Playwright: Sarah Ruhl. At: Victory Gardens Biograph, 2433 N. Lincoln. Phone: 773-871-3000; $20-$48. Runs through: Nov. 9
Playwright Sarah Ruhl invariably incites as much discussion as her plays. The Evanston native is a lightning rod whose work draws rabidly enthusiastic or equally vitriolic reactions. The Clean House was a Pulitzer finalist, Passion Play a bloated spectacle, Dead Man's Cell Phone a headscratching overdose of saccharine whimsy. With Eurydice, Ruhl uncharacteristically finds a middle ground that's skitters on the edge of mediocre ground. Her take on the Greek myth of Eurydice is smooth, enjoyable and drizzled with just enough emotional honesty to keep it from tipping into a waterfall of treacle.
Speaking of which, the uncredited lead is H2O. As in the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, there's water, water all around. Key elements include a beach, a water-cooler, a fantastical elevator containing a downpour, a bathtub stand-in for the River Lethe—and that's just the set. The text is equally drenched, with lovely lines such as 'I heard your name inside the rain' punctuating the dialogue. The result is a gentle stream of tragedy and a meditation on memory, loss and love.
Such Big Issues can sink a story, turning it into a pretentious slog faster than a lightning crack in a cloud burst. But by weaving a modern sensibility with a lyrically pattering sprinkle of magical realism, Ruhl makes the myth ( and all its implications ) as accessible as a picture book. Directed by Sandy Shinner and Jessica Thebus, Eurydice is defined by a simple, clean poetry and beguiling staging.
The story is paradoxically simple and endlessly complex. Orpheus loves Eurydice with as much passion as he lavishes in his other lover—music. Eurydice loves Orpheus with equal fervor. The two marry with a devotion that is boundless, obsessive and forever rapturous, world without end, amen. But Hades intervenes—as it so often does, metaphorically—and so the lovers embark on separate odysseys, floating on language above and underground as they try to find each other and remember what they've lost.
Shinner and Thebus construct a world of sweetly hallucinatory dreamscapes. Pastel pink balloons, an old claw-foot bathtub, a boardwalk, an ordinary ladder—all combine in Dan Ostling's set to create a world and an underworld of airy lines and colors.
As Eurydice and Orpheus, respectively, Lee Stark and Jamie Abelson glow with the straightforward beauty of youth and perfectly interdependent devotion. But the scene-stealer ( in the best possible way ) here is Beau O'Reilly, a Chicago treasure whose whiskey-over-smoking-gravel voice and leering presence invigorate the tale with a gleeful malevolence. Few people are capable of making a shiny red tricycle gleam with menace—O'Reilly does it with the ease of the Big Bad Wolf downing an ingénue.
Like water, Andre Pluess' sound design is also a character, a layered mix of storms, showers, drips, drops and jarring, head-banging hellishness that one might expect to hear way down under. The result? An engaging, if unremarkable, evening.
