Maya Hawke To Make Off Broadway Debut In Sarah Ruhl's EURYDICE At Signature Theatre

Maya Hawke (“Stranger Things”, Asteroid City, Inside Out 2)  has joined Signature Theatre's production of Spotlight Resident Sarah Ruhl's Eurydice, directed by Les Waters, May 13–June 22, in the title role. The actor, musician, songwriter, and producer will embody the reexamined mythological character in this new staging in Pershing Square Signature Center's Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre (480 W 42nd St).

Hawke was included in Variety's 2022 New Power of New York list, the 2023 Young Hollywood Impact Report, and the 2023 TIME100 Next list, and recently portrayed “Anxiety” in Disney and Pixar's Inside Out 2, which became the biggest animated movie of all time. She stars in, and produced the Flannery O'Connor biopic, Wildcat, directed by Ethan Hawke, which premiered at Telluride Film Festival and Toronto International Film Festival in 2023, and was released to critical acclaim in 2024. Notable past film and TV credits include Wes Anderson's Asteroid City; Jennifer Kaytin Robinson's feature Do Revenge; Human Capital opposite Liev Schreiber and Marisa Tomei; Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood; Amanda Kramer's independent film Ladyworld;  Gia Coppola's feature film Mainstream; and Bradley Cooper's Leonard Bernstein drama Maestro, which was nominated for seven Academy Awards in 2024.

Eurydice marks a spirited conclusion to Ruhl's residency, which has thus far featured one celebrated world premiere (Letters from Max, a ritual, 2023—an adaptation of the 2018 epistolary book Letters from Max: A Poet, a Teacher, a Friendship by Ruhl and Max Ritvo) and an imaginative, world-building production of another one of the playwright's beloved works (Orlando, 2024). Eurydice also rekindles an inspiring collaboration between Ruhl and Les Waters. The two artists, who joined forces in 2006 for the world premiere production of Ruhl's Eurydice at Yale Repertory Theatre, together return, with a new vision, to this emotionally flooring excavation of the powers of memory and love.

The “weird and wonderful play” was praised in 2007 by Charles Isherwood in the New York Times, for its  “insistent heartbeat, the rhythmic threnody woven by its language, its subterranean feeling and its strangely potent imagery”; Isherwood's Critic's Pick review also celebrated Waters' “rhapsodically beautiful” production.

Writing the play for her father, whom she had recently lost, Ruhl reframed the myth of Eurydice and Orpheus—so often reduced to Orpheus' infamous mistake—around Eurydice's relationship to her father, whom she re-encounters in the underworld. Eurydice tightens the bond of two themes Ruhl has explored, often simultaneously and symbiotically, at Signature: loss and transcendence. Letters from Max, a ritual was a work of ritual theater, openly discussing terminal illness and testing poetry's capacity to put to words what otherwise feels ineffable. Orlando was a theatrical trip through space, time, and gender, adapted from Virginia Woolf's novel.