Synopsis
Eurydice is a 2003 play by Sarah Ruhl which retells the myth of Orpheus from the perspective of Eurydice, his wife. The story focuses on Eurydice’s choice to return to Earth with Orpheus or to stay in the underworld with her father (a character created by Ruhl). Ruhl made several changes to the original myth’s story-line. The most noticeable of these changes was that in the myth Orpheus succumbs to his desires and looks back at Eurydice, while in Ruhl’s version Eurydice calls out to Orpheus (causing him to look back) perhaps in part because of her fear of reentering the world of the living and perhaps as a result of her desire to remain in the land of the dead with her father. Ruhl’s script has been explicitly written so as to be a playground for the designer of the sets.
Source: Wikipedia
Reviews
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New York Times, Critic’s Pick
Les Waters’s marvelously burnished revival … stars an instantly likable Maya Hawke as a self-possessed Eurydice, cerebral but with a romantic streak, and a beautifully understated Brian d’Arcy James as her mild father, funny here in a dadly way and immensely moving, too. Caleb Eberhardt plays Orpheus, gentle and determined, pouring his misery into music and writing to his dead wife. – Original • Archive
Time Out
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. – Original • Archive
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