Persephone finally finds her agency in a contemporary retelling called bad eggs
Unladylike co. playwright and Jessica Hood upends the Greek myth in an innovative film-theatre-animation hybrid
Sarah Roa stars as Persephone in the animation-tweaked bad eggs.
Unladylike co. presents the premiere screening of bad eggs at the Norman and Annette Rothstein Theatre on March 13 at 7 pm, with a Q&A afterward, and online from March 16 to 27, free or by donation
READING THE ANCIENT Greek myth of Persephone, playwright Jessica Hood was struck by the parallels to modern life.
Those similarities might not be obvious at first glance. Those who didn’t doze off in their high-school English class will remember Persephone as the goddess Demeter’s beloved daughter, who was kidnapped by Hades and taken to the Underworld to become his wife. When her mother begged for her return, Hades relented, but made Persephone eat the seeds of a pomegranate—meaning she would have to return every year.
Hood first experimented with updating the story as a short sketch a few years back—and quickly realized its potential for a full play.
“I wanted to investigate more of Persephone’s agency in this. What if she was the hero?” Hood tells Stir. “She’s had to contend with this man who’s abducted her and she’s trying to find a way back to her mother. A lot of us go through that, as a more emotional abduction, with the person we partner with.”
Hood became intrigued by the way that women always seem to be defined—in plays, literature, mythology, and the wider world—by their identity as mother, wife, or daughter. In other words, by their relationship to someone else.
“I was interested in how society places roles on women, and also what that means: Who are women as well as those roles?” Hood says. “Who is Persephone and what does she want?”
The result is Hood’s darkly funny feminist play bad eggs, premiering in a unique new hybrid of live theatre and film.
The updated storyline centres around Persephone’s infertility struggles. She decides to see the fertility doctor, Eve, who also happens to be her mother. Feeling the stress of her emotionally abusive husband and her strained relationship with a mother who has refused to speak to her since she eloped, Persephone suffers debilitating panic attacks. And those episodes of anxiety allow Hood to crack open the world of the story and move beyond literal reality.
Jessica Hood
Bad eggs was supposed to debut at the rEvolver Festival in 2020, but was postponed. The ongoing pandemic forced Hood and her team to take a radically different approach. “I said, ‘What if we try to film this really well, from multiple angles, with great post-production and editing and even add animation?’” she says.
Hood says the approach has allowed the production to bring the story to life in ways they never could have with a straightforward onstage performance.
To pull it off, she has assembled a multidisciplinary team to create the theatre-film, with a cast that stars Sarah Roa as Persephone, Raes Calvert as Hades and Lissa Neptuno as Eve. Pedro Chamale directs. Emily Pickering has created rotoscope animation—added on top of the filmed footage—to bring to life some of the more magical elements of the script.
It’s just the kind of production that Hood and best friend Rachel Miguel had in mind when they launched the Vancouver theatre company unladylike co. in 2018.
“We were both writing plays and realizing that it was going to be up to us to get them produced,” Hood relates. “There’s still a lack of representation for female writers and producers for all aspects of theatre-making. We thought, ‘Let's fill that gap and help hire people in those roles.’”
In other words, they’re finding agency onstage, and that nicely echoes the way Persephone finally finds her agency in bad eggs—despite the hardship the character has to go through first.
“It's got these dark undertones: there are intense mental health issues and trauma and discovering things about herself that are quite scary,” Hood hints, “but it leaves on a hopeful note.”
Related Articles
