Sigh.
South Coast Repertory's Eurydice, like Helen, was a great disappointment. This is yet another play inspired by a Greek myth that I was really looking forward to ... and it did not live up to my expectations.
And I do have very high expectations for adaptations of Greek myths or tragedies. After all, I studied them extensively, so I assume that if you take on the challenge of bringing a myth to life or reimagining the story in an ancient text, you're doing so deliberately with oozeloads of meaning dripping from your words.
Essentially you will get me to buy tickets to your play if I know it's a take on a Greek myth.
And so Eurydice lured me in with its siren call, but what I didn't know is that Sarah Ruhl wrote this play as a means of working through her feelings when her father passed away. I learned that night at the talkback that Ruhl didn't even consult the myth as she was writing this play; she was using the myth as a therapeutic tool.
In doing so, I have but to question whether choosing Eurydice was really the right myth to go with. Ruhl wanted to write a play about connecting with her dead father, about finding a way to reach the dead, about that familial bond that transcends death. But the myth of Eurydice is all about her and Orpheus - the story of sorrow of losing the person you love twice.
I noticed in this production that there were profound echoes to Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland - and those I found fitting, for Ruhl portrays Eurydice as a girl who doesn't really know who she is, a girl who's wrestling with ideas of identity and love in a strange world.
Don't get me wrong - the story of Eurydice and her father is a very powerful one. I absolutely bought that the father loved his daughter, and that he was devoted to her even in death. Ruhl's Eurydice is really a story about a father losing his daughter twice.
Tim Cummings, who plays the Hades character, is deliciously, creepily malevolent, selfish, and disturbing. He first appears as A Nasty Interesting Man, luring Eurydice down the rabbit hole. Then in the Underworld, he's a child, then a teenager, and finally an oversized man. Cummings' commitment to the role is unapologetic and amazing, creepy to the very core.
But other than the father and the devil, all other performances were quite lacking, lifeless. The amazing set design and lighting projections couldn't make up for that.
South Coast Repertory's Eurydice, like Helen, was a great disappointment. This is yet another play inspired by a Greek myth that I was really looking forward to ... and it did not live up to my expectations.
And I do have very high expectations for adaptations of Greek myths or tragedies. After all, I studied them extensively, so I assume that if you take on the challenge of bringing a myth to life or reimagining the story in an ancient text, you're doing so deliberately with oozeloads of meaning dripping from your words.
Essentially you will get me to buy tickets to your play if I know it's a take on a Greek myth.
And so Eurydice lured me in with its siren call, but what I didn't know is that Sarah Ruhl wrote this play as a means of working through her feelings when her father passed away. I learned that night at the talkback that Ruhl didn't even consult the myth as she was writing this play; she was using the myth as a therapeutic tool.
In doing so, I have but to question whether choosing Eurydice was really the right myth to go with. Ruhl wanted to write a play about connecting with her dead father, about finding a way to reach the dead, about that familial bond that transcends death. But the myth of Eurydice is all about her and Orpheus - the story of sorrow of losing the person you love twice.
I noticed in this production that there were profound echoes to Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland - and those I found fitting, for Ruhl portrays Eurydice as a girl who doesn't really know who she is, a girl who's wrestling with ideas of identity and love in a strange world.
Don't get me wrong - the story of Eurydice and her father is a very powerful one. I absolutely bought that the father loved his daughter, and that he was devoted to her even in death. Ruhl's Eurydice is really a story about a father losing his daughter twice.
Tim Cummings, who plays the Hades character, is deliciously, creepily malevolent, selfish, and disturbing. He first appears as A Nasty Interesting Man, luring Eurydice down the rabbit hole. Then in the Underworld, he's a child, then a teenager, and finally an oversized man. Cummings' commitment to the role is unapologetic and amazing, creepy to the very core.
But other than the father and the devil, all other performances were quite lacking, lifeless. The amazing set design and lighting projections couldn't make up for that.
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