In trying to outmaneuver their mortality and reconnect with one another, Orpheus, Eurydice and Eurydice’s father each arrive at an oblivion more desolate and lonely than what they’d known before.įor all I appreciate about the way both productions offer Eurydice more agency, I do think they give her short shrift. So the grand tragedy of the piece isn’t contingent on Orpheus’s inconvenient rubbernecking and the implications about trust (though that’s in there too) it’s the ways death has riven these relationships. Eurydice, having lost both her husband and father twice, follows her father into oblivion. Eurydice’s father, having lost all hope of reuniting with his daughter after her husband arrives to save her, takes another dip into the Styx, causing him to die a final death. Orpheus, Eurydice and Eurydice’s father all end up in the underworld together, but they find no peace. “Eurydice” commits more explosively to woe in its stellar third act, after two acts of tedious exposition. In the lurid “Hey, Little Songbird,” Hades draws in Eurydice with promises of security and comfort, while undermining Orpheus, mocking him as a starving artist: “He’s some kind of poet and he’s penniless?/Give him your hand, he’ll give you his hand-to-mouth./He’ll write you a poem when the power’s out.”īut the pressure goes further in Patrick Page’s beguiling performance, Hades is explicitly predatory, exploiting Eurydice’s feelings of displacement and neglect in her relationship. Orpheus and Eurydice are trapped in some otherworldly version of the Depression era. In Anais Mitchell’s “Hadestown,” the seduction is twofold: financial and sexual. In comes Hades, the ruler of that realm, as sleazy as a back-alley hustler, to manipulate her grief he baits her with one of her father’s letters. She’s bored and missing her dead father, who has been secretly trying to write to his beloved daughter from the underworld. In Aucoin and Ruhl’s “Eurydice,” the new bride wanders off from her own wedding party. But Eurydice doesn’t merely get dragged down into the underworld in both versions she’s tempted by the offer of something she wants. Perhaps, the productions suggest, Orpheus was the original slacker musician boyfriend, so concerned with his next big hit that he neglected the love who inspired his best work. ![]() But both adaptations draw a line of causality from Orpheus’s behavior to Eurydice’s death. Her death is a touch of bad luck - you never know when a venomous snake will slither underfoot on your wedding day. In both, Orpheus remains a genius musician who, though in love with Eurydice, is preoccupied with his art above all. ![]() Renowned filmmakers like Jean Cocteau created their own narratives in the 20th century.īoth “Hadestown” and “Eurydice” interrogate that starring role. Operatic renditions by Monteverdi and others date back to the early 1600s. Here’s that spoiler: Orpheus looks, and Eurydice is damned to Hades forever.įor such an old - and short - story, the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice is still frequently told and adapted, much like that of another famous ill-fated couple, Romeo and Juliet. He descends to the underworld, where the god of the dead offers him another chance at love: He can leave with Eurydice, but only if he walks ahead and never turns around. Orpheus, the greatest musician of all, marries Eurydice, who dies when she’s bitten by a snake on their wedding day. The myth has been kicking around for over two millenniums, after all. I recalled another time I heard such a gasp: from the character of Eurydice near the end of “Doubt Comes In,” a song in the Broadway musical “ Hadestown.” Then, too, the audience gasped along with her.Ī lifelong classics nerd, I was surprised both times by the reaction: Does the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice really require a spoiler alert? When Orpheus turned around to look at Eurydice during the closing performance of Matthew Aucoin and Sarah Ruhl’s “ Eurydice” at the Metropolitan Opera, the audience’s collective gasp seemed to shake the grand theater.
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