Swimming in a lake near her home, 40-something Phoebe is startled by a man watching her from the shore. She exits the water, dripping wet in a bikini and nearly blind without her glasses. Moments later, without a word, the man rapes her. Hundreds of miles north, family man and successful attorney George Paxton pauses in the midst of mowing his lawn to stretch out in the grass and gaze up at the sky. That’s when he sees it––a dirigible floating overhead––a sight so singular he is moved to turn his entire life upside down in order to ply the skies in such a craft himself.
We move back and forth between Phoebe’s life in Georgia as she navigates her unexpected pregnancy, and George’s life on the Connecticut shore and Nantucket Island as his obsession with airships compels him to abandon his long marriage and lucrative legal career. Despite disparate ages and circumstances, the two share a call to abandon the selves they have been to become the souls they were meant to be.
Opening with a police station lineup and ending with a birth, Ensoulment invites us to become intimates of Phoebe and George as they are drawn toward each other not just in spirit but, ultimately, in fact, when George––aloft in his dirigible––is brought down to earth, and into Phoebe’s world, by storms.