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ur supporting the arts

The UR International Theatre Program continually brings new, challenging, and excitingtheatre to Rochester. We can’t do it without your support. Become a patron of the arts,

and a supporter of new, exciting work and fresh talent, by making a donation to the Program today.Even the smallest amount can make a difference. Call 273-5159 to find out how you can contribute...

(and every donation is tax-exempt to the fullest extent of the law.)

This season is supported by pledges, gifts and donations from the following generous alumni and friends:

Anonymous - Randall Fippinger & the Frances Alexander Family Fund of the Fidelity Charitable Gift FundEliza Goldblatt - Mark C. Perlberg - Jean Marie Sullivan - Lisa G. Chanzit - Laura Platt - Jill M. Cohen

Join their ranks and support the theatre by filling out the pledge form in your program.All donations are tax deductible to the fullest extent of the law.

special thanksBerkeley Repertory Theatre

Yale Repertory TheatreMadeleine OldhamPlaywrights Center

Polly KarlMichael Struzik & The Brighton High School Music Dept.

Nazareth College Theatre DepartmentNazareth College Arts Center

Brandon FullerApplied Audio

Tosh FarrellCynthia Netsky and the Eastman School of Music

Josef M. Hanson and the UR College Music DepartmentMike Levine

Prof. Frank Shuffelton and the UR English DepartmentAll Cast, Crew, and Staff Members who graciously lent

their personal musical instruments to the production

the ur international theatre program

artistic director nigel maisteradministrator katie farrell

production manager gordon riceassistant technical director kellen mcnallywardrobe coordinator nadine brooks taylor

props masters carlotta gambatobox office & front-of-house manager lorry o’leary

assistant wardrobe coordinator anna crisologoassistant props master leana jelen & macie mcgowan

scene shop assistant bridget maynewardrobe interns becky narver & daniel reade III

props intern gahyun (naomi) kimpublicity interns arien darby, amanda doyle, elizabeth gall,

liz natale & trina schattenkirktheatre intern emily pye

program information written & compiled by daniel mauroURITP photographer richard bakerURITP videographer matt workman

graphic, program & poster designi:master/studios at imaster.studios@gmail.com

www.rochester.edu/theatre

!get with the program

ur supporting the arts

The UR International Theatre Program continually brings new, challenging, and excitingtheatre to Rochester. We can’t do it without your support. Become a patron of the arts,

and a supporter of new, exciting work and fresh talent, by making a donation to the Program today.Even the smallest amount can make a difference. Call 273-5159 to find out how you can contribute...

(and every donation is tax-exempt to the fullest extent of the law.)

This season is supported by pledges, gifts and donations from the following generous alumni and friends:

Anonymous - Randall Fippinger & the Frances Alexander Family Fund of the Fidelity Charitable Gift FundEliza Goldblatt - Mark C. Perlberg - Jean Marie Sullivan - Lisa G. Chanzit - Laura Platt - Jill M. Cohen

Join their ranks and support the theatre by filling out the pledge form in your program.All donations are tax deductible to the fullest extent of the law.

special thanksBerkeley Repertory Theatre

Yale Repertory TheatreMadeleine OldhamPlaywrights Center

Polly KarlMichael Struzik & The Brighton High School Music Dept.

Nazareth College Theatre DepartmentNazareth College Arts Center

Brandon FullerApplied Audio

Tosh FarrellCynthia Netsky and the Eastman School of Music

Josef M. Hanson and the UR College Music DepartmentMike Levine

Prof. Frank Shuffelton and the UR English DepartmentAll Cast, Crew, and Staff Members who graciously lent

their personal musical instruments to the production

the university of rochester international theatre program presents

directed by sean danielsset design by daniel meeker

costume design by jessica fordlighting design by ben stanton

original music by david hanbury

by sarah ruhl

this production runs one hour and fifteen minutes without intermission

please remember to switch off all cellphones and electronic devices

CAST

Anna Kroup ......................... EurydiceT. Bohrer ......................... Her FatherMike Riffle ......................... Orpheus

A CHORUS OF STONES

Kathryn Stilwell ......................... Big StoneNikola Vukovic ......................... Little StoneCatherine Crow ......................... Loud Stone

Arthur Goldfeder ......... A Nasty Interesting ManJonathan Wetherbee ......................... A Child

This production has been made possible through the combined efforts of ENG 170 & 270 (Technical & Advanced Technical Theatre), ENG 172 (Intro to Stage Lighting & Sound)

and ENG 290 (Plays in Production)

Krista Butler - Charl DeCamilla - Lindsay Dussing - Philip Fleischer - Michael Freeman - Kevin GessnerHaley Hoffman - Annie Imperatrice - Leana Jelen - Marin Kobin - Ted Limpert - Carl MaryCarol

Peter McEneaney - Michael Minnick - Randolph Pena - Pamela Reese Smith - Malik Sams - Dan SiegelJeremy Sliwoski - Nate Snyder - Ben Sopchak - Jim Spangler - Brian Tanaka - Jay Jay Vanderstyne

Jazmine Venegas - Todd Venning - Revay Wilson - Matt Workman

need a gift for that special someone? how about a Todd Theatre or UR International Theatre Program production momento? visit our GIFT EMPORIA on the web at www.rochester.edu/theatre/gifts.php

t-shirts totes caps books mugs cards buttons and more!

A Selection from Bertolt Brecht’sConcerning a Drowned Girl

Evenings the sky grew dark as smoke,At night the stars held light suspended.And early it grew bright and still for herMorning and evening were not ended.

BEN STANTON (Lighting Design): Off Broadway: Sandra Bernhard: Everything Bad & Beautiful (The Daryl Roth), Play Yourself, Light Raise The Roof, Bexley, OH!, and Throw Pitchfork (NYTW), The Thugs (Soho Rep), The Triple Happiness and The Dear Boy (Second Stage), Orange Flower Wa-ter and Stone Cold Dead Serious (Edge Theater), Finer Noble Gases (Rattlestick Theater), Esoterica, Indoor/Outdoor (DR2), Orange Lemon Egg Canary (PS122), Black Russian, A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream, The Listener, Edward II ( Juilliard), Caligula (AUDELCO Nom. Classical Theater of Har-lem). Regional: Godspell (Paper Mill Playhouse), Love’s Labour’s Lost (The Huntington Theatre), The Cook (Hartford Stage), The Crucible (Actors Theater of Louisville), Bus Stop and The Chekhov Cycle (WTF), Loot (The Intiman).

DAVID HANBURY (Composer) is an actor, playwright, and composer who has collaborated and cre-ated original work in New York (International Fringe, Art Attacks Puppetry Slam, High Life/Low Life @ The Marquis), Providence (Trinity Repertory Company, Perishable Theater, Brown Uni-versity), and Boston (Boston Center for the Arts, Mobius Arts Center, The Comedy Studio). His one-man show Personal Instrument which used heavy metal guitar virtuosity to explore issues of identity and the artist’s life was nominated for an Independent Reviewers of New England Award and toured to San Francisco’s New Conservatory Theater Center. He wrote original guitar composi-tion for that show and has also written folk songs, choral pieces, instrumental scoring, and pop punk noise for plays as varied as Twelfth Night, Blood Wedding, Yesterdays Window, Poona the F*!@dog, and God Save Gertrude. In 2005 he received his MFA in Acting from the Brown University/Trinity Rep Consortium. He is currently starring in the heavy metal comedy cabaret, Stairway to Hell at Club Snitch in NYC.

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Sarah Ruhl was born in 1974 in Wil-mette, Illinois. Ruhl began playwrit-ing when she was in the fourth grade.

The play was a courtroom drama about land-masses simply because she loved words like ‘isthmus’ and ‘peninsula.’ Her teacher, Mr. Spangenburger, decided not to produce the play. However, Ruhl would go on to study playwriting at Brown University under Pu-litzer Prize winning playwright, Paula Vogel. Ruhl earned a B.A. in English in 1997 and an M.F.A. in playwriting in 2001. While working between degrees, Ruhl spent much of her time in smaller the-atres in Chicago and New York. Addition-ally, she was a Kennedy Center Fellow at the Sundance Theatre Laboratory in 2000. Ruhl achieved widespread recognition in 2004 with her play The Clean House, a com-edy about a physician who cannot convince her depressed Brazilian maid to clean her house. The Clean House won the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize for Best Play Written in English by a Female Playwright in 2004 and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2005. In September 2006, at age 32, Ruhl was hon-ored as a MacArthur “Genius” Fellow. In the MacArthur Foundation announcement, she was described as a “playwright creating vivid and adventurous theatrical works that poignantly juxtapose the mundane aspects of daily life with mythic themes of love and war.” Additional plays by Sarah Ruhl include Melancholy Play (2002), Orlando (2003), Passion Play: A Cycle (2005), and Dead Man’s Cell Phone (2005). Her plays have been produced across the U.S. and Eu-rope at such venues as Lincoln Center The-ater (New York), the Actor’s Centre (Lon-don), the Goodman Theatre (Chicago), and at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre, among many others. Eurydice had its premiere at the Madison Repertory Theatre in Madi-son, WI in 2003. Ruhl currently resides in New York with her husband Tony and their newborn baby, Anna.

sarah ruhl artist bios

King Lear (V, iii, 9-12)

We two alone will sing like birds in the cage.When thou dost ask my blessing, I’ll kneel down

And ask of thee forgiveness; so we’ll live,And pray and sing and tell old tales...

SEAN DANIELS (Director) just wrapped up three seasons as the Associate Artistic Director and Resident Direc-tor of the California Shakespeare Theater. He is also an Associate Artist of the Geva Theater Center in Roch-ester, NY and spent a decade as the Artistic Director and Co-Founder of Dad’s Garage Theater Company in Atlanta, Ga. Directing Credits at Dad’s: O Happy Day and Out Of The Trees (world premieres by Monty Python’s Graham Chapman), Cannibal! The Musical (world premiere by “South Park” creator, Trey Parker); Say You Love Satan (world premiere by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa); 43 Plays for 43 Presidents; Carrie White: The Musical; Action Movie: The Play; Assassins; Poor Superman; and Strange Snow. At Cal Shakes: The Comedy of Errors, Othello, The Merry Wives of Windsor & The Life And Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby Parts 1 and 2. At Geva: The Race Of The Ark Tattoo & Noodle Doodle Box. At Alliance Theater: Bat Boy: The Musical. For the Neo-Futurists: ‘Tron and The Santa Abductions (world premiere by Sean Benjamin). He’s also directed work-shop productions for Geva, Magic Theater, Playwrights Center and Ars Nova. Sean has been named “One of the top fifteen up & coming artists in the U.S., whose work will be transforming America’s stages for decades to come.” and “One Of 7 People Reshaping And Revitalizing The American Musical” by American Theatre magazine. In Atlanta, he was named “Best Director of 2000 and 2001” by Creative Loafing, and in the Bay Area he has earned the Bay Area Critics Circle and Dean Goodman Choice Awards for Best Direction and Best Production. His production of Nicholas Nickleby was named to the Top Ten of 2005 by every major Bay Area newspaper.

DANIEL MEEKER (Set Design): Moonlight & Magnolias and The Rink (The Cape Playhouse); Hello Dolly (Hangar Theatre); Great Googley Moo (The Sage Theatre, NYC); The Consul and Owl Creek (Ithaca College); Scenery & Lighting: Noodle Doodle Box (Geva Theatre); Tony & The Soprano and The Drawer Boy (The Kitch-en Theatre); The Soup Comes Last (59E59 Theatre). Lighting Design: Bill W & Dr. Bob (New Rep); Auntie & Me (Merrimack Rep); The Magic of Christmas 2005 (Portland Symphony Orchestra); The Blowin of Baile Gall (Irish Arts Center); The Korean Contemporary Dance Showcase 2006 (Kaye Playhouse at Hunter College); Cool Wave Dance Festival 2006, The Dumbo Dance Festival 2005 and The Dumbo International Dance Festival 2005, (White Wave Performance Space, Brooklyn); American Landscape (Nai Ni Chen Dance Company, NJPAC). Upcoming productions include: Lighting for the Off-Broadway production of Bill W. & Dr. Bob. Projects outside of theatre include designs for Barbara Israel Garden Antiques and designing custom residential light fixtures. Dan is a graduate of The Yale School of Drama and Ithaca College, and is a member of United Scenic Artists.

JESSICA FORD (Costume Design): Regional credits include Hamlet (Shakespeare and Co.), BUG, Big River (Syracuse Stage), The Taming of the Shrew, Comedy of Errors (Milwaukee Shakespeare Co), King Lear (Yale Rep), All in the Timing, Sleuth (Hangar Theatre). New York: Mary Stuart (Pearl Theatre), Mayhem, Spain (SPF), You’ve Never Done Anything Unforgivable (NYFringe), Hard Lovin’ Ever After (Active Eye Co), Two Rooms (Checkpoint Productions). Film: Laurie Anderson’s Hidden Inside Mountains. Jessica re-ceived her MFA from the Yale School of Dra-ma, where she designed costumes for The Great Magician and Rough Magic, sets for Dance the Holy Ghost, and sets and costumes for The Home (Summer Cabaret).

continued overleaf

The basis for Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice is the Greek myth concerning the tragic love between Orpheus and Eurydice. Orpheus, the deity of the arts of the song and lyre, was the son of Apollo and

the muse, Calliope. He married Eurydice, a nymph, under the blessing of Hymen, who offered no happy omens for the couple at their nuptial. Shortly after the marriage, the shepherd, Aristaeus, saw Eurydice while she was wandering with fellow nymphs. He was struck by her beauty and made advances toward her. Eurydice fled from him, but in doing so, stepped upon a serpent that bit her. Shortly after, she died. Following Eurydice’s death, Orpheus played his lyre and sang, creating nothing but sad and mournful songs. Nymphs and other gods wept at his music and tried to give him advice. The only way for Orpheus to lighten his painful loss was to descend into the underworld where his wife resided among the dead. After finding his way in through a cave, he passed by many crowds of ghosts and presented himself before the throne of Hades and Persephone, god of the dead and queen of the underworld. There, he sang and played his lyre for them. Through his music, Orpheus softened their hearts. Being the only person to have ever softened their hearts, Hades and Persephone agreed to allow Eurydice to return to earth with Orpheus. However, her departure from the Underworld was based on one condition: that Orpheus must walk in front of Eurydice and not look back until he had reached the upper world. In his anxiety, Orpheus looked back, and Eurydice vanished. After this loss, Orpheus renounced the love of women and took only youths as his lovers. Before Sarah Ruhl’s adaptation, this Greek tale of love and loss had been adapted in many different forms and mediums. The story has been told in film, such as Marcel Camus’ 1959 feature, Black Orpheus; drama, including Tennessee Williams’ Orpheus Descending; and opera and musicals, such as Stravinsky’s Orpheus and Philip Glass’, Orphée. It is also suggested by some musicologists that the second movement of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto was modeled after the story. The myth can also be found in references in modern television, music, and various other art forms. However, the majority of these works tell the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice as the myth was told: from the point of view of Orpheus. Sarah Ruhl has taken the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, and included in it the character of Eurydice’s father. She explores the human qualities of the myth and investigates the relationship beneath the surface of the two tragic young lovers. Ruhl delves further into the Eurydice character by allowing the story to enter the underworld with her. Down there, we meet Eurydice’s father, a figure not mentioned in the myth, but an integral part of Eurydice’s life. Ruhl retains much of the original story and has even included a Greek chorus of stones in the underworld. However, with her adaptation written in a poetic, yet modern language, she achieves more than a simple tragic story. Her play is concerned with love and loss and what it means to lose loved ones. It is also a highly personal story that builds on the myth and Ruhl’s own relationship with her father.

production staff

production stage manager................................emily pyeassistant stage managers.....shannon mccarter/costumes..............................................................taryn kimel/lights.......................................................brian lobenstine/lights.............................................................jim spangler/lights..........................................................montoia davis/props..........................................................................alma floodmaster electrician..............................................julia cosseassistant master electrician............................marin kobinaudiovisual engineer..............................michael minnickassistant director.........................................daniel maurocostume stitcher............................................irena kuvizic

Program content is compiled by Assistant Director, Daniel Mauro. For a complete list of sources and works cited, please contact the editor.The program is supported in part by the UR English Department (The Program Project).

a note about the program

the myth

The story of Orpheus and Eurydice is iconic in western art and litera-ture. The list of artists that have taken on the doomed lovers’ tale reads like a who’s who of culture: Ovid, Anouilh, Cocteau, Rilke, Ber-

lioz, Gluck, Haydn, Offenbach, Stravinsky, Weill, Rodin and Rubens. Most of these artists are male, and concerned more with Orpheus than Eurydice. “So many major authors felt the need to grapple with it,” says Chicago-born playwright Sarah Ruhl, “Orpheus became a metaphor for themselves.” Would it be fair, then, to consider Eurydice a metaphor for Ruhl? “The whole play is a prism which refracts and is in some ways transparent in terms of my life. But Eurydice has her own soul, which is separate from mine. We are different. For example,” she offers with understated humor, “I’ve never been dead before.” The transparent relationship of the play to Ruhl’s own life is cen-tered on death: her father died of bone cancer when she was 20. “My father was a very gentle man. It was inspiring to see how gracefully he handled being sick. I partly wrote the play to have more conversations with him,” she says, “but I wasn’t consciously aware of that at the time.” She has given Eurydice’s dead father a prominent role in her re-telling of the myth and, as she wrote, she gradually became aware of art imitating life. Sarah’s father, like Eurydice’s, taught his daughter words, although the purpose and setting were very different. “My father would take me to a pancake breakfast every week and teach me some new complicated word. It probably warped me for life—a seven-year-old, knowing words like ‘ostracize’.” Ruhl uses the word “subterranean” several times in discussing the process of writing Eurydice. Her relationship to the original myth is intui-tive, not analytical. “I kept thinking about that moment when Orpheus looks back—to lose so much in such a small moment.” Her most direct literary inspiration was the Rilke poem “Orpheus, Eurydice, and Hermes,” and she read the section about them in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (see accompanying text), but mostly she was relying on the basic myth we all know from oral tra-dition. “There’s not a lot in the original Greek—Ovid has two pages, that’s it. There was a play, but it didn’t survive. There are a few mentions in Virgil. And of course there’s plenty about the cult of Orpheus, but Eurydice didn’t get much consideration in that.” Ruhl tried not to read any material that was reminiscent of the story while actually writing the first draft of the script; however, while rewriting, she saw Cocteau’s “brilliant, gorgeous” Orphée, and loved the “obvious, crude theatrical special effect.” She is also a fan of the Brazilian film, Black Orpheus, as well as Anouilh’s stage play. Ruhl is glad she did not read his version until after she had written her own, “or I probably would have been too daunted to write at all,” she says. Although she was not strongly influenced by other artists’ rendi-tions of the myth, Ruhl had inspiration along the way. She wrote the first draft of the play in one month for a new plays festival at Brown University, and then spent two years rewriting it. It was during those two years, once her own relationship to the story was clearly established, that she reached out more consciously toward other sources. Her eye was drawn to anything touching on the myth; she absorbed what was useful and discarded the rest.

After reading the script for the first time, it really made me think about saying ‘goodbye’ and how much ‘goodbye’ can affect people’s lives. Saying goodbye is something we do every day, and yet it is often passed off as a simple ending to a conversation. When there is no opportunity to properly say goodbye, such as between Orpheus and Eurydice, it is regretted. When I was about twelve or thirteen years old, my mother underwent major sur-gery. Following her surgery, she had further chemo treatments and had to stay at home to rest. Every morning when I left for school, we said goodbye, but I always felt melancholy at leaving. Every morning I worried that something serious would happen to my mother during the day. The ‘goodbye’ could be indefinite. Eurydice is able to resonate because, although it has its magical and fanciful moments and setting, it is still a very human world that we experience throughout our lives. Much of it is concerned with saying ‘goodbye,’ and the tragedy that ensues from ‘goodbye’. My mother recovered well, thankfully, so ‘goodbye’ was just for the day.

Up until very recently, I had been fortunate enough to never experience loss in any great sense. However, in the last year I have been confronted with grief and loss on a very large scale. I don’t think I would have been able to bring as much to my character before this year’s experiences. I also think the play has really helped me to cope with my feelings on a new level; it forced me to address my own fears and conceptions about death, and deal with the losses I have suffered

Eurydice is an amazing play, and Eurydice is an extraordinary character under extraordinary circumstances. She gets to ask all the questions of her father that she never got to ask while they were alive. I realize that I may not be as lucky as Eurydice and meet with my father in the underworld, so after weeks of rehearsing, I went home and started to ask those questions. It’s amazing what doors can be opened in your perception of a loved one with their stories of the past. Story telling is such an important part of our rela-tionships, especially of those relationships with people of another generation. My par-ents have so much information that I haven’t yet tapped into, and Eurydice made me realize that you have to start asking the important questions...now.

Eurydice is about relationships. I have the advantage of being not only the child of a parent, but also the parent of a child. And though I am strongly moved by the Father’s recollections of his father’s life and death, I find that I resonate even more strongly with the Father’s parting from Eurydice as she prepares to leave the underworld—a parting that evokes a flood of memo-ries of sending daughters off, first to college, and then to a married life of their own. I am also touched by Eurydice’s reflections on Orpheus and his music, her awareness of the emotional trials of living with an artist. Being married to a musician, I have felt Eurydice’s frustrations, I have known the challenges she must have encountered in her relationship with Orpheus. It’s a relationship which is, I suspect, nearly as challenging as being married to an actor.

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Hymen went…to preside at Orpheus’ wedding, which didn’t go well. A bad job all around…The bride, on the grass among her attendant naiads, stepped on a viper, whose sharp and envenomed fangs killed her at once. The wedding abruptly turned to a wake. Orpheus, the bridegroom, all but out of his mind with grief, went into mourn-ing, carrying his complaints to the ends of the earth and beyond, even down to the shadows below, where the insubstantial spirits shimmer. There, he sang out in pain and anger. “Gods of the dim domain to which we are all consigned sooner or later, hear me … I am here to follow my wife, my bride, …I have tried to bear it, to come to terms with the world’s inherent unfairness, and master my grief, but I cannot. I cannot go on this way. In the name of love, I am here to throw myself on your mercy—…Desperate, bereft, I appear to ask: Restore to me that young woman you took before her time. We all come in the end to our ultimate home here. You receive every man and woman. And you shall have her as well, but until she has lived her allotted years, let her be with me, either above, alive, or else accept me here and rejoice in the death of us both. Let me remain with her.” …Orpheus’ lyre drew from the insub-stantial shadows physical tears… and the queen of darkness granted the suppliant’s prayer that his wife, Eurydice, be summoned…She came, still limping from the viper’s bite, and the mistress of shades gave her up to the singer-hero of Thrace with this one proviso only—that he should not turn to look back until he had left Avernus and returned to the world of the living. Hesitation or doubt, and the gift would be nullified. A simple enough condition? It ought to have been, and the singer led the way, ascending the sloping path through the murk. A long way they traveled, almost all the way, and, concerned for her, or not quite believing that it wasn’t a cruel delusion, a dream or mirage, he turned to confirm for himself what he couldn’t unreservedly trust, and there she was, but slipping backward, away, and down. He reached out his empty arms to hold her, touch her, catch at the hem of her garment, but nothing. Not even words of complaint, for what could she charge him with except that he’d loved her, loved her too much per-haps? She spoke but only one word, “Farewell,” which he barely heard as he watched her vanish back into darkness.

Deciding that the physical reality of the play required a light touch, she re-read Alice in Wonderland because “it’s the world we live in turned upside down”—an inspiration she translated quite literally into the Underworld. She also found inspiration in Samuel Beckett. “How could one consider using a chorus of stones without thinking a little about Beckett…his understanding of silence, stillness and vaude-ville all at once.” But inspiration came in all forms, from the specific and spon-taneous—like the tricycle, a found object added during a workshop—to the conceptual, in the form of Ruhl’s own musings upon “the nefarious category of ‘interesting’,” which led to the character of the Nasty Inter-esting Man. “There is a certain kind of person who forever delights in ‘interesting’ over ‘good’ or ‘bad’,” Ruhl observes. “It’s an empty category of intellectual experience. [In the play] Orpheus is more interested in dividing the world into ‘beautiful’ and ‘not beautiful’, but it’s harder for Eurydice to accept that. The Nasty Interesting Man is a projection of Eurydice’s desire. He uses the word ‘interesting’ to suck her in.” Sometimes the inspiration was subtler, less direct: the string room, for example, was to Ruhl the image of building a nest—a parent creating an invisible, spiritual home for a child, “the ability to build security out of thin air.” (She speaks with amusement of talkbacks held during work-shops of the play, when people would ask her shy she wanted to “work with string” when avant-garde director Richard Foreman “had already taken string to such extremes.”) Some sources of inspiration remain a mystery to her. She has no idea where the elevator came from, but it does strike her as a con-temporary expression of approaching the Greek Afterlife, especially since traveling in elevators can be very disorienting—the door always opens in a place other than where it closed. Ruhl is now fascinated with elevators; whenever she sees one she wonders, “Would this elevator be in the Underworld?” If some of these images seem more symbolic or poetical, there’s a reason. Ruhl’s original life plan was “to get a Ph.D. and become a pro-fessor who wrote poetry.” With that in mind, she was studying English and Creative Writing at Brown, focusing on non-dramatic forms (“bad fiction,” she calls it). A graduate student instructor encouraged her to study playwriting and Ruhl quickly became smitten with the teaching and work of the renowned Paula Vogel, who runs Brown’s playwriting program. After graduation and stints in both Chicago and New York, Ruhl returned to Brown to attend the graduate playwriting program there, where she studied with Mac Wellman. A year after grad school, she moved from Providence to L.A. for love; she “can’t think why else anyone would move to Los Angeles.” When asked if Los Angeles, the is a kind of Underworld for her, she replies, “Yes, without the moral and spiritual structure that an Underworld implies. But I’ve written two plays since I’ve been here. And I’m starting a third. The world seems to be generous in surprising ways when you try to do hard things for love. Which is not always the lesson that the Greeks teach us.”

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Being a student at the University of Rochester, I often find myself subject to the pressures of maintaining a certain degree of success, balancing the demands of my academic, financial and social life. Sometimes I feel like I’m standing before the ocean, my arms spread wide, striving in vain to keep the constant waves, towering colossus-like over my head, from crashing against the shore. Futile as the effort is, cold and shaking as I might be, I feel like I have to hold back a tide which is beyond my capac-ity to control. My great-grandmother, someone with whom I was once very close, but haven’t spoken to in years, died early in this semester. Classes had not yet resumed, and most of my friends hadn’t arrived back on campus. My usual feeling of isolation became intensified as I listened to my sister’s disembodied voice relaying the information on the telephone: ninety-six years old...died in her sleep in the nursing home. The day be-fore she had been animated, I later learned—full of life and in complete command of her senses. Her memory and wit were as sharp as they had always been. Often, when there is too much for me to deal with in my life on campus, I resort to long rambles in Mount Hope Cemetery. The still-ness there has always comforted me, and I have never felt the fear of burial grounds that some do. The night I was told, I ran away there to “sort myself out”. I didn’t feel numb. I didn’t feel grieved or broken or bound by regret. There was no wracking sense of loss. My general lone-liness was just enhanced, tempered by anger with myself for not being impacted more greatly by the loss. I should have felt so much more in that moment than I did. I should have felt a need to mourn. Reading the script for Eurydice I still had not forgiven myself for my coldness. The hollow place my sister’s voice had fallen into still remained empty. I was surprised by how moved I was by the script. The language was so simple, so beautiful. As I read it, my mind filled up with all the things the characters in the play never speak. They breathe in the spaces between the spoken words, filling the silences of the work, pouring out between the words, familiar things crafted into a delicate and alien music. The things I left unsaid; those years between my great-grandmother and myself where distance turned into neglect or forgetful-ness... all the things I would like to have impressed upon her will never die. They don’t have to. Like the stone monuments in a cemetery, the comforting cold and immutable faces of the tombstones and cement stat-uaries they are not for the dead, but for the living. I did not feel a loss at this death, because nothing was lost. I still love that woman who fell so fast asleep in that nursing home bed. And she remembered me then, too. Finding that somewhere in this play, this work of imagination, has given me a great deal of comfort. I know now that one of these nights, surrounded by the stones and hills and ponds of Mount Hope, I will finally fully forgive myself for my emptiness, because it isn’t really a void, just a melody so fragile I haven’t yet learned to stand quietly enough to hear the refrain.

from the metamorphoses

jean gabin in jean cocteau’sorpheus

an interview with sarah ruhlSarah Ruhl turns the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice inside-out and upside-down in her moving play about love and loss. She fills the piece with imaginative elements that challenge directors and designers. From cre-ating the physical reality of the Underworld to costuming a chorus of stones, the artists who work on this play must decide how to make Ruhl’s language come alive. Yale Repertory Theatre production dramaturg, Amy Boratko, talked with Sarah Ruhl about Eurydice and how the text supports the realization of productions.

Many artists have written adaptations of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth. What compelled you to write this story?

I first saw the play in the moment when Orpheus looks back at Eurydice. It’s such an iconic image—very mythic and primal. A lot of people have retold the myth from Orpheus’s point of view, but I wanted to follow Eurydice from that moment. I wondered how Eurydice experiences the Underworld. What is this place like for her? I thought that meeting her father would be a natural thing to do in the Underworld. My father died when he was 52, and my desire to have one more conversation with him inspired the relationship between Eurydice and her father in the Underworld.

But Hades normally conjures up tortured images of Sisyphus rolling the rock up the hill or thirsty Tantalus surrounded by water. How did you create an Underworld that would allow Eurydice to talk with her father?

I’m fascinated by the Greek concept of the Underworld. The shadowy netherworld is a morally neutral place for the Greeks. Theatrically, it’s a place with its own rules where anything can happen. I was really drawn to the idea of the river Lethe and forgetting. To what extent is language the thing that one has to lose in order to forget memories? You have to forget memories to be happy in the Underworld. For the Greeks, it’s not a sad place to be.

A chorus of stones inhabits this Underworld. Who are these strange figures, and how do you put them on stage?

In the original myth, the music Orpheus plays at the doors of the Underworld is so beautiful, “even the stones weep.” I was interested in that part of the myth. They can—and have been—done in a number of ways. In one production, they were lifeguards. In another, they were bratty English school children. Once, they were actually played by children. I’ve seen them played like teenage slackers, couch potatoes. I’m still waiting for the production that actually has them dressed like stones. I’m fascinated about what each director has known about the stones.

What else did you learn about the play from your first collaboration, and how has that affected your approach two years later?

Giving a director your play is like handing over your baby. I try to write with as much accuracy as to what I’m actually seeing as I write a play, but I don’t necessarily expect it to be realized in a particular way. I hope the stage directions and the images I use in the text will help the designers understand what the world of the play is.