Review: Dark Comedy ‘Dido of Idaho’ Is Wild Fun Once You Get Past Self-Love Clichés

The play “Dido of Idaho” is raucous, irreverent, and extremely funny. Now showing at the Chelsea Theatre Works/ Apollinaire Theater, in Chelsea, the dark comedy details the struggle of 32-year old professor Nora who turns to alcohol and unreliable men to ease the pain she feels inside. She is madly in love with a married older man, who she hopes will leave his well-adjusted, unintellectual wife for her. Yet things take an unexpected turn when the two women meet. Two different worlds collide, yet there are surprising resonances between the women. This tragicomedy, written by Abby Rosebrock, is an exploration of addressing childhood trauma, love and friendship, and what it feels like to be a modern woman doomed by wanting love from men who can’t treat women right.

LOVE TRIANGLE: Ashley Lyon as Crystal, Parker Jennings as Nora. Courtesy Photo by Danielle Fauteux Jacques

“Dido of Idaho” is a funny, largely feminist reimagining of the love story in the 17th century English baroque opera “Dido and Aeneas.” In the original story, Dido tragically dies after her lover Aeneas abandons her. She plunges a sword into herself on a funeral pyre, believing it better to be dead than to live without her man. Thus the original story is ultimately about Aeneas’ hero’s journey. The woman is the sacrifice on the altar he must make. “Dido of Idaho,” though, features Nora (as Dido) and Crystal (also as Dido) plotting their own heroinic journeys. Although the unfaithful husband casts a long shadow into the play far after his last scene – somewhat unsettling in how few scenes passed the Bechdel test (where two or more women talk about something other than a man) – the story undeniably centers the interior struggles of the female protagonists.

As a dark comedy, the performance is fresh and successful, driven by excellent acting from Parker Jennings as Nora, Mariela Lopez-Ponce as Julie, Paola Ferrer as Ethel, Ashley Lyon as Crystal, and Mauro Canepa as Michael. Line after line of comedic bangers kept the audience laughing. There was a nice mix of elements driving the humor. The performance is rife with unabashed body humor and physical comedy; the dialogue is laden with double meanings; and the details of the juicy drama of the affair are executed deliciously in a way that rivals the best reality TV out there. Caught just below laughter in my chest, though, was a sense of ominous foreshadowing and heavy sinking – a sense that things are about to turn from casual off-kilter rock bottom to a more brutal rock bottom. Indeed, one of the most successful elements of the writing was making the audience feel “in the know” of things to come, creating ever-building suspense and a riveting sense of not being able to look away from impending disaster, while also delivering real surprise.

The ricocheting, however, between the “dark” to the “comedy” of dark comedy sometimes creates emotional whiplash. The comedic parts always land, but what the darker parts give entryway to – ambiguity about the characters and their commitments, as well as questions about how to make sense of one’s life with a sense of brokenness – don’t have time to breathe. Indeed, the ending was emblematic of this issue. Although overall successfully communicating an interesting message about self-love, the play’s bias towards infusing every scene with comedy made for an abrupt and almost unbelievable ending. Indeed, the quick conclusion made the entire play feel akin to a basic advertisement for female self-love, taking its place alongside women’s self-help books, podcasts, and dating advice literature that profess that the key to making it in a world that doesn’t love you back is, simply, to love yourself. Yet women under patriarchy and the gender relations it creates, including in intimate relationships, are abandoned by more than bad men. “Dido of Idaho” does touch on these things briefly, pulling in themes of mother troubles, grief and trauma, and different standards for men and women in the professional world. But what is the right response to men sleeping around with women, and falling back on society’s support of them and their greater political and economic capital, whereas women who do the same are pilloried? Indeed, this fate befalls Nora, whose brokenness is partially portrayed as tied to her being a “tramp” that cannot successfully form a stable monogamous relationship.

Although supposedly we are in a fourth wave of feminism in the U.S., it is also a time when feminism is broadly not on the agenda as a collective mass movement questioning how patriarchy intersects with structural relationships between men and women, both in intimate relationships and as societal classes. This conversation is much more vibrant and collectivized, in both the solutions feminism proposes as well as in feminist organizing, in other places including in many Latin American countries. In our neoliberal times the answer “Dido of Idaho” gives to a man’s disrespect is an individualized one: If a man disrespects you, respect yourself. If Aeneas leaves you to commit suicide on the funeral pyre and return to the fanfare of his countrymen and of the gods themselves, then get back on your feet, look in the mirror and call yourself beautiful. As a bonus, make some female friends for solidarity. But after this moment of self-reckoning, how will Dido make a home for herself in a society that still celebrates Aeneas (and leaves the unfaithful man unscathed)? This is a world that tolerates and even demands her consistent sacrifice or self-sacrifice for a male-driven narrative.

The play is surely feminist, yet it also feels like a reduction of can be done by “Dido of Idaho” already stepping outside of the hero’s journey into the interiorities of modern women trying to love themselves in Idaho. Is this just Aeneas’ journey but inversed, with women as the protagonist, and the man sacrificed as a plot device in their path to self-realization? Arguably, Dido and Aeneas in their first incantation in Virgil’s “the Aeneid,” written in 19 BC, as well as in their resuscitation in the opera 17th century opera were constructed in times when male-driven societal and literary narratives demanded clean-cut masculinized journeys that culminate in messages about duty, sacrifice, and empire-building. Women, then, functioned as the sacrifice (if not a distraction) on the altar before a man and a polity’s coming of age. Yet somehow “Dido of Idaho,” although excising the betraying Aeneas from the stage early on, still somehow leaves open the question of whether these two women end up carrying the mantle of self-sacrifice more than the man, for all the humiliation they go through in both the plot and as comedic spectacle in front of the audience.

“Dido of Idaho,” overall, is awesome and hilarious. The set design is well-executed and compelling, and the pacing left the audience engaged. I laughed a lot and got to eat a freshly baked chocolate chip cookie that was made during the play itself at a heightened moment of comedic drama. Rosebrock’s writing is sharp and compelling, which explains the play’s laurels, including Winner of the 2025 LA Drama Critics Circle Awards for Best Original Writing, Best Direction, and Best Featured Performance.

"Dido of Idaho" runs through May 10, with performances Fridays and Saturdays at 8:00 p.m. and Sundays at 3:00 p.m. at Chelsea Theatre Works, 189 Winnisimmet Street in Chelsea, Massachusetts. Written by Abby Rosebrock and directed by Brooks Reeves and Danielle Fauteux Jacques, tickets range from $15 to $65 and are available at https://www.apollinairetheatre.com/tickets/tickets.php.