EURYDICE: A DEEPER DIVE

About Sarah Ruhl

Sarah Ruhl is one of the most innovative playwrights of the 21st century. Originally from Chicago, she received her B.F.A. in English and her M.F.A. in playwriting from Brown University,where she studied with Paula Vogel. An alum of 13P and of New Dramatists, she won the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize in 2005, a MacArthur Fellowship in 2006 and the Steinberg Distinguished Playwright Award in 2016. She is the recipient of the PEN Center Award for a mid-career playwright, the Whiting Writers award, a Helen Merrill Award for Playwriting, the Feminist Press’ Forty under Forty award, and a Lilly Award. Her plays include The Clean House (Pulitzer Prize finalist), In the Next Room, or the Vibrator Play (Pulitzer Prize finalist, Tony Award nomination), and Eurydice (named one of the best productions over the past 25 years by the New York Times.) Her plays have been translated into fourteen languages, and have been performed around the world, on Broadway, off-Broadway, and across the country. 

Sarah is also an acclaimed essayist and writer. Her books include Letters from Max (with Max Ritvo), Smile, a memoir, 44 poems for you, Love Poems in Quarantine, and 100 essays I don’t have time to write, a Times Notable Book of the Year. Her forthcoming book Lessons From My Teachers will include portraits of her teachers from preschool to the present day, including those of  students she’s learned from during her time as a professor at Yale School of Drama. Eurydice has been adapted into an opera and performed at the Metropolitan Opera and Boston Lyric Opera. She’s currently developing a musical adaptation of Meg Wolitzer’s The Interestings with Sarah Bareilles, and an adaptation of R.J. Palacio’s Wonder with A Great Big World. Last fall, she premiered her musical A Face in the Crowd with Elvis Costello and Kwame Kei-Armah at the Young Vic.

Sarah teaches at Yale School of Drama and lives in Brooklyn with her husband and three wonderful children –  Anne, William, and Hope – and her poodle/writing partner, Minerva. 

Sarah Ruhl: A Love Letter To Language

“When Sarah first read pages [from Eurydice] aloud in a workshop, all of us shivered in the room at this crystal-clear voice telling us an eternal story from the imperative of a daughter’s grief. Sarah, with her peers, is creating an enormous catalog of women’s experiences. Women’s perspectives. Thank God, Women Protagonists! She has fused her poetry with her sense of humor, her desire for justice, and a clear-eyed look at the disparities we as women face, while celebrating the erotic and familial experiences-not to be overlooked. […] There is no greater thrill for me than the new pages that will come from her desk.” – Paula Vogel 

On Sarah Ruhl’s Writing

Many of Sarah’s pieces, and in particular, the plays produced as part of her residency at Signature Theatre, are marked by a reverence for language and a wonderful, creative understanding of writing as a craft. Her work features songs, poems, letters, plays-within-plays, and even musings on what makes a good joke. 

It is through these genres and styles of writing that her characters make deep connections – with family, strangers, new and old loves, and even the audience. In Eurydice, first, a father in the underworld writes letters to his daughter in the land of the living, and later, Orpheus writes songs to his lover in the land of the dead. Eurydice herself is a voracious reader, eager to learn new words and meet interesting people. The title character of Orlando longs to write a great poem about his oak tree, to offer something to “attach his floating heart to,” and Sarah and Max of Letters From Max share poetry, letters, and soup.  

Sarah’s plays are poetic, moving, tender, whimsical, and deeply funny. She blends magical realism, historical adaptation and humor with writing that demands theatricality and to be put onstage. Eurydice is the 3d and final play in her residency at Signature Theatre (following Letters From Max and Orlando) and marks her 13th collaboration with Les Waters. 

Selected Plays by Sarah Ruhl

Eurydice – includes poetry, songs and letters

Letters From Max, a ritual – includes letters and poetry 

Orlando – includes poetry poetry

The Clean House – includes thoughts on crafting jokes 

Dear Elizabeth – includes letters 

Late, A Cowboy Song – includes songs

For Peter Pan on Her 70th Birthday – ft. conversation about plays 

Becky Nurse of Salem – ft. conversation about plays 

“Letter writing is a form of dialogue with space between the dialogue for life to happen.” – Sarah Ruhl

PlayWright’s Note

After twenty years, it is difficult to ask questions of a play you once wrote, and difficult for the play to answer. Am I the same person who wrote Eurydice, if there ever was such a person? Still, I feel compelled to ask her some questions; mainly, the questions I have been time again asked by actors, designers, audience members, directors, and students. It seems only compassionate to answer them in print. These questions, mind you, are not the most important ones to ask of the play, but because they seem to be repetitively mysterious, I wanted to be of service.

1) Are the directions the father speaks near the end of the play directions to a real place?

Yes, these directions take you to a house in Davenport, Iowa where my grandparents lived, on 111 McLellan boulevard. They don’t live there anymore. But you’re welcome to follow the directions and say hello to the house from the road. I found a scrap of these directions written out to me, by my father, in my desk, while I was writing the play. My father died of cancer when I was twenty, and I was very close with him. Much of the play was inspired by the attempt to have more conversations with him. Now the grief in this play belongs to other people—those who read or embody the play.

2) Did Eurydice really have a father who she met in the underworld?

No. We know so little about Eurydice, we only have scraps from Virgil and Ovid. We know so much more about Orpheus, and even he is mysterious. But in my imagination, it stood to reason that Eurydice would meet an ancestor when she reached the underworld; in this case, her father.

3) Why are Eurydice and Orpheus written to be wearing 1950s bathing suits in the first scene?

That is probably the question I am asked more than any other question. Other than torturing the actors, the reason I pictured Orpheus and Eurydice in vintage swimming trunks was that I wanted to conjure the feeling of memory, without actually setting the play in the 1950s, or in the distant past. I did not want the play set in ancient Greek times because I did not want the opacity that such distance can create, but I also did not want to set the play precisely today. The feeling of memory is often associated with our grandparent’s generation (one step removed). For me, that generation wore pink traveling coats to elope or die in. For others, memory might look very different, and I welcome other interpretations. If Orpheus and Eurydice were people who lived today, they might be young artists without much money who love vintage clothing, and you might find them rummaging around in the Salvation Army or in their grandparents’ closets, to find a particular traveling suit.

4) How do you costume the Stones?

When I wrote the play, I imagined that the stones might literally be three little rocks on stage with light shining on them, voiced through a microphone behind the curtain. But when I first staged the play, it seemed far more theatrical and interesting to have live actors moving around and speaking rather than pebbles lit up. The stones enforce the rules of the underworld, amuse us when things are going very badly, and they are immovable spirits who are ultimately moved to tears by music. How a director conceives of the stones is, I think, the secret code of a whole production—they, in a way, create the world, and I have seen the stones enlivened in so many ways.

In Les Waters’ first production, the stones were ossified Victorians wearing grey encrusted clothing; they even wore eye contacts to render their irises colorless. I’ve seen the stones as lifeguards, as Kabuki dancers, as children, and as old people. The director Daniel Fish once duct-taped the actors who played the stones to a couch, and they were costumed as teenaged slackers. In Germany, for some reason, the stones flew. It always makes me happy to see a new interpretation of the stones, and this production is no exception. 

5) What texts inspired the play?

Beyond the text of my own life (as I said, the play is quite personal), I was inspired by Virgil, Ovid, Cocteau, Mary Zimmerman’s Metamorphoses, Rilke and H.D. Very few of the treatments of the Orpheus myth center the view of Eurydice. One of the few pieces of art by a man that imagines Eurydice’s consciousness is an incredible poem by Rilke, “Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes.”

Another poem that gave me substance and inspiration while writing Eurydice was by H.D. (aka Hilda Doolittle, the imagist poet). She writes in her poem “Eurydice”:

So you have swept me back…

So for your arrogance

I am broken at last

I who had lived unconscious

who was almost forgot;

if you had let me wait

I had grown from listlessness

into peace,

if you had let me rest with the dead,

I had forgot you

and the past…

At least I have the flowers of myself,

and my thoughts,

no god can take that…

6) You mentioned Mary Zimmerman. Didn’t she just direct an opera version of Eurydice, and what was it like to make the play into an opera?

Yes, by extraordinary synchronicity, Mary directed the premier of Eurydice the opera. I’ll never forget the image of Orpheus turning around in her Lookingglass production in Chicago (she and I are both from Chicago and drank the same theatrical water there) and how she used repetition so that the audience saw that gesture over and over again.

By a stroke of good fortune, we collaborated on the opera together with Matt Aucoin, the extraordinary composer, who funnily enough, was the same age when he started writing the opera as I was when I started writing the play (twenty-six.) The process of making the play into a libretto was one of distillation, with effort and grace. It takes longer to sing a line than to say a line. So the main difference between the libretto and the play is that, though the libretto is shorter in terms of pages, it is longer in terms of duration on the stage.

Occasionally I changed a line from the original and resorted to rhyme. Or I changed a word to make a vowel more singable. Serendipitously, the play was already written with a chorus, and structured in three Movements.

7) Do you have thoughts on how productions can handle the spectacle of the play??

One thing I love about seeing a range of productions of Eurydice is how the play can be done with utter simplicity in a backyard, under a tree out of doors; (one of my favorite productions was directed by Davis McCallum under a tree at Vassar) or in a black box, or in a theater that can make an elevator come down from the grid with rain.

I remember when I did the first workshop production of the play at Brown University, some young Rhode Island School of Design students were working on the set. They were engineering students, and after they read the play, they looked very worried, and said they thought they could make a raining elevator in the tiny black box, but didn’t have the funds. I said that we didn’t really need a real elevator, just a light cue, and the sound of rain. Or possibly a bucket of water that went through a sieve. “Oh!!!!” They said.

In another one of my favorite productions, the river of forgetfulness was simply an old bath-tub. (That was Jessica Thebus/Sandy Shinner’s production at Victory Gardens.) In another beautiful production, at UCSD (directed by Daniel Fish) one hundred empty water bubblers were stacked on top of one another to make a glowing blue wall, and stage hands pulled a cord and the wall of water bottles all came tumbling down with an enormous crash when Eurydice fell into the underworld. In one of the most beautiful lighting cues I have ever seen, a blue wall was revealed to be a wall of letters that the father had written to Eurydice (this was Scott Bradley’s set and Russell Champa’s lighting cue, directed by Les Waters.) In another gorgeous design (Mimi Lien’s at the Wilma theater, directed by Blanka Ziska), the string room was held aloft with helium balloons. In each case, the bath-tub, the water bottles, the paper illuminated with light, the balloons, the materials were very easy to obtain.

I love it when the poverty of the theater stretches the imagination. Sometimes a bloated budget creates a very skinny imagination in the theater. But I have also loved the epic scale of Dan Ostling’s design at the Metropolitan Opera, which has a far bigger budget than the one he also designed at Victory Gardens, which was little more than a bath-tub.

8) And have you ever been in love with a musician?

Yes. Haven’t you?

Some Important Questions you might ask of yourself when approaching the play:

I said earlier that the questions I am posing to myself aren’t necessarily the most important ones to pose when approaching this play, either as a collaborator or as an audience member, or as a reader (and aren’t all the best readers really collaborators?)

1) Who have you lost and what would you say to them if you suddenly found you could have more conversations with them?

2) Who would win in a battle between language and music and does there need to be a battle?

3) What is your vision of the afterlife?

4) When you lost the person you loved, did it make a sound? Was it sudden? Seen or unseen? Over a long period of time, or in a single moment?

5) Could you freely give a person you love to another person’s love, if you could not be with them?

6) What memories would you keep if you could hide some inside of rain?

7) Who or what would be your own personal Hades?

8) How can we show improvised care for someone we love, even if all we have on earth is a ball of string?

9) How can we mourn in the theater, and what is the proper place for ghosts?

10) Are we our memories, or something else?

I want to end with gratitude for all of the people who have played these roles, and designed temporary worlds for this language. I think all great theater is the meeting of this triad: actor, ether, and language. The language in these pages would be incomplete without the ether that a company creates through the bodies of brave and magical actors.

In some ways the theater is a kind of incarnation. Unlike the film world, which takes an actor’s body and turns it into image; the theater world takes language and makes it live with the body of an actor. And the language can be alive, in the present tense, every time it is performed with a new voice. I’ve never seen a more thrilling magic trick.

Thank you to all of you who have embodied these words,

Sarah Ruhl

Note adapted from Sarah Ruhl’s ‘Afterword to Eurydice in the Form of 20 Questions,’ originally published by Theater Communications Group

Display Photo Credits:

• Photo of Sarah Ruhl – HanJie Chow
• Photo of Sarah Ruhl in library – Kathleen Hinkle
• The Cast of Eurydice – HanJie Chow 
• Ben Edelman and Zane Pais in Letters From Max – Joan Marcus
• Addie Johnson and Carla Harting in Late, A Cowboy Song – Andromache Chalfont
• Kathleen Chalfant in For Peter Pan… – Kevin Berne
• The cast of The Clean House – Liz Lauren 
• Hannah Cabell and Maria Dizzia in In the Next Room… – Kevin Berne
• Les Waters and Sarah Ruhl – HanJie Chow
• Deirdre O’Connell and Alicia Crowder in Becky, Nurse of Salem – Kyle Froman
• The cast of Orlando – Joan Marcus 
• Jessica Hecht and Zane Pais in Letters From Max – Joan Marcus
• Taylor Mac in Orlando – Joan Marcus 
• James Saito, Celia Keenan-Bolger and Jon Norman Schneider in The Oldest Boy – T. Charles Erikson
• Kathleen Chalfant and Harris Yulin in Dear Elizabeth – Joan Marcus