If ''Orpheus X" isn't as viscerally powerful as ''Highway Ulysses," Eckert's last collaboration with director Robert Woodruff at the American Repertory Theatre, its resonances are nevertheless lovely, disturbing, and haunting. While Orpheus tries to stop time through his refusal to perform his music publicly until his muse is restored to him, Eurydice does it through her poetry, which is constantly reborn in Hades. And Eckert himself, through this multilayered reinvention, succeeds in doing it by mixing classic forms of opera and storytelling with striking video imagery and rocklike music.
When the play opens, Orpheus is mired in grief. As he sings out a kind of beat poetry over a blend of polyrhythmic jazz and cacophonous art-rock, it's as if he knows that Eurydice's poetry, even though few people read it, was in touch with something far deeper than he can get to, and he needs her back to help him find his artistic grail.
Suzan Hanson's Eurydice is lost in her own world, or underworld. As you enter Zero Arrow Theatre, she's under the stairs, naked, scrawling out poetry. Eventually she and Persephone (John Kelly, who also plays Orpheus's manager) enter into a musical dialogue about leaving the world behind and settling into a bath of forgetfulness. Her nudity, which is projected at times onto a variety of screens and beams via Denise Marika's video contributions, recalls a baroque version of an innocent Eve. Eckert gives Hanson and Kelly's Persephone equally baroque music in the underworld, and they are both gorgeous to listen to.
The stage is fairly stark. Woodruff, having created some of the ART's most memorably panoramic productions on the Loeb Stage, seems to be enjoying the narrower acreage at Zero Arrow.
Speaking of narrow confines, Eurydice's distrust of what Orpheus has to offer -- a return to the world -- is at the heart of the play. She's the one with whom our sympathies lie throughout. Eckert makes it clear that Orpheus's world is more hellish than Hades.
