Kirsten Brandt, the award-winning Artistic Director of Sledgehammer Theatre, penned this imaginative play mixing Wagner’s Ring Cycle, Norse mythology, Icelandic sagas, and the modern corporate environment into a mind-bending and visually captivating play, currently enjoying its world premiere at Sledgehammer’s St. Cecilia’s Playhouse. David Lee Cuthbert’s stunning lighting enhances virtually every scene with a spellbinding effect including numerous lights shining down from the ceiling that create several different unusual settings, various psychedelic lighting effects, as well as the glow of the roaring fires that keep Woden’s punished daughter, the wayward Brunhilde, separated from all humanity in some sort of celestial “timeout.” Cleverly, that timeout lasts throughout intermission, with Brunhilde sleeping onstage in the midst of the crackling fire while her mother Erda (Janet Hayatshahi) comforts her.

In many ways this is really the story of Brunhilde, one of the four Valkyries, the daughters of Wotan and Erda. Brunhilde is Wotan’s favorite, and his most loyal and clever business executive who tries to save the company and the gods’ very lives. For Wotan, in order to pay the ancient giants for creating Valhalla, gave them his sister-in-law Freya who had provided the gods with magical apples that served as their fountain of youth, and since then the gods have not been aging gracefully. Brunhilde’s resourcefulness saves them all, but she falls from grace when she falls in love with an idealistic mortal man and refuses to do her father’s command, even though her father in truth did not want that horrible command carried out. Wotan, believing that loyalty has more to do with obedience than with love, curses Brunhilde so that she can only be saved by the love of a brave mortal who is willing to walk through the flames to wake her in Sleeping Beauty-like fashion.

Laura Lee Juliano is a strong Brunhilde who is at her best when she realizes, thanks to the idealistic human, that love is more important than anything else on earth or in Valhalla – including riches, power, and life itself. The always-depressed Wotan (Ruff Yeager) keeps the tone brooding and progressively despairing. Nicole Monica plays his even more melancholy, and eventually cruel, wife Fricka, who is initially weakened so severely by the lack of her sister’s youthful apples that she can speak only in a whisper (ingeniously doing so into a handheld microphone so the others, and the audience, can still hear her). But Nicole’s best role is as the mortal woman Gutrune, the jealous, unrequited lover of the mortal Siegfried, who himself falls in love with Brunhilde. The three cocky giants, decked out in stylish nineteenth-century clothing reminiscent of the times when the architectural pioneers built America’s first skyscrapers, add a bit of humor to the production, as do the three Rhine Maidens. The Maidens, keepers of a great ring of power, enthusiastically and sensually mock an ugly, sex-starved, working-class, badly dressed, mortal dwarf named Alberich. David Tierney performs this choice role with decadent crassness. Angered and embarrassed by the Rhine Maidens’ teasing taunts, he steals the powerful ring and seeks to ride it to the top of the corporate ladder of Valhalla, putting this ballsy, little “mouse that roared” on a collision course with some pretty big lions.

Brandt’s highly original creation is an ambitious work that has divine potential. Several great characters and all the remarkable visuals are this tragedy’s greatest strengths. Directors Michael Severance and Jessa Watson beautifully blend the talents of their design crew with the story, and maintain a steadily increasing dark and somber feel to the play that befits an immortal corporate environment whose top executives know they are eventually doomed.