Of all U.S. playwright Tennessee Williams's many major works — including "A Streetcar Named Desire" and "The Glass Menagerie" — "Orpheus Descending," which opens in Tokyo next week with a star-studded Japanese cast and multi-award-winning English director Phillip Breen at the helm, is among those most rarely staged anywhere.
Premiered in 1957, the play is a radical retelling of the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus, a minstrel who was taught to play the lyre by the god Apollo — but whose blissful life with a nymph named Eurydice is cut short when she's bitten by a deadly snake while fleeing from a son of Apollo intent on rape.
However, Orpheus finds a cave leading to the Underworld, where his singing and playing charms the King of the Dead so much that he lets him take Eurydice back to the Land of the Living — as long as he doesn't look at her face before they get there. When he does just that, though, Eurydice is lost to him forever — and after he vows his eternal love for her, jealous wild women of Thrace rip Orpheus to bits.
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