Word: prascak
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...Mark Prascak, who set Peer(less) Gynt in the Adams House pool last month and painted his set--and actors--green in last year's The Dream Play, directs the myth of Orpheus and Euridyce mainly for laughs...
Cocteau wove overt references to popular culture into his adaptation of the classic. Hints of thrillers, dime romances and detective films abound in the tale of the poet Orpheus's (Jim May) descent into Hades and return with his bride Eurydice (Magdalena Hernandez). Prascak, perhaps true to Cocteau's intentions, begins the play with a Madonna medley and transforms Death (Jennifer Lyn Bader) into a lovely Material Girl in white...
Unlike Peer(less), the production of Orphee can't be faulted for excessive length. In fact, Prascak compresses all the action--including journeys from Earth to Hell and back again and then to Heaven--into less than an hour. Scenes, events, allusions and jokes fly by altogether too fast. And Prascak too often seems less concerned with making the myth relevant than with, say, an allusion to Alice's Restaurant...
...PRASCAK transports his Orphee to Harvard Square and packs his script with local references--to eating establishments like Au Bon Pain and Steve's Ice Cream (which Death happens to manage). These touches are rarely intrusive and sometimes quite necessary...
...most part, Prascak maintains Cocteau's scene structure and characters. His major switch is to replace a talking horse with a small Oscar the Grouch figure, the same Muppet that starred in The Dream Play. This horse-turned-Muppet opens the play with cryptic messages that provide Orpheus with poetic inspiration. It is helpful to keep in mind that this--like much of what else is odd in the production--is weird thanks to Cocteau, not Prascak...