But with all these stories, why begin with an obscure Norse goddess named Sigyn?

“I had a lot of stories—even with the paltry amount of research available, I had far more stories than I could put in one play,” she said. “So I needed to think about which ones I was going to tell, how I was going to combine them and create fictional characters around them, and what could hold them all together.”

“Then I was doing research on something else entirely—on gods and goddesses in general—and I discovered this one goddess, Sigyn. I’d never heard of her. But her husband, the god Loki, was chained up and imprisoned under the earth. And I thought, wow! She’s the wife of a prisoner, and nobody knows who she is—which is just like families of prisoners today. So I thought she could be like the patron saint of prison families, the one around whom all these other stories could be organized.”

But as she began to work Sigyn into the play, the goddess took on another important function. “I needed to vary the tone of the play, because like anything to do with human beings, there are all kinds of emotions involved in these stories, including humor. I started playing up the comic possibilities of a goddess in the modern world, trying to make a life and yet bearing these responsibilities, and these stories.”