Emerging Artists Project, at Cafe Voltaire.
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Attempting any comedy crime for a laugh, Chrisi Collins perpetrates a clumsy remake of the Greek legend in which earth mother Demeter invades the underworld to rescue daughter Persephone from a forced marriage to Hades, prince of hell. The compromise worked out, of course, is that the four months of winter unleashed by Persephone’s yearly visit to her husband will be balanced by spring, summer, and fall. (But how do you explain this summer, when hell’s visited earth?) According to Collins’s “life of a teenage goddess,” 15-year-old Persephone is a pouty Valley girl, Zeus a drunken cipher, and Hades a misunderstood lech. A chirpy, irritating three-person chorus impersonate trees, bitch about their subordinate roles, and indulge in cheap anachronisms (a hungover Zeus can’t open the childproof bottle of aspirin they give him).
