Olympus on 81st Street

God might be dead, but the ancient Greek gods are alive and well, struggling to stay relevant and young in a confusing, fast-paced new world. They live on the 89th floor of an 88-story building on 81st and Broadway, in New York City, where they can watch the furious ebb and flow of humanity from their shining palace of Olympus. As the gods battle hair loss, flab and a loss of control over their thunderbolts, they despair at the state of the earth and the condition of mankind: the imaginations of today’s mortals have been sucked dry by tabloids and television, and they couldn’t find Sparta on a map if their lives depended on it. 


Enter Dimitri, a depressed, forty-something high school teacher who knows the ancient myths inside and out. Dimitri spends his fifty-minute lectures heroically fighting to inspire his busily-texting students with the tales of the great Olympians. Dimitri is discovered by the Immortals one drunken Friday night when he accidentally burns an offering on his living room floor and shouts a heart-felt prayer to Zeus.


The King and Queen of the Gods swing into action from their shining palace of Olympus. They summon the West, South and North Winds to spread out and find the rest of the great gods. It is time to fix what is wrong with the world, and while they were at it, reward their mortal champion for his devotion.


Poseidon, God of the Sea, hasn’t surfaced since the last oil tanker went down and wiped out another species of precious fish. Hermes, the God of Travelers, Tricksters and Thieves, is firmly embedded among the mortals on Wall Street. The God of Wine has long since graduated to harder drugs and spends his days strung out with his followers in a bubbling meth lab in the Midwest. The God of War is deep in the Pentagon stirring up trouble, cultivating perpetual conflict. The Goddess of Love and Beauty is reluctantly ageing in Los Angeles, fed by a steady diet of face-lifts and breast implants. Pandora’s evils are thriving and Mother Earth would just as soon kill human beings off altogether and give herself a fresh start with the cockroaches. 


Olympus on 81st Street is a humorous, provocative look at the delicate, symbiotic relationship between Mortals and Immortals. Ancient myth and modern chaos are blended together, as both gods and men struggle to make sense of the world in which they live.