The story goes that the mortal Psyche – you remember her from the Greek myth of yore, yeah? – was so deeply enamored of her love-god lover, Eros, that after she broke a promise that royally teed him off, she was willing to go to his mom, Aphrodite – who had a serious hate on for Psyche – and run errands for her in order to win him back. And being this goddess’ errand girl meant performing three impossible tasks, the third of which involved, quite literally, going to hell.
A small band of students in the University of Texas Department of Theatre & Dance must have something of that same deep affection for Psyche herself, or at least for her timeless tale. They’ve given over much of the last three years to crafting an original adaptation of her myth and bringing it to the stage not once, not twice, but three times. And while the first two versions were mounted at the university, they’ve been willing to mount the third iteration, which opens this week for a four-week run at the Blue Theatre, on their own, and as anyone in the arts can tell you, producing a show yourself is its own kind of hell.
Tom Truss, an actor who’s part of what came to be known as The Psyche Project, recalls that he and his colleagues “went into the project being amazed that a 2,000-plus-year-old story captivated us and inspired so many deep conversations and questions.”
Director Marie Brown echoes that sentiment. “When we began exploring this story, it resonated very deeply with me,” she says. “I think we all have grown to deeply love this myth. It keeps us coming back for more. Without that love of Psyche, I think this process would never have moved past ‘go.'”
Now, as is often the case with love affairs, no one going into this relationship suspected how deeply involved they were going to get or how long it would last. According to Truss, this was just an exercise in generating stage work sparked by the desire of playwright Jenny Connell (Summer People) to have “the experience of writing a play that had the director and actors in the same room as the playwright from cradle to grave.” In January 2008, Connell approached Brown, a master’s in directing candidate, with the idea of exploring ensemble-generated work. They recruited Truss and eventually pulled in actors La Tasha Stephens, Smaranda Ciceu, and Ben Schave and designer Kevin Beltz. That spring, says Brown, this busy crew “somehow managed to block out a few hours a week to meet, embraced whoever managed to join us, and slowly began developing our piece.”
The process they followed is described by Brown as “disorganized.” “We operated like a bunch of children playing pretend. Our roles were very undefined. We all took on jobs of every discipline. And we never worked from a script.” A different person would lead each rehearsal, bringing a different skill set to the exploration. Connell, for example, led writing sessions. (“Write about a time you were jilted.”) Truss led Viewpoints exercises.
At some point, Psyche and Eros had become the basis for their project, and the ensemble began to concentrate on just telling their story. “We would come up with different modes,” says Brown, “such as sitting in a circle and letting each person offer a line, having a single narrator tell the story while everyone else improvised the action, and improvising interviews with the characters.” They did puppet versions in which ensemble members had to find a prop in the room and make it a character. “Eros became a cowboy hat, Aphrodite a squirt bottle,” recalls Truss. “It was quite goofy and productive. What was key and common in all of our meetings was how much there was to talk about. We never wanted to just retell the story; we always wanted to add our flavor or opinion to it.”
That interjection of ensemble members into the story may be best exemplified by the group’s “stop” rule. “At any time, anyone in the room could call out, ‘Stop,'” says Brown. “The action would stop accordingly, and the individual could ask a question about that moment in the story, tell a personal story as to why the moment resonated with him personally, or, as often ended up being the case, spin off on a diatribe as to why it didn’t make any sense why anyone would leave their daughter on the top of a mountain or go against everyone’s advice to open ‘that damned box’ [that Psyche was required to bring back from Hades]. We all began to understand elements of the tale through empathy with other ensemble members’ stories. And in some cases, those ‘stop’ conversations became seeds for what grew into pivotal scenes in our script.”
For Brown, this personal touch was key to making the project’s retelling of Psyche’s story true to the tradition from which it sprang and yet immediate to a contemporary audience. “We were working with an ancient tale whose original mode of transmission was oral storytelling,” she explains. “At one point, a man named Lucius Apuleius wrote down a version in his larger story The Golden Ass. Other versions exist, but the vast majority of stories of Eros and Psyche that we find today – other than the traces that show up in Beauty and the Beast, Sleeping Beauty, and so on – can be traced to Apuleius’ version. So the act of writing it both preserved it and froze it in a time and place. Oral storytelling changes with each telling, even if just slightly. Tales that are passed orally can stay current from generation to generation. So our first job was to find a way to bring this oral tale back to the current day. That meant some things had to change.”
Among the alterations that developed as work extended into the fall of ’08: The setting was moved to modern times, with Eros’ customary arrows replaced by a .45 automatic that fires bullets of love and the Underworld becoming a shopping mall. Characters were cast across gender, with male Truss taking on imperious Aphrodite and female Stephens playing Eros’ Olympian sidekick, Zephyr. And the ending … well, it didn’t exactly jibe with Apuleius’ affirmation of love conquering all (even pissed-off goddesses of beauty). But then, does the idea of happily-ever-after still have a place in this jaded age?
That’s the question that the ensemble wrestled with as it strove to create a Psyche for our time. “Finding the end of the play was interesting,” recalls Truss. “We had a version that no one liked. It was OK, but it wasn’t compelling. I don’t even remember what it was now; I just remember that it didn’t sit well with anyone. So Jenny went away and came back a few weeks later with a rewrite and a whole new ending. We read the script, and the end hit us hard. Some loved it, others hated it, but we knew it was right.”
And in the spring of 2009, a year after the project’s start, the ensemble had the opportunity to discover if anyone else thought it was right. They staged a workshop version at the David Mark Cohen New Works Festival, a biennial showcase of original work generated by students in the department. The enthusiastic response made it seem like everyone who saw it knew that the ending was right – and everything that came before it, too. In my list of Top 9 Theatre Productions of 2009 That Did Ascend the Brightest Heaven of Invention, I called the show: “The mythic romance of a mortal and the god of love rebooted in modern times with an irreverent wit and a questioning air. This imaginative, whip-smart, wickedly funny student work wondered provocatively if an ancient myth of love still has meaning in 21st century America.”
Best of all, when festival attendees were given the chance to vote on which work should be revived for the department’s main-stage season in the fall, The Psyche Project got the nod. That allowed the ensemble members to keep their love affair with Psyche going a few months longer and push their retelling forward a little more.
But it turned out that they weren’t able to do all that much, owing to a lack of time, funding, and a departmental mandate not to radically rework the script. Adding to the challenges were the necessity of recasting the role of Eros and modifications to the Brockett Theatre that prevented the company from using the original set and staging. While the second version was, in Brown’s estimation, more refined in some ways, “I think we all felt like the restrictions put us in a funny middle ground of getting to workshop in front of an audience again and being expected to operate like it was a finished product. The play was far from finished in my mind. Thus the second production only fueled the desire to go back to the drawing board all the more.”
And so, even though Connell had moved away and several members of the ensemble, including Truss, would be graduating in the spring of 2010, talk began about a third production in the summer. “Marie and I asked ourselves what would make it worth it for us to work on Psyche again, and we said music,” says Truss. “[We] have music backgrounds, and we realized that there were moments in the script where people could have full-out songs and musical numbers. We didn’t get that far, [but] we took our first step and got Mother Falcon to compose music for some of the scenes and dances, and they created a few ditties that are like musical numbers.”
They also wanted to give Psyche more agency in her own fate. “In the previous incarnations and in most of the versions of the myth, Psyche is continually saved by the gods,” says Truss. “But in her research, Marie came across a more ‘feminist’ approach in that this was actually a story that was told by women for women. It was a rite of passage for women to see if they wanted to be married and mothers. It’s a story of action and transformation, and we wanted to make sure to portray that Psyche had consciousness and choice-making in all of the steps along her journey.”
The new production, titled re:Psyche, also features a smaller ensemble that corresponds to the one that first developed the work and production values simple enough that it could be toured. “We hoped to take Psyche to other cities,” says Brown. “So we threw in the added challenge with this process of making this a ‘show in a box.’ We all have in the back of our heads ways to make this a malleable acting troupe that could pack up all its playthings in a big trunk and hit the road.”
Does that mean that this contemporary Psyche might have yet another life?
Truss believes so: “I don’t think my destiny is filled with it yet. This story has been inside me for a lo-o-ong time. I read it as a teenager and swooned with the symbolism and moments of betrayal and true love. Years ago, I created, with a bunch of high school students, a giant puppet version on a farm in Western Massachusetts. I would love to see our version produced elsewhere, and I would like to have another go at it with a budget that’s not from a shoestring and a heartbeat. I could also see doing the full-fledged musical version.”
“Is this the third and final production?” asks Brown. “I have no idea. Psyche has always felt a little bit bigger than any one of us can hold onto. I think her journey is hers to determine.”
re:Psyche runs June 24-July 18, Thursdays-Saturdays, 8pm; Sundays, 7pm; Wednesday, July 7, 8pm, at the Blue Theatre, 916 Springdale. For more information, call 888/666-1257 or visit www.secondhandtheater.com.
This article appears in June 25 • 2010.