THE STORY: “It wasn’t me. It was the black hole.” With these words, a temp worker named Genny launches us on an epic, fantastical journey through corporate America, Appalachia, astrophysics and beyond. TEMPODYSSEY tells the story of a young woman who’s convinced she’s the goddess of death. Fleeing the imminent creation of a black hole on one side of the country, she lands smack in the middle of a bomb manufacturing company on the other. Her only hope lies in the unlikely guise of a nameless temp who considers himself immortal. Can he help Genny cast off her dark mythology once and for all? Or will she explode, taking all of downtown Seattle with her? Dan Dietz melds the absurdity of contemporary cubicle life with the epic poetics of Greek mythology, and the results are hilarious, horrifying and ultimately uplifting.
“Mr. Dietz’s postmodern fairy tale—Homer meets the Brothers Grimm and Stephen Hawking—is laugh-out-loud funny yet strangely moving…Get in on the fun, but be sure to buckle your seat belt. This is one wild ride.” —The New York Times.
“The playwright uses temping, astronomy and poultry farming as an allegory for the feeling we can’t outrun ourselves and the energetic fates which seem to follow us, no matter how hard we may strive to change or escape them. Hence the title of Dietz’s work: Whether we are temps or not, we each at some point feel our lives are some sort of Olympian test, an odyssey that we have no control over. Dietz has just dressed up the age-old question a bit with talking corpses, sage-like temp goddesses and a graphic description of how one skillfully and painlessly kills chickens by hand. It all makes for some great fun, especially if you can identify with dysfunctional work environments, insecure and bullying bosses and the desire to occasionally go postal on your co-workers.” —CurtainUp.
“Dan Dietz has written an amazing play. Following a temporary office worker named Genny through her first and only day in a new office, Dietz jumps back and forth in time and from one coast (Atlanta) to another (Seattle—the anti-Atlanta), touching on themes of work, family, the virtual reality of the Internet, and our relationships to death, time, and the market economy…His characters often speak in alliterative, frighteningly beautiful, poetic dialogue and then, suddenly, switch to monosyllabic one-liners that sting with comic perception.” —Austin Chronicle.
