‘Orpheus’ Pushes Limits

If a play’s reach should exceed its grasp, then director Robert Woodruff’s “Orpheus X,” at the Zero Arrow Theatre, playing through April 23, is a triumph. Told in words, music, writing, song, projected images, and one climactic, devastating silence, the operatic play is hugely ambitious and completely unique. It is, however, more interesting than it is entertaining, at times overreaching to the point of inaccessibility.

Written by and starring Rinde Eckert, “Orpheus X,” an American Repertory world premiere, updates the well-known myth of Orpheus (Eckert), a musician so gifted he could move mountains with his song, who descends to Hades to rescue his recently-killed wife Eurydice. He convinces Persephone, wife of Hades and queen of the dead, to release Eurydice, only to lose her by looking back at her as they leave.

Here, Orpheus is a rock star, with an electric guitar instead of a lyre. Instead of being married to Eurydice (Suzan Hanson), he has collided with her—literally—only once, when the taxi he was riding ran her over. She dies in his arms and becomes his obsession: Orpheus becomes haunted, refusing to play and brooding over a small shrine of Eurydice’s possessions.

Unlike the myth, the play refuses to let Eurydice be defined by Orpheus’ dreams and imaginings: it portrays not only Orpheus in his grief, but also Eurydice in Hades. She has also been given the traditionally Orphic characteristic of compulsive creativity and is now a poet.

The changes to Eurydice are the strongest aspect of the updated story. In addition to giving the myth a much-needed feminist boost, the two stories of Orpheus on Earth and Eurydice in Hades create a parallel structure—Eurydice comes to accept her reality and Orpheus rejects his, heightening the tension between the two characters, who don’t directly interact (except in scenes that take place in Orpheus’s imagination) until the final scene.

Both characters have a sounding board and interlocutor who challenges them to let go of what they hold dear. For Orpheus, it is John, his manager, who periodically comes to his apartment bearing news of a world gone mad for lack of his music; for Eurydice, it is Persephone, who extols the virtues of impermanence and forgetfulness.

Both characters are played brilliantly by John Kelly, who provides a vital link between the stories in Hades and on Earth. As Persephone, he steals the emotional show from the more demonstrative Orpheus and Eurydice.

The form of the play resembles an opera re-imagined by a Beat poet: sung and spoken dialogue alternates, often bleeding into each other and usually backed by the cacophonous melodies of a band on one side of the stage. Virtually each line is delivered with breathtaking intensity, which contributes to the tone but occasionally leads to some unintentionally amusing moments, as when Eurydice dramatically sings about the mug of pens on her writing desk. Most of the time, however, they’re singing about love, death, Hell, and obsession, so a certain excessiveness is appropriate.

The actors throw themselves wholeheartedly into their demanding roles, stomping around the stage, yelling and muttering (and doing both in song form, which can’t be easy) and going mad. Hanson and Eckert are in fine form during the intense moments, but incongruously maintain that high pitch when called upon to be less emotional. These moments are few and far between, however.

The intensity of the play isn’t limited to the lines and their delivery. The instant the audience enters the theater, the near-mad franticness of the play takes hold. The area under the seats is open, and between the supports, Hanson is naked, blindfolded, and frantically scribbling with chalk on glass set into the floor. A camera shot up through the glass is projected onto a screen above the stage.

This action more or less sets the tone for the play. Woodruff constantly pushes the limits in his direction, filling the corners of the play with nervous movement, such as Eurydice’s constant scribbling on the walls or Orpheus’s pacing, and protracting moments like the silence when Orpheus loses Eurydice, which lasts for several agonizing but transfixing minutes. He refuses to put the brakes on and give the audience room to relax, making the play one long crescendo.

“Orpheus X” is also one of the most technically interesting and virtuosic plays I have ever seen.

A video designed by Denise Marika—from flowing honey in a scene in which Eurydice relates a dream involving bees (cleverly, her dream relates to how she dies in the original myth) to a blurry image of Eurydice dropping a glasses case (the catalyst for her death in the play)—is projected onto a screen as well as onto what look like two huge girders criss-crossing the stage. The latter foreground the images, making them almost another character.

Because the stage is mostly open, the play uses light to delineate it—portraying shifts between dreaming and waking, or Earth and Hades, by subtle shifts in the quality of the light. At times, it is less subtle: when lighting designer Christopher Akerlind puts the main characters in squares of light across the stage from each other, the separation is as complete and cruel as a wall could be.

“Orpheus X” is a play of loneliness and pain whose only cure, the final scene seems to suggest, is silence and forgetfulness. Until that point of silence, the play is as frantic and unrelenting as its characters. While it doesn’t always reach the emotional resonance it seeks, it is always compelling.

—Reviewer Elisabeth J. Bloomberg can be reached at bloomber@fas.harvard.edu