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A2 Pulp Review: Athena

  • 2 days ago
  • 3 min read

Parries and Ripostes: Theatre Nova's "Athena" utilizes staged combat as a pivotal storytelling device in a tale of friendship and ambition


Mon, 07/20/2026 - 10:45am

My longtime best friend is also a writer—a brilliant, super-talented poet and teacher—and I can’t tell you how often I’ve thanked my lucky stars that we work in entirely different realms of the writing world.

Why?

Because the intersection of ambition and friendship is a treacherous emotional minefield, but it also provides the narrative engine for Gracie Gardner’s play Athena, now playing at Theatre Nova, directed by Shelby Seeley.

Focused on two 17-year-old fencers, Mary Wallace (Brittany Batell) and Athena (Jen Pan), the 80-minute play begins with them sparring. Athena, the more skilled and worldly city kid, goes to clubs, occasionally drinks, crows when she wins a bout, and lives in a small apartment with her smoker dad. Mary Wallace, meanwhile—who crumples to the floor weeping upon losing the opening duel—loves her parents and marine biology, and takes the subway in from suburbia after school every day to train.

Athena—who’s adopted the goddess moniker as a kind of stage name—tentatively encourages Mary Wallace to be her training partner, and an awkward, earnest friendship between opposites takes root. Yet when they must compete against each other for a spot on the Junior Olympic national team, their bond is strained and tested.

Any conversation about this play must start by acknowledging its unique physical demands—fencing skills and loads of fight choreography—but Theatre Nova has assembled a kind of stage combat dream team for its Athena. Pan and fight director Joe Wright are the founders of the Ypsi-based company Theatrica Gladiatoria, which specializes in “the art of dramatic violence,” and Batell and Amanda Buchalter (who appears in the play’s final scene) are certified TG students.


So it’s not terribly surprising that the fencing bouts unfolding just a few feet from audience members not only look legitimate, but play a pivotal storytelling role. After all, the conversations between these two guarded, awkward teenage girls are often pithy, but on the piste, where they compete, they become more fully embodied, and thus reveal more fully who they are.

Set designer Amanda Bates has reconfigured Theater Nova’s performance space so that the piste bisects it, with rows of seats flanking both sides. This brings audience members right up close to the action, making the women’s bouts more visceral. Jade Guerriero's lighting design sets the appropriate mood for each scene (and often conveys the passage of time); Michaella Victoria’s costumes provide another realistic, immersive layer into the world of competitive fencing; and Kennikki Jones-Jones’ sound design supplies an apt aural backdrop for the two friends’ high-stakes final duel.

Batell and Pan both look youthful enough to play teens and have the stage combat chops to pull off Athena convincingly—something I have to believe is a rare casting combination.

But Gardner’s script? While I always love being introduced to an entirely new world (competitive fencing), and appreciate the risk Gardner took in relying so heavily on physical combat between two young women as a means of storytelling, I couldn’t help but wish, by play’s end, I’d come to feel a stronger, deeper emotional tie to the characters.

Yes, a conversation in the final scene makes it clear that the friendship has permanently changed them, but I also wanted it to change me a little, too.

Jenn McKee is a former staff arts reporter for The Ann Arbor News, where she primarily covered theater and film events, and also wrote general features and occasional articles on books and music.      

"Athena" is at Theater Nova, 410 West Huron Street, Ann Arbor, through August 9. Visit theatrenova.org for tickets, showtimes, and more info.

 
 
 

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