“There’s no getting around the fact that Joyce set himself up to be a genius,” says playwright Anton Piatigorsky, about the now-­monumental places of high modernist texts like Ulysses, Pound’s Cantos and Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities in the literary canon. “It’s so interesting to me that there’s this self-awareness, this mock-heroism and mock-genius in modernism, yet it’s ended up being taken so seriously.”

Piatigorsky’s new play, Eternal Hydra, which opens Nov. 26 at Buddies in Bad Times for a week of workshop performances, creates a fake modernist author and novel as a way to explore such paradoxes. Ostensibly, it’s a postmodernist take on modernism: Eternal Hydra’s narrative, a detective yarn of sorts, concerns professor Vivian Ezra (Liisa Repo-Martell), who comes across a long, unsung book from the period by Irish scribbler Gordias Carbunkle (David Ferry). Ezra’s attempts to trace its origins and intent uncover a bunch of sticky issues relating to art-making and art-loving, and demonstrate the kind of hubbub modernist aesthetics continue to cause.

“You get to see the ways in which [Carbunkle] has written one chapter,” Piatigorsky explains. “The book has 99 different chapters, but the play ends up hinging on only one. I decided I didn’t want to write a play that did what [many modernist novels do], which is to attempt to capture an infinite amount of voices — so I did the inverse, focusing on one story, one chapter, and making it representative of what happens throughout the book.”

As is clear even from the characters’ names — presumably Ezra is a reference to Pound, and Gordias Carbunkle a poke at the simultaneously blight-like and mystifying quality of literary games — Piatigorsky is engaged, at least partly, in satire. Modernism and postmodernism alike seem at the playwright’s mercy: Carbunkle’s text might be a red herring, but it has contemporary publishers and writers running around like chickens with their heads cut off.

“I’m aware of the ways in which [books like this] can mask obsessions of various kinds,” Piatigorsky says. “[Ezra] has conjured the author as her kind of ghost pet in the first part of the play, whom she talks to constantly. So, yes, a lot of [Eternal Hydra] is about possession and obsession. You’ll often hear [Ezra] hide a very personal need behind well-thought-out, academic arguments.” Piatigorsky is by no means denigrating his characters or their dilemmas, however. “I’m trying to walk a line between making it funny, while also letting those involved be complete people.”
There’s a suggestion, for instance, that postmodernism has significantly elaborated on modernism: that it has, through entities like reader-response theory and identity politics, called attention to the subjective nature of interpretation. “And these are issues you can find in Ulysses anyway,” notes Piatigorsky. “So the play’s more about the act of reading; it’s about a way of approaching the thing, rather than the thing itself.”