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With the dream-like Highway Ulysses, Rinde Eckert adapted Homer’s Odyssey, reimagining the canonical plot and iconic characters within the context of contemporary America. Directed by Robert Woodruff at the American Repertory Theatre in March 2003, the piece traced the journey undertaken by an unnamed soldier, just back from war, and suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. This essay attends to Eckert and Woodruff’s revision of Homer, focusing on how their production troubled the received idea that Homer’s text is a series of “civilizing gestures.”

The libretto and a sample of the musical score of \"Ravenshead,\" composed by Steven Mackey with libretto by Rinde Eckert, is presented.

The volume decreases and as the tragic story unfolds, in a fragmentary way, I found myself gripped by this subversive interpretation of the Orphic legend. Orpheus (played by [Rinde Eckert]) has never even met Euridice, far less married her. He simply held her, dying, after his taxi-driver knocked her down. Euridice, a poet, is in Hades where, cruelly deprived of her personal effects, she is allowed to write only in chalk. Persephone, the camp queen of the Underworld, helpfully points out that, as a poet, Euridice will be alright, though \"narrative junkies don't do well in Hades with its lack of any future and absence of plot\". Euridice will be bathed in water which will blot out all memory. Embracing the oblivion of Lethe, she will learn and feel everything anew from the perspective of a dead soul.

It certainly doesn't help that [Rinde Eckert] is such a charmless performer, though his desolate wails of loss at the end send shivers down the spine. Suzan Hanson as Eurydice sings beautifully and poignantly captures the confusion of a woman who finds herself caught between the living and the dead, while John Kelly as Persephone has all the wit and grace Eckert so conspicuously lacks. Meanwhile, Eurydice is finding Hades disconcerting. She's lost her spectacles and her pen, and is told she can write only in chalk because then her words will be ephemeral. Persephone, queen of the Underworld, and played by a camp male actor, then promises her the sweet forgetfulness of Lethe, which comes as a bit of a relief to Eurydice, who has belatedly realised she was always a terrible poet.

In ancient myth, Orpheus is the grief-stricken poet and singer who descends into the underworld in order to reclaim his beloved wife, who has died on their wedding day. In Rinde Eckert's music-theatre version for the American Repertory Theatre, Orpheus and Eurydice are strangers who meet only at the moment of Eurydice's death, when the taxi in which the rock star Orpheus is travelling runs her over. Falling in love with the dying woman whom he cradles in his arms, Orpheus becomes paralysed by guilt and, much to the chagrin of his manager, is unable to write and fulfil his obligation to his fans, having cast the dead poet Eurydice as his muse. The only solution is for Orpheus to pop down to Hades and get her back, which his manager is fortunately able to arrange.

The difficulty is, though, that for all the power of this central concept, [Rinde Eckert] and his director, Robert Woodruff, don't yet quite seem to have found the dramatic, musical and visual means to do it justice. They have a fabulous Eurydice in Suzan Hanson, a beautiful bluestocking poet killed one night by Orpheus's taxi. Yet the nature of Orpheus's obsession with her seems obscure, as if he was motivated not by the pure love that gives the myth its grandeur, but by some strange sense of intellectual inferiority; and the music only rarely achieves the power that a genuine fusion of rock and modern opera could unleash.

Here Orpheus is a tortured, self-absorbed rock star holed up in his studio after he was in a big yellow taxi that knocked down and killed the poet Eurydice. With his manager buying up her collected small press works in downtown bookstores, Orpheus creates a living shrine as he turns his experience into a tear-stained concept album. It's the sort of thing Lou Reed might have done circa his Berlin album. Whether Lou would've gone down the mean streets of underground Hades to rescue his dead damsel, however, is a different matter.

It's the world premiere of Rinde Eckert's \"Horizon\" that has the Lied administration most excited. \"(Rinde) could have done this anywhere, but he chose to do it here,\" said Lied executive director Charles Henry Bethea. The touring Broadway show \"Thoroughly Modern Millie\" will make its Nebraska premiere at the Lied in December. PHOTOS COURTESY THE LIED CENTER FOR PERFORMING ARTS

Rather than dying via poison as per Shakespeare's classic drama, Romeo awakens to Juliet's decaying body in the crypt, discovering that the poison, rather than killing him, has lengthened his life span to centuries. The theatrical piece begins with an embittered and acerbic Romeo awaking to find himself again a survivor -- this time on a World War I battlefield. Attired in charnel house trappings and caked in clay, almost like a vaguely human-shaped golem, [Rinde Eckert]'s Romeo prowls a barren battlefield -- a no-man's land, certainly a limbo -- questioning the sanity and reasoning that would allow the impractical idealism of fantasy and single-minded love to exist when judgment, conscious and perception scream the sensibilities of realizing the insignificance of the one in the whole.