ARTicles vol.4 i.4: A Trip to the Underworld

Ryan McKittrick: Like Highway Ulysses, which you developed at the A.R.T. in the 2002-03 season, Orpheus X is a new riff on an ancient story. What attracts you to the Greek myths?

Rinde Eckert: I’m attracted to anything that gives me poetic license, and I’m interested in theatre as a medium of poetry. I’m drawn to the Greek myths because myth is essentially a poetic form. It exists in a legendary landscape and therefore doesn’t force you to abide by the time of real world operations. So myth allows us to stop, sing, and wax poetically on one subject for a long time. There’s so much in our media today that’s hurrying us along, insisting that we keep up with the fast pace of our world. We go to the movies and we’re zipped along in this precipitous rush. Sometimes that’s an exhilarating rush. But the great breath of theatre is to sit in a time that is suspended, extended, and removed.

RM: Who is Orpheus in your version of the myth and what is his journey?

RE: During the early phases of development for this project, I began to think of Orpheus as a kind of modern-day, Dionysian poet. He’s a pop star who, like so many famous entertainers, isn’t particularly troubled by nuances or by irony. My initial impulse was to follow the myth more closely and have Orpheus grieving his deceased wife. But I didn’t get very far with this idea before I came across a story about a man who had been in a cab that ran over someone and who became obsessed with the person who had been killed. This seemed like an interesting direction in which to take the myth, because Orpheus would be mourning someone he doesn’t know – which suddenly thrusts him into an ironic situation. So my Orpheus, this iconic singer with a pop sensibility that’s completely removed from the complications of irony, is hurtling through the city in a taxi with all his glorious ambitions completely intact. And while he’s racing through the city, an obscure, distracted poet named Eurydice is fumbling with her glasses’ case as she’s crossing the street. She’s the exact opposite of Orpheus. She’s bookish – a wordsmith who is completely attuned to the ironies of life. And as she’s putting away her reading glasses, she’s hit by the cab. Just before she dies in Orpheus’ arms, she recognizes him and says, “Oh, it’s you. How strange.” She’s aware of the fundamental irony of her death: that she, a relatively unknown poet who’s spent her life trying to figure out what a sentence can do, is dying in the arms of a famous idiot who sang, “Oh baby, baby, baby.” But her final words seem cryptic to Orpheus. So he shuts himself up in his room and starts reading Eurydice’s poetry. But he doesn’t have the skill to decipher it or her or her final words. He longs to see her in the world. He believes that he can be saved by seeing her body in the world – that he’ll be able to rekindle his sense of Dionysian ecstasy if he can just get her back into her body. So he descends to the underworld as an attempt to rescue himself and get back to his old way of life. But the myth is a tragedy, so Orpheus fails. And I think ultimately the tragedy of this piece is that in the end Orpheus still doesn’t know how to process the ironies of the world he lives in.

RM: Why is it important to recognize and contemplate ironies?

RE: The ability to see and understand irony is a beautiful aspect of human evolution – it’s the soul of intelligence. Figures like my Orpheus are there to distract us from the ironies of our lives – as opposed to elevated poets who illuminate us and alert us to those ironies. I understand why someone like Orpheus can attain such stature. I appreciate those distractions. We all need them occasionally. But not as the only thing we pay attention to. Irony is of course a difficult and problematic value. We can lose ourselves in a solely ironic position and become completely debilitated. But we need irony in order to preserve and appreciate the beauty of the other operations – those Dionysian operations – in our world. For me the ideal Orpheus is an Orpheus who can move back and forth between the innocence of Dionysian ecstasy and a more Apollonian attention to irony.

RM: Most renderings of the myth focus on Orpheus more than Eurydice, but in your version she plays a central role. Why?

RE: Rather than making Eurydice a handmaiden to Orpheus and a useful device with which to frame his tragic turn, I wanted to give her agency in this piece. Of all the figures in the Greeks myths, Orpheus is one of the least dramatically viable because he doesn’t have a foil against which to measure his loss or engage in conflict. In most versions of the myth, Eurydice doesn’t have a say or stake in Orpheus’ operation. She’s really just a poetic device. So in order to dramatize the myth, she has to have a significant degree of agency – she has to be more than a complaining lover or more than just a servant to the great, magical Orpheus.

RM: Why does your Eurydice rip the blindfold off Orpheus and force him to turn around, thus condemning herself to death everlasting in the underworld?

RE: She knows that to return and be a part of his scheme is just to return to a hell on earth. When she dies, Eurydice is at the end of her writing life. She’s lost her passion, she’s somewhat jaded, and she’s just going through the motions. Persephone, the queen of the underworld, offers her a kind of redemption: to bathe in the River Lethe, the River of Forgetfulness, and see everything around her from a fresh perspective. At the end of the piece Eurydice is able to look at the poems she’s written and experience them with young eyes. She’s able to see the world with wonder again. So she retrieves a kind of innocence and becomes, not unlike Orpheus, a creature of nature – but hers is an innocence born out of experience.

RM: In other versions of the myth Hades, the King of the Underworld, is also present when Orpheus secures Eurydice’s release. Why doesn’t he appear in your piece?

RE: Hades, who abducted Persephone and forced her to become his queen, is too similar to Orpheus, who is trying to carry off Eurydice in order to make his world more bearable. This is just what Hades did with Persephone, so I don’t need him in this piece. Persephone’s dilemma is more interesting to me than Hades’, and she has a rapport with Eurydice that Hades couldn’t possibly have.

RM: Could you describe the music you’re developing for the piece?

RE: I’m working with the obsessive sounds of rock and roll, which will initially be associated with Orpheus. It’s not exactly rock and roll, however, because I tend not to write in duple meter. Most rock and roll is written in duple meter because it’s an even rhythm that’s easy to dance to. I’m trying to give the music a more jarring quality, so I’m taking some of the sounds of rock and roll but not its normal character. For Eurydice’s world I’m thinking more in terms of Art Song. Art Song fully developed in the nineteenth century as French mélodie and German lied and involved the setting of poetry to music. It’s harmonically rich and rhythmically intricate because the poetry demanded that of the music. I’m also using Hanns Eisler, Kurt Weill, and Nino Rota as models for Eurydice’s world. Her music will be more akin to dances, both courtly and folk, than to the Dionysian ecstasy of rock and roll. And certain parts of the piece will combine these two styles.

RM: On the first day of rehearsal you spoke at length about the rhythms of the piece. How would you characterize the tempos of the songs?

RE: This is a piece about worlds that are out of balance. Orpheus’ world is completely out of balance because the superstar has shut himself up in his room and this has consequently thrown the world outside into chaos. The underworld is superbly ordered realm, but because it’s so rigidly ordered it, too, is actually unbalanced. So I wanted to give a sense in the music that things are out of balance in both worlds. I also think that regular meter tends to lull audiences. So I’ve tended to speed up or slow down within measures, producing rhythms that are like agitated breathing. It’s true that a composer can alter the pace of a song by subdividing the beat. Beethoven did this all the time. So does Philip Glass. But subdividing a beat within a measure produces the illusion that you’re moving faster. I didn’t want the illusion of a quicker pace – I’m actually trying to subtly violate the tempo within the measure.

RM: What instruments are you using in the piece?

RE: I’ll be playing the electric guitar to capture some of the energy of rock and roll, and I want the instrument to function as Orpheus’ lyre. We’ll also have two orchestral instruments – the viola and the double bass – that might perhaps conjure up the world of Art Song and chamber music. I’m also using keyboard, electric bass, and drums.

RM: You’re tailoring the songs to the voices of three phenomenal singers: John Kelly, Suzan Hanson, and you. What are these three voices allowing you to do as a composer?

RE: We all have enormous ranges, which gives me a lot of notes to work with. John has a wonderfully developed falsetto, which will give him a more feminine quality as Persephone. I also sing in falsetto a lot, so John and I will be able to sing up high together in a number of songs. Suzan has a more classical voice that brings both the refined feeling of chamber or salon music and the intensity of opera. You don’t get that intensity of feeling anywhere else. Not in cabaret singing and certainly not in rock and roll. People who aren’t properly trained just can’t go there with their voices. So I think Suzan is perfect for Eurydice, because the character is in a sense trained – trained in poetry and in irony. This is the first opportunity I’ve had in a long time to write for a soprano voice like Suzan’s.

RM: Over the centuries the Orpheus myth has inspired an extensive body of poetry and a number of operas. What do you hope setting the story to music will do for audiences?

RE: Music exists in the theatre in part to draw out time. It gives us time to think. Or sit for a while with something that otherwise might pass in an instant. It slows us down enough so that the images can sit with us, and we can see their associations with other images. This is one reason to intone a story. The other is that music can augment feeling, or suggest unspoken aspects of the lyric, like masked emotions or irony.

Ryan McKittrick is the A.R.T.’s Associate Dramaturg.

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