Theatre in Review: Eurydice (Signature Theatre)

	Caleb Eberhardt, Maya Hawke. Photo: HanJie Chow

Eurydice, which put Sarah Ruhl on the map some twenty years ago, is a bold stab at a new kind of poetic theatre, reframing one of Western civilization's most enduring and poignant myths with a battery of expressionist theatrical devices. It's a young writer's play, filled with creative touches, and one wishes Ruhl had been able to harness them into a compelling dramatic vision. This is, of course, something of a minority opinion: Eurydice has many partisans, and, at times, it undeniably gets at something essential in the way we experience grief -- how, over time, the sharpest pain fades into a dull longing mingled with forgetfulness. And yet, to my mind, it is undone by a certain self-consciousness; Ruhl's writing constantly calls attention to itself, leaving its heroine oddly obscured.

Ruhl's main invention is to reimagine Eurydice's story as a triangle, involving her, Orpheus, and her unnamed father. Following a brief scene of courtship, she falls to her death on her wedding day. Dispatched to the Underworld, she discovers her long-deceased parent waiting for her. (He has spent much of his afterlife composing letters, offering advice that never reached her eyes.) She finds solace with him, calling up family memories, and working with him to hold onto language -- which, we are told, falls away post-mortem. Their relationship alters the balance of the narrative, sidelining Orpheus and establishing her father as Eurydice's true love. As she notes, "A wedding is for daughters and fathers. The mothers all dress up, trying to look like young women. But a wedding is for a father and a daughter. They stop being married to each other on that day." Until, perhaps, she dies.

One suspects that this conceit has a highly personal meaning for Ruhl, who, among other things, includes the directions to her late grandparents' Iowa home in one of the play's later passages. But her rendering of the Eurydice-Orpheus relationship is distressingly wan, thanks to dialogue that uncertainly straddles the line between poetry and preciousness. A discussion about books -- she likes them, he ribs her about it -- is almost embarrassingly generalized. ("It can be interesting to see if other people -- like dead people who wrote books -- agree or disagree with what you think," she says, sounding like a librarian in the Young Adult section.) Getting romantic, Orpheus tells her, "I'm going to make each strand of your hair into an instrument. Your hair will stand on end as it plays my music and becomes a hair orchestra. It will fly you up into the sky." Whether you find such thoughts thrilling or alarmingly twee will determine your reaction to Eurydice.

Ruhl works here in a minimalist manner, sketching in the myth's basic lines rather like a caricaturist calling up an entire face with a few strokes of a pen. And, in its best moments, Eurydice measures the terrible, uncrossable gulf between this world and the next. What is worse, the playwright wonders: the pain or mourning or the decision to forget? But her reliance on metaphors rather than ideas, airy fancies instead of flesh and bone, can be counterproductive. Les Waters' production relies almost entirely on the appealing Maya Hawke and Caleb Eberhardt as Eurydice and Orpheus. Still, once Eurydice lands in the Underworld (via an elevator filled with pouring rain), Orpheus seems incidental to the story. More problematically, Ruhl posits death as a form of dementia, an unraveling of the self that involves the irrevocable loss of memory and language. But Eurydice is so insufficiently realized that she has no identity to shed; one almost feels she was baptized in the River Lethe at a very early age.

Hawke, who appears to be making her stage debut, goes a long way toward giving Eurydice a full range of emotions. She is charmingly playful in her early scenes with Eberhardt's Orpheus; it's not their fault that we don't see enough of them to care about their marital happiness. Hawke also endows her failed attempt at escaping the Underworld with enough agony to leave one wondering if, down the road, she might tackle, say, the role of Antigone. Brian d'Arcy James, dressed in a three-piece ensemble suitable for a bank loan officer, his snowy beard giving him a faint Santa Claus aura, is ineffably touching as Eurydice's father, offering her Polonius-style advice about comportment and practicing walking down the aisle at a wedding he cannot attend.

Supplying a distinctly creepy undertone is T. Ryder Smith, first as a kind of Grim Reaper who ushers Eurydice into the world beyond life, staging a monstrous fit worthy of a horror film during which he seems to physically alter. He returns as the Lord of the Underworld, an oversized kid patrolling the premises on a tricycle, laying out the rules by which Eurydice's planned escape will inevitably fail. Ruhl's unhappiest invention is the Chorus of Stones, a trio of allegedly inanimate objects who incessantly hector Eurydice. Inexplicably dressed by Oana Botez to look like refugees from John Tenniel's vision of the Queen of Hearts' court, and shouting their lines in grating voices, they are massive intrusions, and the play would be better without them. Do not blame Maria Elena Ramirez, Jon Norman Schneider, and David Ryan Smith, fine actors following their director's lead.

Scott Bradley's set, based on his design for the original production, renders the Underworld as a kind of bathhouse thanks to an upstage wall composed of blue, pink, and green tile; an enormous crystal chandelier completes the look. Reza Behjat's lighting deals out various ideas -- cold versus warm washes, strategic bursts of saturated color, and eerie footlight effects -- to suggest Eurydice's disorienting journey between worlds. Botez's costumes often have a faintly retro look, suggestive of (perhaps) the 1980s, for reasons that remain unclear. The sound design by Bray Poor, also a veteran of the original staging, is a symphony of effects, including crashing surf, dripping water, thunderstorms, and bits of Orpheus' symphony.

In 2020, Eurydice was made into an opera composed by Matthew Aucoin to a libretto by Ruhl. It is, I think, a much more successful work because music supplies the stylization that Ruhl reaches for in the play but never quite achieves. Ruhl has gone on to write much better plays, but this one persists, having been staged globally across the years. It does, I suppose, let the audience get to know an ancient tale that, centuries later, continues to hold much meaning for us; still, I wish the introduction weren't quite so casual. This play about death is a kind of haunted house, filled with ghosts of characters rather than the real things. --David Barbour