"Eurydice' at the Wilma (3rd review)

A daughter's loss, a bride's dilemma

JIM RUTTER

Nine years after mounting the Tennessee Williams play Orpheus Descending, the Wilma Theater is offering Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice. Both ostensibly concern the myth of Orpheus, who lost his wife Eurydice on their wedding day. Both also distort the myth almost beyond recognition, inserting characters and themes more common to our time.

Not that it would matter. Western worldviews now lack the metaphysical view of a pantheon of gods dictating the course of human affairs. Nor do we possess the pagan sense of an animated universe (though Ruhl’s play tries to convey that sense through a trio of talking stones).

But like a form of cultural lag, the power of myth lingers long after the societies that created them have disappeared. Few theatergoers in 2008 expect a modern realization of the Orpheus myth; instead we hope— with Williams and Ruhl alike— that the work will impart some allegorical understanding of our own lives.

And while the Inquirer's Toby Zinman may have had some difficulty comprehending the allegory, Ruhl’s play is indeed a consistently moving meditation on the enduring bond between father and daughter— one circumstantially altered by marriage, but not fundamentally changed over time. Dead long before the play begins, Eurydice’s father (Stephen Novelli) writes her letters from hell. Knowing that it’s her wedding day, he sends his thoughts— “a wedding is for a daughter and a father, who stop being married to each other on that day”— and instructions for wedded life, telling her to take care, because there’s “No greater choice in life than choosing a beloved.”

Dangling letters from dad

By this point, we’ve already seen Eurydice (Merritt Janson) playing on the beach with Orpheus (all impassioned longing in Benjamin Huber’s performance). Though Orpheus is consumed with thoughts of music, his starving artist clearly loves her, and proposes with a knotted piece of string.

But on their wedding day, an “interesting stranger” (Triney Sandoval) lures her away with a promise of contact with the underworld— dangling one of the letters from dad. While running away, she slips and plummets to her death. A bittersweet underworld reunion follows: Although her father hasn’t washed away his memories, Eurydice mistakes him for a porter. As the stones advise him, “Father is not a word dead people understand.”

In Blanka Zizka’s sensitive direction, the remainder of the play unfolds in a series of visually provocative, poetically touching moments. While Orpheus writes songs and braves the gates of Hades, Eurydice regains her memory and once more remembers her affection for the one man she can always depend on: her father.

Novelli plays the father with deep paternal affection, using patient, caring recollections to gently cajole her memory and allow her to adjust to her separation from Orpheus. Janson remains adorable and endearing throughout, and if her acting seemed strained, it’s only because it’s hard to believe that someone could have ever been so earnest, so sincere.

Who’s that singing?

Toby Twining’s original music ranged from annoyingly funny to vocally interesting— though whoever’s singing/repeating the single word “Eurydice” (it’s hard to tell because of the sound design) when Orpheus knocks on the gates of hell has a mesmerizing voice.

Although Orpheus travels to the underworld to retrieve Eurydice, he must do much more than sing and write songs (of remorse and loss), because Ruhl’s creation of the father character confronts Eurydice with a difficult decision. Given the choice between a rocky tumultuous love and the quiet, safe comfort of a father’s affection, does she want to go back?

Here’s where Ruhl’s allegorical tale finally, devastatingly culminates. In a world of brief marriages and interminable divorce proceedings, the newlyweds’ voyage out of hell becomes a journey of mutual recriminations. Ruhl’s script and Zizka’s production take full advantage of a chance to reinvent myth— the young lovers nearly make it out of hell and could get back together— and consequently Eurydice’s realization that their relationship has reached the point of no return is heartbreaking.

Calling out to Orpheus, Eurydice makes her choice: A father can’t offer a husband’s (or a musician’s) passion, but he can build a home in which she feels safe. And no matter what Orpheus tries from then on, the grand gestures that wrap up the play are empty. Like any myth, Ruhl offers a moral: To rescue a relationship, sometimes even a lover’s descent into hell is too little too late.

A touch of the ’50s

It seems strange that Ruhl wrote this play only a few years ago. The ’50s-era swimsuits suggest a loss of innocence in marriage, and Novelli’s “father knows best” sense of a father’s importance in a girl’s development borders on the politically incorrect. I’d expect Christina Hoff Summers (or Ann Coulter) to write such a play (though of course, they’d never get it produced).

I once listened to a playwright describe how writing a play helped her recover from a personal crisis. Ruhl wrote Eurydice shortly after losing her own father to cancer. In her script, the three stones remark that the rest of one’s life is “a long time to be sad; be like a stone instead.” That, or write a play.

As an allegory, Eurydice possesses an elegiac quality that Zizka captures fully. If nothing else, it’s a beautiful eulogy to what fathers and daughters can feel. Or used to. Like the original Orpheus story, Ruhl ultimately imparts a sense of tremendous loss—while making us hope that it’s not something we can’t recover.



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To read another review by Steve Cohen, click here.
To read another review by Anne R. Fabbri, click here.
To read another review by Robert Zaller, click here.