Review: Eurydice by Mary Moody Northen Theatre
by Michael Meigs
In Sarah Ruhl's world, stones can talk, the dead can send letters to the living, and the devil connives to send a fragile bride to her death so he can court her in the afterlife. On the far side of the river of forgetting, memory fades and the ability to read disappears. Young Orpheus, bereft in this life, telephones a long-distance information operator in an effort to try to locate his dead wife.
Despite the striking mythic beauty of its concepts, Ruhl's Eurydice made me profoundly uneasy last year when Different Stages did it at the City Theatre. Perhaps because the shade of Eurydice's father clings to his memories and continues to dream of her, despite the emptiness and unchanging nature of life after death.
Ruhl has a frank and direct consciousness of the all too transitory nature of this existence. She wraps that message in the reworking of the Greek fable of the musician Orpheus who braved the underworld and came close -- just that close -- to bringing his bride Eurydice back.
Jamie Goodwin as the quietly grieving dead father has depth, dignity and stature, in contrast to the simplicity of Nathan Brockett and Cassidy Schiltz as the eternally naive lovers.
Goodwin's foil is David Stahl as the Evil One, even though the two never confront one another. Stahl as the malevolent force -- labelled "A Nasty Interesting Man," "A Child," and later "Lord of the Underworld -- plays them all with a fey abandon that entertains but puzzles, intentionally so. How is he able to lure the credulous Eurydice to his apartment and to the accident that causes her death? Why does he appear as a child in the afterlife? What is the significance of the fact that he grows to towering proportions and prepares to wed her there as her identity ebbs away?
Ruhl appoints three stones -- Little, Loud and Big -- as the chorus that greets Eurydice as she debarks from the unseen elevator that brought her whizzing down to the underworld. They're assertive and cranky when she questions them. Director Michelle Polgar gives them balletic movement as they follow Goodwin's delight and virtual courtship of his own child. Kendra Perez, Sophia Franzella and David Cameron Allen show great powers of concentration as they witness this highly irregular breach of the rules of the end of inertia.
Cassidy Schiltz in the title role is enthusiastic and amazed at each progression in her unexpected existences. Her plosive speech suggests that Eurydice gains little understanding, even in the afterlife, even as her father makes progress in instructing her in reading and in evoking lost memories. Left behind, Orpheus' obstinacy in not accepting her death and disappearance is the opposite failing -- a devotion beyond boundaries of space and time. Nathan Brockett is open and well spoken, but as written, his role is a minor one.
Chase Staggs' scenic design preserves a feeling of emptiness under the high space of the Mary Moody Northen Theatre, setting long, low acquarium chambers under the first rows of seats and establishing a stark platform and water source in the middle of the playing space. He provides Eurydice's father with a clever means to define a "room" for her there. Brief scenes occur in the high corners of the theatre but our attention remains for the most part in the bowl-like space of the afterlife, directly in front of us.
Eurydice engages the audience in its world. There is no intermission to break the spell. The cast and production team produce Ruhl's sweet song of the end of life and time with elegant simplicity.
Eurydice's father accepts this ending at last and makes a sacrifice of acceptance. His tragedy is the quiet tragedy of all mankind, portrayed with sympathy and the the lightest of comic touches.
Review by Cate Blouke for the Statesman's Austin360 "Seeing Things" blog, February 9
Review by Elizabeth Cobbe for Austin Chronicle, February 10
Review by Ryan E. Johnson for examiner.com, February 28
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Eurydice
by Sarah Ruhl
Mary Moody Northen Theatre
