Liz Lauren
Endless love: Eurydice (Kelsey Brennan) and Orpheus (Nate Burger).
“Don’t look back.”
This is the instruction that Orpheus is given before he tries to lead his love, Eurydice, from the underworld to the land of the living. It is also the only way the characters in Sarah Ruhl’s interpretation of the Orpheus myth, Eurydice, can bear to survive — by not looking back on the past.
This story explodes in a stunning fantasia directed by Tyne Rafaeli in American Players Theatre’s indoor Touchstone Theatre — a hyper-theatrical exploration of love and loss with music so sad it makes stones cry.
Written shortly after the playwright lost her father, the play tells the disjointed and poignant story of Eurydice (Kelsey Brennan), a young woman in love with the musician Orpheus (Nate Burger). They wed while her deceased father (James Ridge) watches from the underworld. Tricked by A Nasty Interesting Man (Cedric Mays) to leave her wedding reception, Eurydice falls to her death and is greeted by her father in the afterlife. Although the Stones (Melisa Pereyra, Christopher Sheard and Cage Sebastian Pierre) chide the two, father and daughter fight to remember their previous lives. Meanwhile, Orpheus pines for his lost love, almost rescuing her from oblivion.
As Eurydice, Brennan (with shocking red hair) leads the audience on her bizarre journey with keen intensity and raw emotion. Burger, as Orpheus, brilliantly occupies extremes — from giddy first moments of true love to depths of sorrow. As the father who nurtures and loves his daughter beyond measure — and cannot bear the pain of losing her — Ridge turns in one of the most affecting and complex performances of his career. Mays makes the most of his cartoonish characters (with the help of special vocal effects), while the comic and menacing Stones enforce the rules of a peculiar eternity.
Lighting designer Jason Fassl lets his imagination run wild, creating rooms and staircases of brilliant light and projecting a watery kaleidoscope onto the back wall. Josh Schmidt’s evocative soundscape uses snippets of familiar songs, the sounds of crashing waves, heavy breathing and soothing ambient music that is suddenly silenced.
Elizabeth Caitlin Ward’s costumes bring the ancient myth into a stylized future, placing Eurydice in spiked black boots and an asymmetrical wedding gown, the Stones in an amusing gray ensemble of rubber boots and raincoats and Orpheus in black and red leather. Meanwhile, Eurydice’s father looks so wholesome in his simple shirt and suspenders that he might have wandered off the set of Our Town.
Nathan Stuber’s multi-level set is nothing short of brilliant; he uses surprising, abstract materials to create familiar spaces.
A meditation on love, loss and the mix of pain and comfort that memory can provide, Eurydice is one of the most exciting and inventive productions APT has ever mounted. It is also an exercise in heartbreak that is as disquieting for the audience as it is for the characters.
