Eckert has said in interviews that he wanted to give Eurydice agency rather than have her just be the loved thing Orpheus goes to Hell to get. Indeed, he makes her a deeper character than Orpheus, whose grieving seems little more than sullenness (though it’s clear he’s been affected by his obsession-triggering brush with mortality). Certainly as the piece opens, the ripe vocals allotted Hanson as she drifts into the playing space and toward the Underworld are more arresting than the pounding rock-and-roll re-creation of his dream of her death that Eckert has written for Orpheus, whom he plays in blue jeans and black T-shirt, his guitar hanging from him, when not in use, like a slack appendage. As for Kelly’s yearning Persephone, chained to Hades in fall and winter and to her mother, Demeter, in spring and summer, she pines for an autonomy she evokes in the song “Winter Alone.” In a neat twist, it is Eurydice who in the end gives Persephone agency, spinning the Queen’s dream of a solitary winter persona — “Standing in the snow by myself./Watching the smoke of my breath rising in the freezing air” — into a poem.
Much of Orpheus X takes the form of poetry, either spoken or set to Eckert’s lyrically dense, arrhythmical music, in which aria or art song floats melodically atop jumpy or thundering instrumentals that are mainly rock and roll but may feature a viola scraping viciously along with electric guitar. (The multidexterous on-stage combo has Timothy Feeney on percussion, Jeff Lieberman on piano and guitar, Blake Newman on bass, and Wendy Richman on viola.) And the singers, with both Eckert and Kelly leaping dramatically among registers, are superb. But for all that the Obie Award–winning Eckert is a heady talent, not all of the poetry in Orpheus X is good. What are we meant to think of Eurydice when she writes verse like “On a dark river of broken wire/In a sealed box on a slab of cracked clay/The play song of a blind child/Is borne away to a lost ocean of black gloves”?
One of the things that makes the piece theatrical, though, is the contrast between such stuff (which works better as lyrics) and the strange Alice in Wonderland–like encounters between the smitten Orpheus and the cryptic Eurydice as they straddle worlds. In one vignette, she appears to him at breakfast and they ironically trade pet names; in another he tries to pick her up in an airport, the sound of planes taking off working its way into the score. There are also acute if whimsical digressions, among them Persephone’s song “Narrative junkies,” which explains why poets, who are at home with sparseness and stasis, do better in Hell than novelists and screenwriters, who want their “plots and machinations.”
