In Search of "The Search for the Lost Husband": Playwriting as a Window into the Oral Tradition of the Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index's Tale Type 425
Overall Statement of Interests
As an English major, and simply as a participant in the history of human experience, the process of how we tell, interpret, and retell stories is vitally important to me. Folklore and mythology are elements of this history of narrative that are underrepresented in modern scholarship, but which are nonetheless of great importance in understanding both the cultural landscapes that gave birth to those stories and those that have reacted to them. Certain folktales recur across times and cultures, interpreting and reinterpreting on another, and these in particular play a critical role in illuminating central human preoccupations with aspects of their shared life experiences, and the questions which continually arise as a result.
One of these stories with great longevity comes from the Ancient Greek Eros and Psyche myth, catalogued by the Aarne-Thompson-Uther (ATU) Index of folklore as Tale Type 425, and colloquially known as “The Search for the Lost Husband” (Uther). It’s a story that centralizes a mortal, non-magical, young woman in a context which isolates her for all of those qualities, and focuses on her agency against great odds. The sheer number of cultures adapting this tale while retaining the central presence of the woman as searcher for and savior of her husband is extremely compelling to me. While the myth is most present in the modern Western zeitgeist through the subtype 425C (Beauty and the Beast), many elements which trace their history to or through this story (the two jealous sisters, the curious young woman releasing an evil through disobedience, and the cursed, inhuman husband, for example) remain present as tropes in more popular fairytales, as well as modern literature.
As adaptation and reinterpretation of this myth and its elements continues, I am interested in exploring versions of the myth that fall under the ATU 425 umbrella, as well as the legacy of this myth type in literary, film, and theatrical history, to better understand how people, across time and around the world, have interacted with, contributed to, and drawn from this story.
This research into the existing corpus will then culminate in my own applied research into the process of adaptation and reinterpretation. As a playwright, my adaptation will take the form of a four-play cycle. Each play will delve into critically differentiated, but skeletally similar existing interpretations of the myth: the Greek “Eros and Psyche”, the German “Hans My Hedgehog”, the Indian “Snake Prince”, and the Norwegian “Tale of the Abandoned Princess”.
Through this play cycle I will centrally investigate the questions: 1) What does the myth’s enduring popularity across cultures (especially as a story with many of its elements repeatedly rewritten to better match its tellers’ and hearers’ understandings of the world) say about how its themes resonate with different cultures? and 2) How does engaging with each of these four interpretations as serious works of art and attempts at understanding impact the creative process of playwriting? That is, in what ways will be playwriting also be an act of translating?
This theatrical exploration will also work in tandem with my Individualized Major, “Creating and Educating for the Stage and Screen,” which focuses primarily on the process of script production and the translation of those scripts into fully-realized performances. As I have worked towards this major alongside my English major at UConn, I have had the opportunity to engage with a variety of storytelling forms in the literary, dramatic, and film corpora (in courses including British Literature I, American Literature to 1880, a graduate seminar on Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, Dramatic Literature and Modern Dramatic Literature, the Ancient World in Film, Women, Gender, and Film, and Studies in Film). I have also been able to engage with storytelling creatively, which has helped me to better understand the processes of building up these narrative bodies in the first place (in writing courses such as Creative Writing I and II, Playwriting, and Film Writing, as well as courses like Exploration of Acting, which represent equally crucial parts of the storytelling process in the voice and body). I have also engaged in theatre from the perspectives of writer, actor, and director in my extracurricular activities throughout my secondary schooling and higher education, as well as in internships. For the past three years, I have been an Apprentice Teaching Artist with Elm Shakespeare in New Haven, Connecticut, which has given me a better grasp not only on engaging with theatrical texts as an educator but also as an artist through directing scenes and helping students to understand how they can physicalize the text they have been presented with. This has been an invaluable experience in understanding how directors and actors with various levels of experience engage with the written word, and has helped me in turn to better understand how to write in ways that are most helpful to those key players in the process of mounting a full theatrical production.
Going forward in my educational and professional careers, I believe that this project will provide me with the time and resources to research, write, and stage a project that brings together my academic and creative interests. The opportunity to simultaneously engage with texts as historical documents of their time, place, writer, and audience, and as artistic works of literary merit, will serve me well as I pursue a PhD in English. Through the creation of a cycle of plays of producible and publishable quality, I will also be able to further my career as a playwright.
Learning Plan
In my remaining time as an undergraduate, I will be continuing my study of various forms of storytelling, with particular focus on applying the knowledge I have gained from the courses I have taken on existing narrative works to my own creative work as a storyteller within that larger tradition. I will be able to hone these skills through writing-focused courses such as Nature Writing and two independent studies based around the playwriting process, with a focus on this ATU 425-based play cycle. By having one creative writing-focused course in each of my final three semesters, my progress should be allowed to be as continuous as possible.
Additionally, courses like Dramaturgy, Vocal Performance Techniques, Script Analysis, Introduction to World Puppetry, and Narrative Short Film Production will allow me to even further explore the process storytelling in its multitudinous facets, as well as support my project directly with their focus on theatre studies.
To continue my study of the existing corpus, I will also be taking courses including Anglophone Literatures, Irish Literature to 1939, Plays for Puppet Theatre, Classical Mythology, and Celtic and Norse Myth and Legend, the latter two of which will be particularly complimentary to this project in their mythological focus. Social Anthropology, similarly, will help me to gain a stronger grasp on the anthropological view of the social orders which surround and give rise to the storytelling process. My knowledge of the mythological and broader cultural contexts surrounding my four chosen tales will also be supplemented with independent research.
Over the summer of 2025, I will be completing an internship as a Teaching Artist with Elm Shakespeare Company’s Players Camp. This will allow me to engage even more fully with a dramatic text in conceptualizing how to stage it in its entirety than I was able as an Apprentice, which will be of great help to me in better understanding how to write for actors and directors.
Project Plan
To better understand the ways in which these four versions of the Aarne-Thompson-Uther Type 425 myth interpret the world within and through the stories they tell, I will produce my own four-play cycle dramatizing each of these individual tellings.
Theatrical adaptation of folklore is by no means a novel phenomenon– Aeschylus’ Oresteia, a play cycle focused on stories of the mythical house of Atreides, is dated to a first performance in 458 BC– and adaptations of Greek mythology in particular continue to be written and produced. Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), Jean Anouilh’s Eurydice (1941) and Antigone (1944), and Tennessee Williams’ Orpheus Descending (1957) are just a few examples from prolific playwrights of the mid-twentieth century. More recently, Mary Zimmerman’s The Odyssey (1989) and The Metamorphoses (1996), Naomi Iizuka’s Polaroid Stories (1999), Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice (2003), and Anaïs Mitchell’s Hadestown (2019) have dominated the mythologically-adapted landscape.
The process of creating adapted works for the stage is one that is particularly helpful in further illuminating the historical telling and retelling of mythologies because those stories, for much of their early history, existed solely as entries into their tellers’ oral tradition. In the past 40 years, one of the great leaps in folklore studies has been the revaluing of folktale texts as pieces of oral performance, with a perspective shift that now sees folklore predominantly as “a living social phenomenon, something which has a historical, social and anthropological as well as a folkloristic context; something which is both uttered and – equally important – received, passed on, recreated and developed, not just as words but as a series of images, symbols, sounds, associations and textures” (Gunnell 8), and which, fundamentally, takes up not only sonic, but physical space, with visual cues in expression and body language of the storyteller, as well as the social context of the setting in which the tale is told and the appearance of the teller, which are critical in fully engaging with the story as a general audience member or researcher engaging with the story (Gunnell 7-12). Theatre, as it is conventionally received in modern Western culture, engages simultaneously with a text and audience, casts its performers in the co-occurring roles of storyteller and character, and allows for organic variation so that no two performances, even by the same company using the same script, will be exactly the same, all of which matches strongly with historical oral tradition, making it a vital descendant of and tool for research into orally presented folktales in the modern era (Gunnell 8-9, Honko 11-43).
Through a conscious embrace of the theatre as a setting in which to engage with these folktales, and by engaging with those stories through both the historical/anthropological lens of folklorists and an artistic lens which takes heed from Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation and seeks not to impose understanding through rewriting and squeezing a sense of introvertible meaning out of these stories as strict metaphors or allegories (as is the tradition with the original Eros and Psyche myth in particular, especially in light of Stoic commentary on Greek myth in general), but which values each piece of storytelling as art which is meritorious of existence and engagement in its own right, I will be able to more fully engage with the tales as individuals and as pieces of a larger whole (Sontag 3-14). In a similar vein, by turning to an artform which is as akin to the original oral performance format of these stories as exists on a large-scale, industrial level in the contemporary West, I will be able to reach a more holistic level of understanding of the storytelling experience as it originally existed, as well as to add to the corpus of existing texts that is vital to the myth’s history, as well as to the history of dramatic storytelling both in general and as it pertains to the interpretation of existing myth.
Many of the theatrical adaptations of myth which exist to critical acclaim uproot their stories from their original contexts, adapting them to better fit with the worldview of their audiences in much the same way as German adapters of the ATU 425 type, in absence of Greek gods in their concept of the world, and under a Christianity-infused understanding of magic, traded out Eros as a divine entity for a magical mortal cursed to live as a human-hedgehog hybrid. For Anouilh, this adaptation to familiarity is a French train station in the 1930’s. For O’Neill it is a homecoming after the Civil War. Williams sets his play in a contemporary New Orleans dry goods store, while Iizuka sets hers amongst “street kids” in a 1990’s city and Mitchell sets hers in a Dust Bowl bar. Ruhl goes in a totally opposite direction, setting her play in a world of the familiar abstract, evoking Carroll’s Wonderland as a primary touchstone.
Zimmerman’s Metamorphoses is one of relatively few widely-produced myth-adapted plays which sets its characters in their own time and place, addressing the play’s gods as genuinely divine entities, and very literally portraying the fates which befall its mortal characters.
In writing my own adapted play cycle, I will be approaching each play, as fully as I am able, with the view that the world in which its tale exists is one that is fully real, and which should be taken seriously in its own right as a genuine framing of a perceived reality and attempt at making sense of that reality. This will be supported by my own historical and anthropological research into each of these four cultures at the time of the tale’s telling and recording, as well as my literary review of the tale type as a whole. By engaging with these interpretations of the tale type head-on, I believe I will be able to more truthfully engage with and present the original stories, rather than asking them to justify themselves as relevant to the modern world by another level of assimilation into the world with which I am most familiar.
My adaptation of these four folktales into plays will help me to engage with my guiding questions through a Practice as Research methodology, in which my own process of adaptation, occurring as closely as possible within the bounds of the original telling, will illuminate not only the performance-based storytelling process, but the ways in which the telling of the original tales shapes the perception of the world within those tales as individual stories, and lets them speak in concert with other versions of the tale type. A play cycle, rather than a singular play, is therefore of particular importance as it allows not only one culture’s interpretation of the base myth, but four distinct ones, impacted by many different contextual factors, to be voiced and understood, shedding light on the tale type more holistically than only one permutation of it possibly could.
In order to most fully engage with the magical and non-human elements of these stories, which fall prey the most quickly in adaptation to the rationalizations of modern understandings of the world and either become purely metaphorical or are translated into human roles portrayed through the human body, I intend to write these plays to utilize puppetry, with methods informed by my two planned puppetry courses. The world-building of each play can also, then, be more fully articulated, with strong visuals that place the world of the story directly in front of the audience while simultaneously allowing it to exist as part of a world different from their own. It will also serve to both unify the four plays through this common artistic medium and differentiate them as unique works by engaging different relevant forms of puppetry (Eros and Psyche, for example, would utilize shadow puppetry for its gods, given the tale’s preoccupation with darkness and light and what can or can’t be fully seen).
Though the play cycle will not be given fully staged productions as a part of this project, I will take advantage of my theatre and creative writing communities here at UConn and orchestrate two staged readings in 2026. The writing will also be done through a focus on performance which will influence not only the final product, but the process of writing it. This written work will take place primarily through my independent studies with Professor Darcie Dennigan, and its drafts will be reviewed by my interdisciplinary Faculty Advisory Committee both from a literary-based standpoint and from a dramatic-arts-based one to ensure that its intention as a continuation of the historical oral tradition remains at the center of the work. When complete, it will be of publishable and theatrically producible quality, and will be able to become a part of the field of folkloric adaptation in theatre, as well as the theatrical canon as a whole.
References
Apuleius. The Transformations of Lucius, Otherwise Known as, the Golden Ass. Translated by Robert Graves, Farrar, Straus & Young, 1951. (Source text for “Eros and Psyche”)
Collet, Camilla. Fortællinger. P.F. Steensballe, 1861. (Source text for “The Story of the Abandoned Princess”)
Grimm, Jacob, et al. The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm: The Complete First Edition. 1st ed., Princeton University Press, 2014, https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400851898 (Source text for “Hans My Hedgehog”)
Gunnell, Terry. "Narratives, space and drama: essential spatial aspects involved in the performance and reception of oral narrative." Folklore: Electronic Journal of Folklore 33 (2006): 7-26.
Honko, Lauri. Thick Corpus, Organic Variation and Textuality in Oral Tradition. Finland, Finnish Literature Society, 2000. 11-43.
Lang, Andrew. The Olive Fairy Book. Illustrated by H. J. (Henry Justice) Ford, Crown ed., Longmans, Green, 1929. (Source text for “The Snake Prince”)
Sontag, Susan. “Against Interpretation.” Against Interpretation: And Other Essays. United States, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2001. 3-14.
Uther, Hans-Jörg, and Folklore Fellows. The Types of International Folktales: A Classification and Bibliography, Based on the System of Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson. Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 2004.
Significant Work in the Field
Alfaro, Luis, et al. The Greek Trilogy of Luis Alfaro: Electricidad; Oedipus El Rey; Mojada. Edited by Rosa Andújar, Methuen Drama: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2021.
Anouilh, Jean. “Antigone.” Jean Anouilh: Five Plays. Methuen, 1987.
Anouilh, Jean, and Black, Kitty. “Eurydice.” Jean Anouilh: Five Plays, Hill and Wang, New York, NY, 1958.
Iizuka, Naomi, and Ovid. Polaroid Stories: An Adaptation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Dramatic Pub., 1999.
Mitchell, Anaïs. Working on a Song: The Lyrics of Hadestown. Plume, New York, NY, 2020. O’Neill, Eugene. Mourning Becomes Electra: A Trilogy. H. Liveright, 1931.
Ruhl, Sarah. Eurydice. Samuel French, 2008.
Williams, Tennessee. Orpheus Descending: A Play in Three Acts. Dramatists Play Service, 1987. Zimmerman, Mary, et al. The Odyssey: A Play. Northwestern University Press, 2006.
Zimmerman, Mary, and Ovid. Metamorphoses: A Play. Northwestern University Press, 2002.