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.