BWW Reviews: Ruhl's EURYDICE Brings Back Theatre of the Seventh Sister

The absence of Theater of the Seventh Sister has been felt in Lancaster this past year or so, and to see Gary Smith and company back on stage, even if not in their own home, is a reassuring thing. For all the pleasure that musicals and comedies bring us, there's a place, and a need, for serious and for important dramatic works to be on stage. Sarah Ruhl's work falls in that category, and therefore, it's up to endeavors like Theater of the Seventh Sister to do the heavy lifting of theatre, even when it's not to a full house. Artistic Director Smith brought the theatre back on stage with a production of EURYDICE at Ware Center on May 18 and 19 to a house that was appropriately appreciative of Ruhl's and the cast and creative team's efforts, even if a smaller crowd than it should have been.

Premiering at Madison Repertory Theatre in 2003 and picked up by the Yale Rep, Second Stage in New York and by the Wilma Theatre in Philadelphia and at the Young Vic since then, as well as at a number of colleges and universities, Ruhl's retelling of the classic Greek myth of Orpheus is both an absurdist treat with vague touches of Samuel Beckett, and a serious piece of feminist theatre that stands the original story on its head by centering on Eurydice, Orpheus' wife, and her point of view over her death and Orpheus' aborted rescue efforts. Less discussed about the work is that Ruhl has also created one of the few pieces of theatre that truly dramatizes the relationship between fathers and daughters who are not survivors of massive family dysfunction, and Smith and his cast bring that out admirably on stage.

Ruhl is a latter-day master of the English language, and her dialogue, though colloquial and modern, and though lending itself to the absurd (a man whose only viable adjective is "interesting," an underworld in which a group of stones can both move and be a speaking Greek chorus), is as carefully chosen as any of America's classic playwrights' has been.

The set and lighting design by Barry Fritz, though sparse and modernist, is extremely effective, focusing on an industrial ramp that serves as everything from an apartment balcony to a descending path into the underworld, whose ruler is as much a Lord of Misrule as he is a Lord of the Underworld, an overgrown but not overaged (though played by an adult) Dennis the Menace whose word is law. Timothy Scott Riggs plays this hilarious but menacing figure with short pants, a tricycle, and a libido, with an affectionate whimsy. He and his rules are the bane of the deceased Eurydice (a fine Victoria Rose Bonito), whom we meet alive and in the process of marrying her fiancé, musician and composer Orpheus, just long enough to die while trying to obtain a communication from her already deceased father. In Ruhl's universe, the world of life and the world of death are an inconvenient, but not impossible, distance apart.

But in Ruhl's universe, most people who die manage to forget everything of the world above, and if they do not, they are to be dunked back into the river (Lethe, the river of forgetfulness, found in the underworld - not the Styx, but Ruhl isn't worried about names; for Eurydice's father, the true river of forgetfulness is the Mississippi, in which he bathed away his cares as a child). Eurydice, upon arriving in the underworld, meets her father, who has managed not to forget much of his life, but who has concealed the fact so that he is not obliged to undergo forgetting all of it. In their reunion, her unnamed father, whom she first mistakes for a railway porter, works to bring back her own memories, which cause her to remember that she is married to Orpheus, who still lives up above.

Orpheus, played with amusing charm by Brendan Moser, is as musical as Eurydice, a bookworm, was intellectual, and says with music what fails him in words; however, he manages to send messages, and even books, to Eurydice in the underworld (the postal service between worlds seems no worse than the one on surface these days, alas) just as her father had sent a letter up to her for her wedding. It's the determination to contact her that leads to Orpheus confronting the tyrannical tot Lord of the Underworld for permission to take Eurydice home, back to the land of the living.

And therein lies the crux - does Eurydice return to the world with her husband, whom she left for the underworld, by accident, the day of their wedding, or does she remain with her father? Does she go back and remember, leaving her father and herself with painful memories of an interrupted reunion, does she stay with her father in the room he has built for them out of the nothingness of the underworld, leaving Orpheus alive and miserable, or should she simply give up all memory permanently to avoid pain? The choice she makes is as much made for her as made by her, since it is human nature to react to startling, exciting, or emotional moments.

But at heart, this is a play that tries to answer the question of when a father and a daughter really stop "being married to each other." Although her father suggests that it is the day a daughter marries someone else, the real answer, both in the show and in life, just may be "never."

The chorus of stones, here played by Mary Adams-Smith, Sydney Leigh Allen, and Duane Hespell, is a particularly charming feature of Ruhl's work. They are silent, they say, though the audience can plainly hear them, and they wish that the denizens of the underworld would be equally silent and would forget and be mindless. Indeed, those who live in Ruhl's underworld are indeed just about as silent as Ruhl's stones, who communicate, in the language of stones, almost ceaselessly.

It is a great thing to see Theater of the Seventh Sister up and running, even if without a building, and it is equally great to see Ruhl on stage in the area; fortuitously, as Open Stage of Harrisburg recently did IN THE NEXT ROOM, Ruhl fans have been privileged to see her work twice in two months if they cared to do so. We may hope that this bodes well for the presentation of further serious modern works in the region.

Photo Credit: Theater of the Seventh Sister

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