Eurydice

by Sarah Ruhl

Overview

“Eurydice is a luminous retelling of the Orpheus myth from his beloved wife’s point of view. Watching it, we enter a singular, surreal world, as lush and limpid as a dream—an anxiety dream of love and loss—where both author and audience swim in the magical, sometimes menacing, and always thrilling flow of the unconscious… Ruhl’s theatrical voice is reticent and daring, accurate and outlandish.” —John Lahr, New Yorker

A reimagining of the classic myth of Orpheus through the eyes of its heroine. Dying too young on her wedding day, Eurydice journeys to the underworld, where she reunites with her beloved father and struggles to recover lost memories of her husband and the world she left behind.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781636700090
Publisher:	Theatre Communications Group
Publication date:	12/21/2021
Pages:	120
Product dimensions:	5.38(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Sarah Ruhl’s fifteen plays include the Pulitzer Prize finalists The Clean House and In the Next Room (or the vibrator play), also nominated for a Tony Award. Her awards include a MacArthur Fellowship, and her book of essays 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Eurydice, named one of the 25 best American plays of the past 25 years in 2018 by the New York Times, was developed into an opera with music by Matthew Aucoin, and performed at The Metropolitan Opera in 2021. Her most recent book, Smile: The Story of a Face, was published in 2021 by Simon & Schuster. Ruhl teaches at the Yale School of Drama, and lives in Brooklyn with her family.

Editorial Reviews

"A luminous retelling of the Orpheus myth... Watching it, we enter a singular, surreal world, as lush and limpid as a dream—an anxiety dream of love and loss—where both author and audience swim in the magical, sometimes menacing, and always thrilling flow of the unconscious."

New Yorker

As I watched the final minutes of the Yale Rep’s knockout production of Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice, tears came with the suddenness of grief… The heroine’s arrival in Hades (by elevator, accompanied by a stunning surge of rain) is memorable for technical reasons, but it wouldn’t mean a thing without this playwright’s singular voice… While Eurydice is certainly a play for our fearful times, it is about every death, every loss, every paralyzing pang of grief… Sarah Ruhl has looked into the heart of darkness and found an awful beauty.

New York Times

"Ruhl's wild flights of the imagination, some deeply affecting passages and beautiful imagery provide transporting pleasures."

Variety

"Touching, inventive, invigoratingly compact and luminously liquid in its rhythms and design."

San Francisco Chronicle