Eurydice

Dawn McAndrews Director	Dan Bilodeau Set Designer	Michelle Handley Costume Designer
Sophie Harrington Asst. Stage Manager	Ingrid Pierson Stage Manager	SeifAllah Salotto-Cristobal Lighting Designer
Lorriane Slone Fight, Intimacy, Movement Director	Paige Stone Props Master	Rew Tippin Sound Designer

Cast

A.J. Baldwin Big Stone	Thomas Campbell Orpheus	Trezure Coles Lord of the Underworld	Rebecca Ho Little Stone
Amber McNew Loud Stone	Jamie Saunders Eurydice	Michael Dix Thomas Father

From the Director

How far would you go to retrieve something you lost? What would be worth the journey? An item. A memory. An idea. A Love. What would you be willing to give up in return?

Sarah Ruhl’s dramatic revision of the Orpheus myth, is largely based on Ovid’s retelling of the tale. At the heart of Eurydice is the same profound sense of loss that can be traced in Ovid’s work. Ruhl’s Eurydice is written in movements – a silent symphony of love, loss, memory, and stillness. The play is an elegy. It is also whimsical and surreal with a nod to Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Emotion is heightened, fleeting, childlike, and profound.

As in the original Orpheus myth, Eurydice is about the dangers of looking back. On the day of her wedding, Eurydice looks back, wishing her dad could be there, this opens a crack in the space between reality and desire. And that schism creates the in-between that leads her to ignore her instincts, bringing on her demise. Reunited with her father in the Underworld, Eurydice intuits how to survive, but, as if fated to do so, there is again looking back, which comes at a terrible cost. Looking back offers momentary rewards, but dwelling in that backwards glance is dangerous. And has consequences. Ruhl’s play uses the basic myth as inspiration, but differs in many ways. As classicist M. Owen Lee said in his book Virgil as Orpheus, “A great artist never touches a myth without developing, expanding, and sometimes radically changing it.” Eurydice’s father doesn’t play a role in the original myth, but he plays a pivotal role in Ruhl’s play. In the classical versions of the story, Eurydice is a passive victim. In Ovid’s version of the story, she doesn’t speak at all and in Virgil’s poem she says only a few words after Orpheus has already looked back at her. In Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice, she is given both a voice and a choice. And perhaps most significantly, the opportunity to feel, one last time, a father’s love, and a husband’s sacrifice.