Artistic Director for Theatre of Eternal Values – America (a branch of an Italy-based international company) where she has written, directed and performed in several original productions. With New Muse, she has scripted or adapted three productions in which she also performs—sometimes playing 18 characters in a single one-hour performance. www.PoornimaKirby.com.
