Two women teeter on the precipice of monumental personal change.
The Actress, her life spent in the theatre, struggles to hold onto her sanity, not to mention her sense of humor, even when her life is ravaged by divorce and addiction.
Aspasia, a high-priced courtesan, who once shared the love and protection of ancient Greece's most powerful politician, Pericles, is now fighting for her life in an Athenian prison, incarcerated for speaking out against the war with Sparta. She's lost everything but her fierce determination to save their beloved democracy, now on the verge of total destruction, even if she must pay for it with her life.
Though separated by two thousand years, these women are inexorably linked by their unyielding passion for Euripides’ Greek tragedy, The Trojan Women. The Actress re-imagines the play nightly and inhabits its characters as a way of understanding her unraveling life...while Aspasia in prison digs deeper into the psyches of those war-ravaged characters, understanding only too well how vital it is to write a play that tells the truth.
The Absence of Wanting explores such timeless themes as democracy, gender politics, marriage, desire, families and whether our own personal and political histories are linear or unbroken circles, forever dooming us to repeat the same mistakes.
