Archives for March 2022

Sarah Roa in the poster art for bad eggs

Unladylike co., which is producing bad eggs, is a new, young, feminist company. I’m sympathetic on all these fronts — and I can’t recommend this production.

Written by Jessica Hood, bad eggs, which is being presented online, plucks Persephone and Hades from their myth and Eve from hers, then drops them into a shared contemporary story.

Some of the writing is mildly witty. Rather than abducting Persephone and spiriting her off to the underworld, Hades sweeps her up in a three-day courtship and takes her home to his apartment over the funeral parlour where he works. In the original Persephone myth, her mom, Demeter, doesn’t know about the abduction and searches for her daughter relentlessly. In this retelling, Eve is Persephone’s mother and she’s an emotionally chilly fertility doctor.

Some of Hood’s set-up is resonant. Rather than being trapped in a literal underworld/hell, the twenty-first century Perspehone is trapped by agoraphobia: panic attacks make it scary for her to leave the apartment.

And thematically, bad eggs makes sense. The plot turns on Persephone’s attempts to get pregnant. The mythic Persephone is associated with spring and fertility, but this Persephone’s desire to get pregnant is to please Hades — and that seems to be the point: our new Persephone defines herself in terms of the needs of others, Hades’ need for a submissive wife and Eve’s for an obediently ambitious daughter.

All of this is fine, as far as it goes, but it takes forever for Persephone to exhibit any real agency and that’s a big problem. [Read more…]