Though modernizing the Odyssey is hardly new territory, Woolly Mammoth’s production of Melissa James Gibson’s Current Nobody still manages to feel fresh.

We’ve got a gender flip, and a modern setting. Penelope, now merely "Pen", has been sent to Troy to take war photographs (the Trojan war here doesn’t feel much removed from the Iraq one), while Od is left at home with Tel – for 20 years. The story has kind of a weird feel, in the sense that situations are both realistic and fantastical, infeasible and relatable. For example, the band of suitors after Od is a team of three female documentary makers – who set up shop in his home for years at a time. It’s an eyebrow-raising but amusing concept, and in general, once the play has taken off, it’s easy to suspend disbelief in these scenarios and adjust.

The play’s tone is also somewhat inconsistent. Characters chatter on about frozen breast milk one minute, while the next is filled with lovely, poetic phrasing, (“I sent my thoughts through the universe to you/ you haven’t caught them”). Gibson is doing this intentionally – she gets a laugh, for example, when the doorman Bill (the fine Michael Willis) invokes passages from Homer and abruptly transitions to discussing problems with the hot water in the apartment.

It’s a tough balance to maintain, and Current Nobody largely holds together – though if you’re not intimately familiar with Homer’s work (we’re talking supporting character names at a minimum), you’re going to miss a lot of the play’s clever turns. It’s most emotionally affecting when centering on Od back home; Jesse Lenat is always on the border of collapse when dealing with his wife’s absence, and we're drawn into his plight. As Pen, Christina Kirk can sometimes appear a bit stilted (one scene where she’s been interviewed by an absent Charlie Rose comes to mind), but she draws the most humor from Gibson’s words, particularly when Odysseus’ tale of his travels turns into Pen’s press conference-retelling of her time spent "off the map" on her way home to America.

The production has a multi-media edge, with a giant video screen used sporadically throughout the work (it mostly comes in handy during a final climactic scene, where violence done on camera becomes even more startling when it's eventually repeated onstage).

The great epics are timeless, but Gibson should be commended for making us again feel the pain of absence and the tension between freedom and responsibility all the more acutely. The show runs through Nov. 25; tickets are available online.

Photo of Jesse Lenat in Current Nobody by Stan Barouh