Orpheus steigt herab (Orpheus descending)

A small town where time seems to stand still; a backwater in the middle of nowhere. This tight-knit community is united by a dark past, and the townspeople can’t stop themselves from gossiping about the same old topic over and over again: Twenty years ago Jabe Torrance, the owner of a convenience store, murdered the father of his now-wife, Lady. Back then, he had been the ringleader of a racist mob that set fire to the Italian immigrant’s wine garden, killing him in the process. Everyone knows, except Lady. Now Jabe is on his deathbed, while Lady has taken over the day-to-day business of running the store. It is into this small-town hell on earth that Tennessee Williams’s modern-day Orpheus descends: Val Xavier, a charismatic young singer and outsider, gets a temporary job working at the store and opens Lady’s eyes to the possibility of a new life. But her attempt to break free from this bigoted, racist world seems doomed from the outset.

Williams’s drama ORPHEUS DESCENDING shows the destructive mechanisms of a society characterised by a hatred of foreigners, exemplified in a town in the Southern United States during the 1950s – thereby telling a story that keeps repeating in a similar form all over the world at all times.