Eurydice
A palpable sense of loss hangs over Eurydice, Sarah Ruhl's bittersweet 2003 expansion of the enduring Greek myth about the doomed romance between a musician and his muse. In most iterations, the action centers on Orpheus’s ill-fated journey to the underworld in an effort to reclaim his late bride, Euridyce. But Ruhl’s interpretation, inspired by her father's death when she was 20 years old, gives the title character greater agency, centrality and ultimately heartbreak.
Eurydice (an appealing Maya Hawke) and Orpheus (Caleb Eberhardt) are first revealed in the youthful flush of their intense courtship, canoodling in bathing suits on Scott Bradley's beautiful set of tile and pipes, a watery bridge between this plane and the next. But Eurydice abandons her own wedding celebration to follow a ghoulish man (the delightfully creepy T. Ryder Smith) who claims to have letters for her from her beloved dead father. Thus lured into the underworld by Hades, god of the dead, she encounters a chorus of cheeky Stones (Maria Elena Ramirez, Jon Norman Schneider and David Ryan Smith, informative and funny). Although her doting dad is also there—played by Brian d'Arcy James at his most endearing—her passage through the River of Forgetfulness has made her unable to recognize him or communicate with him. Thus begins a poignant reacquaintance as Eurydice's father devotes himself to reminding her of the unbreakable bond they retain even in death.
Eurydice | Photograph: Courtesy Brad Holley...
