The Hellenic afterlife is hotter than ever right now, thanks to the recently released pro-shot recording of Hadestown, but that hit Broadway musical is far from the only theatrical reinterpretation of the ancient epic. For instance, what if instead of being an underworld deity or oppressive industrialist, Hades was a tradwife influencer? That’s just one of the provocative questions posed by To Hell With Marriage, the latest original production from Playwrights’ Round Table, which premiered at the Lowndes Shakespeare Center’s Santos Dantin Studio Theater Oct. 16 and continues through Oct. 25. Earlier this month, I spoke with director Bethany Dickens Assaf and author Irene L. Pynn about their warped mid-century spin on Eurydice and Orpheus, as well as the collaborative yearlong process behind devising this new play.
Pynn, the native Orlando playwright behind Fringe’s Automatic Orchestra and Enter, Pursued by a Whale, and Dickens Assaf, an Indiana transplant who penned Vast of Darkness and The One Who Calls, will both be very familiar names to fans of smart sci-fi scripts featuring strong female characters. Surprisingly, although they’d both been contributing to Playwrights’ Round Table (which Pynn calls “the only game in town” for producing new work) for many years, this will be their first project together. Their paths never crossed professionally until 2022, when they both participated in the Gainesville Hippodrome’s 2022 New Works Festival and quickly fell in love with each other’s work. “Ever since then, we’ve been orbiting each other, trying to find the right project to work on, and this was fortuitous,” says Dickens Assaf.
The initial idea for To Hell With Marriage came out of a conversation between Dickens Assaf and producer Katherine Riley Stevens about devised works being created at local colleges, and their desire to see the same in community theater. “There was so much about that process and the resulting theater that we really admired,” recalls Dickens Assaf. “We were like, well, if no one else is doing it, maybe we ought to do it. … We were just really surprised and delighted by the amount of interest, not only from those folks at PRT and Irene, but also just actors in the community who really had not had an experience to work on something like this.”
For the uninitiated, “devised” plays are developed through a series of documentary interviews and/or improvisational exercises with the actors, which the playwright then mines for material to make a final script. (The Laramie Project by director Moises Kaufman’s Tectonic Theater Project is the best-known example of “Moment Work.”) Dickens Assaf, who had previously studied devising and done dramaturgy, had her cast write stream-of-consciousness journals, read old New York Times interviews about marriage and even clamber over chairs while creating moments that evolved into the final show.
“It’s interesting to sort of see what it becomes and build on things, versus me coming in with a very strict idea,” she says. “I’m usually a collaborative director, but this is a whole ’nother level.”
As writer, Pynn watched the rehearsals and took notes, drawing from them both literal dialogue and symbolic inspiration. “It’s like doing the normal traditional playwriting process almost in reverse,” says Pynn. “It takes a long time, and it does result in a collaborative product that contains a lot of metaphorical moments, things that maybe you wouldn’t think to include in a more traditional process. It’s an eye-opening process, and a really rewarding process as a writer. I think it brings a different kind of life to a script that couldn’t be done in a writer’s room alone by yourself.”
Interwoven with Pynn’s prose is poetry by Ashley Alonso, much of which she composed on the spot in response to rehearsals. “It would create such beautiful ideas, visual things that you would never have expected [and] it was such a cool combination of things,” says Pynn. “I was like, ‘Where can I fit in some of Ashley’s beautiful words here?’ Because, what a privilege, she writes some amazing stuff.”
A tale as old as time, the play follows newlyweds Orpheus (Reese Twilla) and Eurydice (Komal Patel) as they struggle to strike a balance in their marital partnership. The modern twist on this 1950s-style scenario is that Hades (Ruby Dickerson) is a TikTok personality promoting regressive gender roles.
According to Pynn, the concept of basing the play’s narrative structure on mythology only came about after it was finally time to massage months of material into a working draft script. “We had a huge amount of beautiful moments, amazing representations of our topic that meant a lot to us after several weeks, but I’m not sure it would have hit the same for an audience. I thought we probably could do well with a story that is going to be easily recognizable and also lends itself well to being reinterpreted, and I think Greek myths are good for that,” Pynn says, explaining why the familiar fable was a natural fit. “It is also about a relationship, a new marriage, and very two very different expectations from two different genders.”
“This is risky work,” admits Dickens Assaf. “This is experimental work; this is work that doesn’t have a natural built-in audience.”
However, audiences who do take the risk will be rewarded with the product of nearly a year’s worth of effort from the entire creative team. “All the actors [have] created their characters. They knew their characters earlier than they saw a script, so they’ve all been able to really put so much of their art and their perspective into the into these characters, which is really cool.”
8 p.m. Friday-Sunday, Oct. 23-25; Santos Dantin Studio Theater, Lowndes Shakespeare Center, 812 E. Rollins St.; theprt.com; $17.25-$22.50.
This article appears in Oct. 21-27, 2026.