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eurydicedramaturg-blog · 7 years

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Let’s talk about me. Hi! I’m Lydia. I’m dramaturg, assistant director, and your guide to the wacky world that is Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice.

I’m also queer and proud of it. How does that connect to all this? As you may or may not be aware, Orpheus and Eurydice in modern culture is incredibly heteronormative. The quintessential story of doomed heterosexual love.

Let’s start with a definition. For my purposes, heteronormative here means “portraying heterosexual desire as default or ‘normal’ state of being” as well as “enforcing stereotypical gender roles in romantic and/or sexual relationships.” So, for example, Li Shang and Fa Mulan in Disney’s Mulan would not qualify as heteronormative, despite the relationship being between a man and a woman, because Mulan actively defies stereotypes of how a woman should behave.

I’ll be spending a lot of time talking about the differences between the adaptations I’ve looked at, but let’s first talk about the similarities. Every single adaptation I looked at, with one exception (The Hip Hop Waltz of Eurydice), features not only a romance between a male Orpheus and a female Eurydice, but more or less conforms to stereotypical gender roles.

Eurydice’s agency can mean the difference between her being a sock puppet and an actual person, but let’s look at how the story as its understood in popular culture is almost inherently heteronormative, and why.

Extremely influential in western understandings of heteronormative love throughout the ages is the medieval tradition of courtly love, most notably encapsulated in the poetry of Petrarch, where he speaks of his desire for a beautiful woman named Laura, who never returns his feelings and is out of reach because she is already married. Laura is the ideal woman: beautiful, unattainable, and silent. Her side of the story is never told. This illustrates the ideal of courtly love: a man in love with a woman who remains out of reach. While Petrarch was already being parodied and subverted by Shakespeare’s time (Romeo and Juliet being the most famous example), the ideal has greatly influential in western culture.

So here we create a vision of an ideal heteronormative romance: A man who goes to great lengths for the woman he loves and suffers without her, and a silent woman whose most characteristic trait is her beauty and who seems unattainable.

Eurydice has long been seen as either a symbol or a quest object, sometimes both. In many ways, she’s become an Ideal Woman: silent and out of reach. Being killed on her wedding day, Eurydice retains the “purity” of her virginity, while still giving Orpheus claim to her. What could be more unattainable than death? And what could be a more noble and doomed quest for love than following her into the underworld in an attempt to restore her to life?

In earlier versions of the myth, Persephone was often the one who gave Orpheus the “don’t look back” stipulation. In many modern adaptations, the role of Persephone is altered or left out entirely. Beginning with Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld, the tradition of Hades as the “other man” has become somewhat common in adaptations. Often, the roles of Hades and Aristaeus become inextricable. Male insecurity about being unable to control women’s sexuality leads to adaptations where Hades is no longer Eurydice’s jailer, but instead Orpheus’ rival for her affections, and Orpheus’ failure to bring her back to the world of the living is a manifestation of a man’s fears that his wife will leave him.

Like the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, Romeo and Juliet has also been assimilated into this courtly love tradition in popular culture. Consider the role of the balcony scene in popular imagination (iconic) versus the scene where Romeo and Juliet, having just consummated their marriage, struggle with their desire to stay together in the face of Romeo’s banishment (almost forgotten). Consider how the ending is commonly watered down to “and then the teenagers killed themselves because they loved each other so much” without considering the context of the toxic world created by the feud, which made death their only option.

Perhaps because Romeo and Juliet has a solid source material that actively refutes these cultural misinterpretations, there are several examples of people turning back to the original play and pushing back against the heteronormative mold of courtly love that it’s been shoved into, and even against heteronormativity entirely. For example, the film Private Romeo uses Romeo and Juliet to critique homophobia and the toxic masculinity of a military training academy.

However, there is no equivalent for Orpheus and Eurydice. Even The Hip Hop Waltz of Eurydice, for all its exploration of gender, ends with compliance to heteronormativity.

The strange thing about Orpheus and Eurydice is that there have been plenty of chances to queer the story, and yet no one has done it. Gluck’s opera Orfeo ed Euridice was written with the intention of Orpheus being played by a castrato, a male singer castrated at a young age to stop his voice from changing. Which might in itself seem queer, however, castrati were actually considered quite masculine and commonly played kings and heroes on the stage. As the practice was made illegal in the mid-nineteen century, the role has been played mainly by women ever since.

A perfect opportunity for the sapphic Orpheus and Eurydice of my dreams? Definitely. Sadly, modern opera companies have not delivered. Instead of acknowledging the female body filling the role, they choose to gloss over it, presenting Orpheus as male and carefully avoiding any implications of homosexuality.

Now, let’s take a minute to look back at the Orpheus and Eurydice story in one of its earliest versions. Ovid provides a few interesting elements that are almost universally forgotten in all subsequent adaptations. The first, that Orpheus, after his failure to rescue Eurydice, turned his love to boys. The second is that, after his death, Orpheus’ head washed ashore on the island of Lesbos, most famously home to the poet Sappho, who often speaks of her love for women in her poetry. As Sappho was considered one of the greatest Greek poets, on the same level as Homer, this is most likely intended to imply that she was a spiritual successor to Orpheus. Well, that all sounds very queer. So what happened to all this? Why were these elements dropped, when so much of the rest of the story survived almost completely intact? The answer probably has a lot to do with the subject of this post: heteronormativity. But a better question might be this: why has no one gone back and put these elements back in?

While still a somewhat new trend, there is a history of queering heteronormative stories. Collections of gay erotica based on fairy tales, crossgender casting in Shakespeare productions to create productions such as Private Romeo, and, of course, fanfiction (free fiction stories posted on the internet using already existing characters and worlds. A popular subset known as “slash” consists of stories about characters in queer relationships.) For many queer people, presenting queer versions of traditionally heteronormative stories is not a matter of lack of imagination, but of claiming a place in a society that has shut them out and of fighting the heteronormativity these stories often enforce.

As one of these queer people, I want to make sure our production of Eurydice fights heteronormativity rather than reinforcing it. I want to acknowledge the queer elements that have been stripped from the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, and find ways to reintegrate them into the story.

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