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Sarah Ruhl's version of the Eurydice myth begins as a fable. Nicole Swahn, the childishly enthusiastic and simple-minded Eurydice, frolics at the beach with Bastion Carboni as her beau, the music geek Orpheus. They're on their way to an unreflecting storybook wedding. Little matter that she has no comprehension of the music in his head and apparently no head for her own history. In part, because she's not getting the mail. We learn that Eurydice's father, a deceased man without a name, has been writing letters to her from the underworld. A bit of a simple dreamer himself, he has somehow proven resistant to the anesthetic properties of the River Lethe. Dad remembers her; he remembers and enacts his dreams of squiring her to her wedding. He even remembers how to read and to write, aptitudes that are supposed to drop away in the shades. His epistles, trusted to the worms for delivery, are regularly intercepted by a smirking, swaggering Marc Balester. This is an imaginative turn on the ancient myth. By tradition, Orpheus with his musical gift is the protagonist of the story, charming his way into the afterlife and almost retrieving his wife. Ruhl's reformulation is a curious mash-up of myth, coming-of-age fable and naive Christian tale-telling. Concentrating on the father-daughter relation, she is exploring the persistence of memory and of human attachment in the face of death.
Read more and view performance images at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .
UPDATE: Click for ALT review, January 11
Received directly from Different Stages:
images by Brett Brookshirefor Eurydice a dramatic comedy by Sarah Ruhlperformances January 8 – 30, 2009
Thursdays – Saturdays at 8 p.m., Sundays at 2 p.m.
The City Theater, 3823 Airport Blvd., Ste. D. (map)
Pick your Price: $15, $20, $25, $30
Experience the fantastic and hallucinatory myth of Orpheus through the eyes of its heroine, Eurydice. Eurydice journeys through the jaws of death into the Underworld where she happily reunites with her father who teaches her about love, loss and the pleasures and pains of memory. There, washed in the river of forgetfulness, she struggles to remember her lost love.
When Orpheus returns to rescue her, she must decide whether to stay with her beloved father or return to the land of the living.
Things become more complicated when the malevolent Lord of the Underworld wants Eurydice for his bride, and a chorus of stones try to coerce her into conforming to the rigid rules of the Underworld. With humor, contemporary characters, ingenious plot twists, and breathtaking visual effects, the play is a fresh look at a timeless love story.
Directed by Karen Jambon (Miss Witherspoon) Eurydice features Nicole Swahn (An Inspector Calls) as the title character. Bastion Carboni (Poison Apple Initiative) plays the musician Orpheus. Norman Blumensaadt (A Number) is Eurydice’s father, and Marc Balester (A Number) is the Lord of the Underworld. Betsy McCann (Oceana), Jonathan Blackwell (Oceana), and Miriam Rubin (The Shadow Box) are the chorus of stones.
Performances are Thursdays through Saturdays at 8:00 p.m. and Sundays at 2 p.m.. Tickets are Pick your Price: $15, $20, $25, and $30.
For tickets and information call 474-8497
View more images at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .
UPDATE: Click for ALT review, January 11
Received directly:
Different Stages
presents
Sarah Ruhl’s
Eurydice
January 8 - 30, 2010
at City Theater, 3823 Airport, Suite D
Thursdays - Saturdays at 8 p.m., Sundays at 2 p.m.
“Pick your Price: $15, $20, $25, $30
Call 474-8497
Different Stages continues its 2009–2010 season with the dramatic comedy Eurydice. Sarah Ruhl reinvents the fantastic and hallucinatory myth of Orpheus through the eyes of its heroine, Eurydice. Eurydice journeys through the jaws of death into the Underworld where she happily reunites with her father who teaches her about love, loss and the pleasures and pains of memory.
There she washed in the river of forgetfulness, struggles to remember her lost love. When Orpheus returns to rescue her, she must decide whether to leave her beloved father to return to the land of the living. Things become more complicated when the malevolent Lord of the Underworld wants Eurydice for his bride and a chorus of stones try to coerce her into conforming to the rigid rules of the Underworld. With humor, contemporary characters, ingenious plot twists, and breathtaking visual effects, the play is a fresh look at a timeless love story.
Directed by Karen Jambon (Miss Witherspoon) Eurydice features Nicole Swahn (An Inspector Calls) as the title character. Bastion Carboni (Poison Apple Initiative) plays the musician Orpheus. Norman Blumensaadt (A Number) is Eurydice’s father and Marc Balester (A Number) is the Lord of the Underworld. Betsy McCann (Oceana), Jonathan Blackwell (Oceana) and Miriam Rubin (The Shadow Box) are the chorus of stones.
Performances are Thursdays through Saturdays at 8:00 p..m. and Sundays at 2 p.m.. Tickets are Pick your Price: $15, $20, $25, and $30.
Now, here is a very frightening place -- a hospice somewhere in California, in which a disembodied therapist with a warm but neutral voice projects himself into your cottage once a day. "How are you feeling? Would you like to tell me about it?" That voice is kind, as calmly reflective and enigmatic as a mirror, and it offers not the slightest shred of hope or counsel.
You look good, you might have a few physical twinges but you're not bed-ridden, everything is provided for your comfort. And you're left to get on with your dying. Reconciling yourself with the end of the road and with anger, consternation, or despair.
Michael Christofer's 1977 play is three in one, cutting together stories of Joe the middle class family man (David Dunlap), Brian the wordy, distracted professor (Robert Salas) and Felicity, an ancient woman who refuses to die because she imagines that a dead daughter will be returning soon (Anne Putnam). This choice of characters by Christofer might seem formulaic, a sort of diversity in a platoon on its way to an encounter with Death the enemy, but the impressive quality of the acting by this cast gives life and substance to them.
Director Kyle Evans and the North by Northwest cast move the action smoothly through an abstract set. We accept the eerie situation of small but well-furnished cottages wired up for surveillance, the inexplicable absence of concern about the justification, administration or finances of it all, and the inhabitants' complete blindness to one another. This is death by stare-down in a bare arena, with each inhabitant and companions face to face with the void.
For Christofer it is indeed the void, or at least the unknown. None of these characters has the help or crutch of faith or philosophy. Middle class Joe is fretful about the failure of wife Maggie (Aleta Garcia) to inform son Steve (Kenton Miscoe) of the unnamed disease, and he obsessively relives lost family life. Professor Brian churns out poetry and novels that he cheerfully acknowledges as completely without merit, and he embraces both his visiting wanton ex-wife (Michelle Cheney) and his attendant friend Mark, a male hustler whom he befriended in San Francisco (David Butts). Ancient Felicity is sour and angry when coherent but asleep or in a dream world most of the time, accompanied by her despairing daughter Agnes (Miriam Rubin).
The women companions of this piece are even more striking than the dying principals. Aleta Garcia as Joe's wife Maggie vibrates with anxiety and naked concern for him. Michelle Cheney is raucously self-dismissive, an unapologetic, bejewelled and bespangled devotee of impulse.
As Agnes, the dutiful daughter, Miriam Rubin (right) delivers a devastating performance, one of range and subtle intensity. Though she is largely silent in the early scenes, Agnes is the pivot of the play. She is the only family member to dialogue with the ghostly administration of this padded hell. For the first and only time the Interviewer (Philip Cole) appears, seated with her, courteous and attentive. He pulls out of Agnes a confession: in response to her mother's dementia, Agnes has for almost two years been trying to make Felicity happy by fabricating letters from Clare, the dead daughter.
The Interviewer suggests that this charade has kept Felicity clinging to life when she might be expected to let death take its course. Rubin shows Agnes's struggle to understand. Her indecision and her pained emotion in this confrontation and subsequently with her distracted, strong willed mother are elements of a performance to tear your heart out.
The piece rises to an enigmatic finale, as characters situated across the stage transcend their identities, very like a Greek chorus, to speak of losses and of the pains of facing death.
The program says that this piece was "representative of a breakthrough in both matter and subject form" (sic), a comment substantiated to some extent by the Tony and Pulitzer prizes awarded to it. It is not an easy evening and it provides no reassuring answers. It's poignant, disturbing, and ultimately poetic.
Barry Pineo's review in the Austin Chronicle of February 12: "Rubin quietly and believably makes Agnes' agony palpable. Rubin made me feel her pain, and you can't ask for more from an actor than that."
