words yvonne teh

Rinde Eckert explains why he turned a sublime poet-musician into a narcissistic rock star

So this is what they mean by ‘the stuff of legends’. He may not have been a god but the colourful character of ancient Greek legend known as Orpheus still comes across as larger than life. The son of the muse Calliope and a Thracian king, he is credited with being, among other things, a poet-musician who could enchant wild animals, a seer, and a co-traveller in the adventures of Jason and the Argonauts. He figures most famously in a romantic tale in which he risks death and descends into the underworld to rescue his lost beloved, Eurydice.

In Orpheus X, the American Repertory Theatre’s (ART) 21st century retelling of the 2,000-year-old myth, Orpheus is recast as a vain and famous rock star who dreams of rescuing the poet Eurydice from the Queen of the Dead’s subterranean realm. Conceived as a ‘rockin’’ yet serious work (it is categorized as ‘music theatre’ rather than a musical), with music and text by the multi-talented Rinde Eckert, who also stars, this Pulitzer Prize nominee had its world premiere less than a year ago at the renowned company’s Cambridge, Massachusetts, base. Now it is moving to Hong Kong and its arts festival for an Asian introduction.

Eckert, who has a master’s degree in music from Yale University, delves deep to share his thoughts with bc about his latest revisiting of an ancient Greek tale. (In a previous ART production, Highway Ulysses, he and Orpheus X’s director, Robert Woodruff gave a similar contemporary musical makeover to Homer’s Odyssey.) He points to a fascination for a primordial story he very much believes is archetypal and transcends time and place.

First, Highway Ulysses and now Orpheus X. You appear to have an affinity for adapting classic Greek tales into contemporary musical theatre. Why?
Highway Ulysses and Orpheus X are my only Greek adaptations. The coincidence of these two with ART has to do with my collaboration with Robert Woodruff, who seems particularly drawn to the Greeks. Our conversations around the development of these pieces gravitated, then, to this Hellenic world where large questions and outsized emotions encouraged our somewhat operatic sensibilities.

Does ART’s association with Harvard (it is housed at the university’s Loeb Drama Centre) factor into this as well?
Harvard, although not a direct factor, as an intellectual environment certainly doesn’t discourage the adaptation of classic myths. I have an added personal incentive in that my wife (playwright Ellen McLaughlin) is a well-known specialist in the adaptation of Greek myth.

What particularly attracted you to Orpheus’s story?
I was interested in a novella by Bohumil Hrabal called Too Loud a Solitude. It is a story about a waste management operator in Czechoslovakia who compacts paper in a subterranean facility.

Somehow in the course of considering things subterranean the myth of Orpheus entered the conversation. As I contemplated the myth, I became fascinated by Eurydice’s point of view. I turned to a [Rainer Maria] Rilke poem called Orpheus, Eurydice, and Hermes in which Rilke sees the unfolding event from Eurydice’s eyes.

[After reading the poem,] I became fascinated by the idea of reconstructing the story to emphasize the pathos of Eurydice’s situation. I liked the idea of Orpheus as a stranger and as a disruption of the natural, the greater law of our being. I saw Orpheus as careless of his limits, as arrogant and self-absorbed. He privileges his grief over the very law of life and death. He never imagines that Eurydice might have found a new peace, a sort of balance, or innocence even.

What prompted the recasting of Orpheus, one of the chief poets and musicians of Greek legend, who taught humankind medicine, writing and agriculture and was the inventor of the lyre, into a “vain and vacuous rock star”?
The Orpheus in question here is not the functioning poet and healer, but the obsessed lover. The Orpheus of the ‘descent’ is decadent already. He is not the Orpheus he was. Our dissipated rock star is a fitting analogue of this latter, corrupted Orpheus of the descent.

You play this dissipated rock star in Orpheus X. What similarities, if any, do you see between yourself and him?
I don’t share much with this character except, perhaps, that my guitar playing is on the same level as his!

Is there a particular reason for the decision to make your production’s main character a rock star rather than, say, an opera singer or a grunge-type band leader?
Our Orpheus had to be a celebrated figure, a world-renowned cultural icon in order to mimic the mythic stature of the classic Orpheus. A grunge rocker wouldn’t fill that bill. Also, our Orpheus had to be a songwriter. Opera singers don’t write any of the things they sing.

What do you think that the Hong Kong audience will find particularly attractive about Orpheus X?
The music and the theatrical vision.

Do you plan on making any amendments to Orpheus X for its season in Hong Kong? (If so, what?)
I’ve rewritten a couple of speeches at the end. I also ‘tweak’ the music each time we remount the piece.

What should the work’s Hong Kong audience know in advance before going to take in a performance of Orpheus X?
This is not traditional narrative. It is a poetic elaboration of the themes. A familiarity with the classic myth of Orpheus would probably help. That is to say, the story of his descent into hell to rescue his wife Eurydice from death and his failure to keep from turning to her before he had led her out.

What portions of the classic Orpheus story do you feel has stood the test of time and why?
The traditional Orpheus straddles the world of the higher and lower orders. Able to talk to the animals and even the stones and trees, he is also an elevated lyric poet. This is a classic dilemma. Many of us feel drawn to both worlds, the primitive/inchoate/ecstatic and the cultivated/formal/sublime. Orpheus’s descent is an expression of the difficulty of maintaining a dynamic balance between these worlds. The tension between our higher and lower selves is no less a battle now than it was 2000 years ago. The only hindrance to [the story’s] appreciation is an imagination that has been so hammered by slogans it has lost its elasticity.

The American Repertory Theatre’s Orpheus X will be staged from February 21 to 24 at the HK Academy for the Performing Arts’ Lyric Theatre. The February 21 to 23 performances are commence at 8pm while the Sunday, February 24, show will start at 5pm. Tickets are $480 to $120 from URBTIX, 2734 9009 and HK Ticketing, 31 288 288.