Birth of Athena
a new play reading by Robert McGrady
The Birth Of Athena
Birth of Athena is an exploration of the unique circumstances of the Greek goddess Athena’s birth story and the implications it has with Zeus, her deadbeat father.
Rooted in the sensibilities of visual and performance art, this free associative piece of experimental theatre touches on themes of fluid identity and sexuality.
Rated R for language, sexuality, and violence.
The Collaborative Team
Writer/Director: Robert McGrady
Assistant Director: Mariabella Sorini
Stage Manager: Seth Campbell
The Featured Artists
Corey Baesler
Claire Chenoweth
Joni Griffith
Grover Hogan
Zach Staads
Madeline Wall
About This Work ~ Robert McGrady:
“Some questions that stand out to me include: How do we maintain/regain dignity in the face of humiliation? Is dignity a worthwhile value to strive for? What is the function of theatre? What does this performance owe its audience?
As the writer and director, my challenge now is to synthesize what I observed in the room into a second draft of the script.
Birth of Athena has a lot to do with bodily transformation and its many meanings. Referring back to the piece I made in 2022, Athena’s birth is both painful and satisfying, a cartoonishly large smile under a skull cracked open.
Throughout the show, I try to illustrate how even necessary change represents a violent rupture, something that radically upends how we relate to the world. Delving even further, I am interested in exploring how the origin of our desires are often mysterious to us, that our drives to change carry weight and history that we may not even be able to comprehend.”
I come from a background of comics and printmaking, so I used the tools I was most comfortable with when creating the show. This manifests as a script consisting of illustrations alongside written dialogue.
What excites me about the Birth Play Project producing this play is that I get to introduce them to my more visually informed way of creating while getting to learn from their approach as well. The cohort has already had fascinating discussions stemming from the different perspectives of artists in the room. My hope is that we’re sowing the seeds for future cross-disciplinary collaboration!
The term ‘workshop presentation’ is intentionally ambiguous. We designed this process with a flexible end goal, allowing the final product to be informed by what we accomplish in the room. The most important thing to keep in mind is that this is a work in progress. People may be more familiar with the term ‘staged reading,’ where actors read a script out loud to give the audience an impression of the show without having to mount a full production. This performance of Birth of Athena is similarly in progress. The only difference is that the show’s visual sensibility can’t be communicated unless we include some elements (staging, music, puppetry) that aren’t typical for a staged reading. We hope to land somewhere in between: some technical elements but still very much in process.”
The Birth Play Project is a Minneapolis-based company of artists committed to reproductive stories. For more about us, you can always visit birthplayproject.com, join our mailing list to learn more, or email us directly to ask how you can participate in future productions.
Behind the Scenes
