Making a myth modern

The Orpheus of classical myth descended into Hades to rescue his beloved Eurydice, then lost her forever by disobeying the gods' command not to look back as he led her, singing, up to life. The Orpheus of the American Repertory Theatre's new work ''Orpheus X," which starts previews Saturday at the Zero Arrow Theatre, follows a similar path -- except in this version Eurydice is not the hero's love, but a total stranger.

The twist will come as no surprise to anyone who saw the ART's ''Highway Ulysses," a Vietnam-shadowed reimagining of Ulysses' journey home from war. Like ''Ulysses," which won a 2003 Elliot Norton Award, this ''Orpheus" delights in taking a familiar story and making it strange.

Also like ''Ulysses," this music-theater production is a collaboration between the ART's artistic director, Robert Woodruff, and the composer, writer, and performer Rinde Eckert. A new element this time around comes from a third collaborator, the video artist Denise Marika, who is designing projections of wintry landscapes, demolition sites, and other evocative scenes for the rusted metal surfaces of David Zinn's set.

But why make Eurydice a stranger? More specifically, why make her a world-weary poet who dies when a taxi carrying a rock star named Orpheus knocks her down?

''I thought we needed something fresh," Woodruff says over the phone. The questions in the Orpheus myth that interested him, he says, went beyond the obvious, instantly grasped longing of a bereaved husband.

''What triggers emotion? What triggers mourning? What triggers loss?" Woodruff muses. In doing some research on mourning as he began thinking about working with Eckert again, he came across the story of a man who had been a passenger in a car that struck and killed someone.

''You would think that he would be several steps removed, because he wasn't the direct agent of that death," Woodruff says. ''But he felt totally responsible: 'If I didn't leave my apartment at this hour, if I weren't in a rush . . .' It triggered the same feelings as if a loved one had died."

That story, Woodruff says, connected in interesting ways with one of Eckert's compositions. The director had been listening to Eckert's radio opera ''Four Songs Lost in a Wall," he says, ''about a guy who hides away from society and barricades himself in his room, and the sounds of the world keep drifting into his room."

Eckert laughs when he recalls Woodruff's initial conversation with him about that piece. ''Knowing Robert, I knew this would just be the stimulus," he says by phone. Indeed, at that point neither of them had even thought of Orpheus yet; they just knew they wanted to create something together.

They also started talking with Marika. Her video ''Battle," with images of a sparring, naked couple projected onto an I-beam, creates the illusion of watching a mysterious conflict through a hidden aperture, and Woodruff thought such images could work well in their evolving composition.

''The collaboration has been the most interesting part," Marika says by phone. ''And also to be able to work on something that wasn't set -- to be able to sit and talk about the story." So they sat and talked, and at some point, someone mentioned the legendary hero -- though it's not clear who named him first.

''Orpheus entered the picture, and everything changed," Eckert says. Because both of his parents sang professionally and because of his own love of music, he explains, the mythically gifted musician has always been a hero to him.

''Once you name Orpheus, I'm pretty much done looking around," Eckert says with a laugh. ''And then it became necessary for us to figure our way through this mythology. [The ART staff] gave me the usual 10,000 pages of dramaturgical material --" he laughs again -- ''and I got to work."

But here's the kicker. ''Robert kept saying, 'Well, you know, it's based on this other piece, so you already have half the work done!' " Eckert laughs at how far they've come from his radio opera. ''Now, of course, none of the original piece is in it."

What's in it instead is still very much in a state of flux. ''It's like that old joke," Woodruff says. '' 'How long does it take to get to Cleveland?' 'I dunno, we never got there.' We're working on parts. I know where it begins, and I know where it ends. Now it's really about moving things around and editing. It's about how to use time and silence and what lands emotionally in the room."

He has been figuring all that out in rehearsals with Eckert, who plays Orpheus, as well as a four-person band, the soprano Suzan Hanson (she's Eurydice), and the performance artist John Kelly (in dual roles as Orpheus's manager and as Persephone, queen of the dead). A recent midday session found them singing through parts of Eckert's musically dense, lyrically evocative work, interrupting themselves to pare a line here or refine an underlying groove there.

''It's always an adventure with Robert," Eckert says. ''He's so direct, and he responds so immediately to things. . . . And he surprises me sometimes. I'll take something to him and think, 'Well, he'll never buy this -- it's too much like an art song,' but then he'll say, 'That's really complicated. And that's really interesting.' He wants vital theater, and he knows what that is."

Because of the extensive use of Marika's video projections, Woodruff says he won't really know how all the elements will come together until Tuesday, when the cast moves from its rehearsal room in the basement of Zero Church Street to the performance space at Zero Arrow.

''That's going to change the story," he says.

It's already changed many times over. Marika, for example, pushed to make Eurydice a more active character than the (almost) rescued victim of myth.

''I think it's really important that she is an active agent," Marika says. ''They're both artists, and she's driven to her work. She's present all the time, haunting his space."

So now Marika's videos will haunt the space of Zero Arrow, as will Eckert's compositions, which he describes as ''complicated music -- a lot of meter changes, not so much influenced by modern music as it is folk dance. This wild Romanian music I used to listen to. And baroque. I'm a baroque enthusiast, and it just creeps in everywhere."

The collaboration ''went back and forth early on," Marika explains, ''and then Rinde went off and did his thing, and I went off and did mine. Now we're coming back together to jostle it all back into place."

And just what is that place? Something ancient, and yet something no one has ever seen or heard before. That's the adventure.

Louise Kennedy can be reached at kennedy@globe.com.