SCR's Eurydice

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.

 

Getty Villa's Helen

This has been the greatest disappointment of the year.

Harsh, I know, but true.

It's hard to leave expectations at the door, especially after seeing wonderful plays at the Getty Villa. Not only is the Villa my favorite place in Los Angeles, but I have also seen wonderful performances there: Agammemnon, Peace, Elektra, and The Trojan Women.

But Helen is an adaptation of Euripides' original that tries to do too much. In its overly ambitious effort to try to do too many things, it leaves excellent critiques and themes on the table.

One of the most wonderful notions of the play is how it imagines an "old" Helen, one who is still beautiful, but whose beauty has waned. This production depicts Helen as a Hollywood starlet, and there was so much potential with that: if your looks are all you have going for you, what happens when you lose them? How does that shape your identity?

This production, however, merely scratches the surface by having many characters make quips about how old she looks and having her do a ridiculous pose whenever someone realizes who she is. Very few of the quips are clever, namely the one where Menelaus mistakes her for Clytemnestra - a comical "blow" exploiting the tension between Helen and her sister, as Clytemnestra was not Zeus' daughter, according to the myth, and therefore "inferior" to Helen and her beauty. Then the joke gets old as the play continues.

There were moments for great political tension - and political tension is, after all, why Euripides was writing in the first place, sick of the Peloponnesian War. But instead of milking these moments for all their worth, the production seems to me more concerned with shoehorning in references to Hollywood moments and personas.



 

T@BC's The Children

After seeing it 3 times, I can officially say I liked The Children, at The Theatre @ Boston Court.

Don't get me wrong: it moved me from the very first time I saw it, but it left me with so many mixed feelings that I didn't really know what to make of it.

I knew the play was going to be a take on the myth of Medea, and that someone was going to save the children from their fate. I even knew there were going to be puppets, but when the puppets first appeared, I was terrified.

We were sitting front and center, and they descended from the roof with a red light backdrop. They looked liked big, white voodoo dolls (I mistook the wires for really large needles) who'd been hung. It soon became clear that they were puppets, but it took a lot of disbelief to get past their creepiness for the rest of the show, and whenever a cast member would touch them or kiss their cheeks, I'd be reminded that they're puppets - not children - and I'd get creeped out all over again.

By the third time, the puppets were wonderfully endearing. I got to really appreciate their costumes - how they are made to look like little Greek children: the girl with the peplos a kore would wear, the boy whose hair resembled that of a kouros. I got to admire how much life Paige White and Sonny Valicenti breathed into the otherwise lifeless puppets with their emotion and their gestures.

And I got used to - and appreciated - the noise. There are many louds noises and lighting decisions that are purposefully meant to jolt you, replicating the shock of an accident upon impact. I hated these "interruptions" the first time and found them unnecessary, but I appreciated them so much more the next time.

Lastly, I LOVED the set design. We attended the talkback with the designer, and it was amazing to see how much metaphor is layered onto the set and how they reconciled what was going on in a child's imagination with what was happening in reality.

Overall, it was a deeply moving play with very wise choices, and I'm so glad I saw it more than once.