Bid program note

PROGRAM NOTE A Bid to Save the World Death has never been more bizarre. With longer lifespans, assisted death debates, and exciting new ways to recycle our remains (interested in becoming a tree, anyone?), dying in the 21st century is at an unprecedented degree of weird. Grief, however, is constant; humans at every era have grappled with the fear and pain of loss, no matter their approach to dying itself.

It is no wonder, then, that playwright Erin Bregman reaches to remotest of pasts to explore these ideas. The River Styx was, for the ancient Greeks, a transitory stage of death, a place where souls began their journey into the depths of the underworld. The myths surrounding Styx were many, often involving mortals entering the unknown to bring their loved ones back to the world of the living.

Take the oft-adapted tale of Orpheus, for instance, and his attempt to rescue his beloved Euridice from the Underworld. Orpheus’ quest naturally begins by crossing the River Styx, followed by encounters with many of the Underworld’s infamous characters—spirits awaiting their passage across the river, Cerberus guarding the gates with three mouthfuls of snarling teeth, even Hades himself. The hero’s story ends tragically, of course; in Orpheus’ case, a mere backwards glance at his love is cause enough to drag her once again into Hades’ realm.

This pattern is a familiar one: a hero challenges death through a riddle, bet, or epic journey, only to realize the inevitability and power of mortality. It is an inescapable lesson that everyone encounters throughout life—but that doesn’t stop storytellers from confronting it.

B, like many before her, posits the ultimate “What if?”: What if death—and by extension grief and pain— were gone? Her question is a common one, but her method is utterly unique.

A Bid to Save the World pulls its grieving protagonist into the Underworld—but Bregman takes this narrative many strange, unique, and terrifying steps further. Around an age-old tale, Bregman integrates a variety of other death motifs and ideas, both familiar and astoundingly original. In Sister’s journey, we enter the realms of science fiction and fairy tale, encountering magic spells and songs along the way. The orange as an omen of death—a distinctly modern, American concept, at least since The Godfather—even finds its way into this world. A Bid to Save the World presents a new mythology by taking inspiration from myriad sources, old and new.

What results is a mosaic of ancient myth and modern symbology, of an imagination gone wild and the commonality of grief. A Bid to Save the World, like its many explorative predecessors, does not fix death or answer the unanswerable. It does, however, remind us of the depths of human emotion, the lengths to which we go to protect the ones we love. This play is massive, impossible, mythic, even bizarre—but its question is as shared and sincere as grief itself.