Tennessee Williams
Above is a photo of the great Southern playwright Tennessee Williams (1911-1983). Williams died at the Hotel Elysee in midtown Manhattan after choking to death on a bottle cap. Williams’s most famous plays are A Street Car Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and The Glass Menagerie. (He did not, however, write the “purple patches of poetry”—as critiqued by Brooks Atkinson—that he delivers before the underworld premiere of “The Bride’s Play.” They were, shall we say, ghostwritten...)
Just as Atkinson tells Jack, Williams also wrote a play called Orpheus Descending. One of his lesser-known works, Orpheus Descending re-envisions Orpheus as a guitar-playing visitor to a small Southern town.
Williams was not the first artist to retell the myth. The film Black Orpheus places Orpheus in the Carnival setting in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. In the medieval romance Sir Orfeo, Orpheus must rescue his wife from the King of the Fairies. There are dozens of other retellings in verse, prose, drama, dance, and music. How would you retell the myth to fit into your world?