In life, Eurydice loves books, and Orpheus is a great musician. One of the few heroines who dies twice, she falls to the underworld on her wedding day. In death, she reunites with her father and remembers her life again. Les Waters directs an innovative reimagining of one of Sarah Ruhl’s most beloved plays, inspired by a classic myth.
CRITIC'S PICK - Les Waters’s marvelously burnished revival... stars an instantly likable Maya Hawke as a self-possessed Eurydice, cerebral but with a romantic streak, and a beautifully understated Brian d’Arcy James as her mild father, funny here in a dadly way and immensely moving, too... This Off Broadway revival is similar to that earlier Waters production, yet even more eloquent in execution — the work of a director who by now knows the play’s every ripple and depth.
The familiarity of it all is crucial to the thing. Given the myth, or the number of times you might’ve seen it brought to life, you know the final turn is coming, though that never makes it any less painful. And it’s bracing when Ruhl tightens her lens and has the play become suddenly specific — those instructions Eurydice’s father recites, for instance, direct you to her own grandparents’ former home. For all its whimsy, the play centers on something hard and insoluble: that we’ll lose each other, from one generation to the next, and that we’ll always come back to thinking of the dead, and wishing we listened more.
| 2007 | Off-Broadway |
Off-Broadway |
| 2025 | Off-Broadway |
Signature Theatre Off-Broadway Revival Production Off-Broadway |
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