What if we could have one more conversation with those we love most after they have passed? What would be said? What stories would be lovingly relived in that moment? 

In Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice, those questions are examined through the tragic love story of Orpheus and Eurydice. 

     With their faces still flushed from their wedding vows, Orpheus and Eurydice seem like an idyllic couple in love. But after a strange conversation with A Nasty Interesting Man, tragedy strikes, and Eurydice finds herself on a one-way journey to the Underworld.  There, Eurydice is united with her Father, who, despite the rules of the Underworld, still remembers the land of the living. He does his best to help his daughter remember her life, much to the chagrin of the Stones, ancient elements who take the rules of the Underworld very seriously. While all this is happening below the earth, Orpheus desperately tries to save his love and bring her back to the life they had created. He, too, encounters A Nasty Interesting Man, who tells him exactly how to bring Eurydice home with him, but there’s a catch: Orpheus must start walking home and not look at Eurydice. He must trust that Eurydice is following him out into the sunlight, where they will be together forever. But, there’s a catch…because when dealing with The Lord Of The Underworld, there always seems to be a catch.

While many may know the end of Orpheus and Eurydice’s myth, this contemporary view brings new life to an ancient tale. Ruhl achieves this through powerful and poetic storytelling, which melds the feelings of grief, love, and loss together until the audience feels all these emotions simultaneously. Ruhl wrote this play for her father, who passed away when Ruhl was 20 years old. She wanted to examine the idea of what she would say to her father if she could talk to him just one more time. She has a note in the script that says, “The Underworld should resemble the world of Alice in Wonderland more than it resembles Hades.” The artistic elements within this particular production of UCSC’s Eurydice allow the audience to be enveloped in a surreal and wondrous world. Many of the costumes in the show suggest the 1950s. This could be seen as a beautiful homage to Ruhl’s father, who loved to tell her stories of his life growing up in the 50s. And yet, the play simultaneously gives the feeling that time is a construct that should not be strictly adhered to. With a thoughtful story and beautiful storytelling, perhaps audiences of UCSC’s Eurydice will find themselves asking the same questions that led Sarah Ruhl to write Eurydice. 

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“I love Sarah Ruhl. I just find her work to be endlessly fascinating. It said in the material for the production the show is a playground for designers, but truly, I find it a playground for everyone.”

-Director, Noah Lucé

 

UCSC’s Theatre Department of Performance, Play, and Design production committee was pitched Eurydice by director Noah Lucé in 2021. While Lucé had been familiar with Sarah Ruhl’s work for some time, he was particularly interested in bringing Eurydice to UCSC because it had intimacy. During the Covid lockdown, much of theater performance became about maintaining distance and space. As an intimacy choreographer/coordinator and director, Lucé saw the importance of giving students access to a production that would allow them to connect physically and emotionally. Lucé even added moments of intimacy that were not directly in the script, allowing new dynamics to take shape within the characters' relationships. An example of this is when the Nasty Interesting Man brings out a straw in his mouth and physically puts it into Orpheus before Orpheus goes into the Underworld. Showing the straw moment to the audience portrays the connection between the world of the gods and the world of humans. 

 

Lucé had another connection with the play; just like Sarah Ruhl, he lost his father to cancer. Noah said, “My dad was diagnosed with stage 4, incurable cancer with only two months to live in 2002. He ended up living another ten years, which we were incredibly grateful for.” Many cast members also expressed how the play brought them closer to loved ones who had passed, giving a cathartic release to the audience and the actors. This brings again to light the world that we live in after the COVID-19 pandemic and how tenuous life felt as the number of dead ticked past on nightly news. A play like Eurydice can remind the audience that there is a connection between all of us who have experienced loss. 

 

As a collaborative director, Noah Lucé was pleased that while the show did not look exactly as he had imagined, it all fell into place beautifully, “I believe all the strong conceptual things I wanted occurred in the production. I am really proud of them. But do I think the production looked exactly what was in my head? Nope! And that is great!”

By allowing those around him also to stretch their creativity, the production became an amalgamation of different but symbiotic ideas. As the design team was mostly made up of students, they were allowed to test their own creative choices to see what worked and what did not. This provided a solid foundation where both the actors and the creative team could find a way to authentically tell this version of Eurydice while still finding those times to play in the playground.