PL AYBILL EURYDICE
EURYDICE sarah ruhl }{
approximate running time: 90 minutes. there will be no intermission
ARTIST NOTE: MICHELLE MONTEITH
Our lives are our stories. We see ourselves in stories. Arguably, it is why we come to the theatre or why, as Eurydice says, she reads books: it makes you a larger part of the human community. As I have been thinking about what I’d like to share with you, my mind has been swirling with the play’s themes: love, loss, letting go, holding on, surrender, memory. However, I keep coming back to the fact that Sarah Ruhl wrote this play for her father after he died. This truth has been my guide as I navigate through the world of this story. Four weeks into rehearsals with this extraordinary company, and Eurydice for me, right now, is about reconnection. A second chance with someone who has died. What would you do if you had one more moment with that person? What would you say? And then it hit me: I would simply BE with them. That would be
enough because being present is all that really matters; it’s all our children need, all our spouses want, or our family and friends want. And perhaps, that’s all you need from us as storytellers: to be present, to bring our most authentic selves to the story. This play gently demands that from us. Through love, through loss, through awareness of our own impermanence, both in life and on stage, we can be reminded how to live, how to cherish, how to celebrate this very moment. It is in fact, all there is.
michelle monteith Eur ydice in Eurydice
CREATIVE TEAM
EURYDICE
CA ST
Oliver Dennis Eurydice’s Father
Michelle Monteith Eurydice
Stuart Hughes Lord of the Underworld
Alex McCooeye Big Stone
Courtney Ch’ng Lancaster Little Stone
Oyin Oladejo Loud Stone
Gregory Prest Orpheus
Produc tion
Alan Dilworth Director
Monica Dottor Choreographer
Lorenzo Savoini Set & Costume Designer
Kelly McEvenue Alexander Coach
Kimberly Purtell Lighting Designer
Nancy Dryden Production Stage Manager
Debashis Sinha Sound Designer
Arwen MacDonell Stage Manager
Emily Mewett Ashlyn Ireland Assistant Stage Managers
SOULPEPPER PRODUC T ION
Jacqueline Robertson Cull Head of Hair & Makeup
Barbara Nowakowski First Hand
Greg Chambers Props Builder
Stefan Dean Susan Dicks Geoff Hughes Cutters
Emma Zulkoskey Dresser
Michael Baumgart Props Handling
Isaac Robinson Carpenter
Paul Boddum Scenic Painter
This play was originally produced by Madison Repertory Theatre, Madison, Wisconsin, August 29, 2003. Richard Corley, Artistic Director, Tony Forman, Managing Director. And subsequently produced by Berkeley Repertory Theatre in 2004. Tony Taccone, Artistic Director, Susan Medak, Managing Director. And Yale Repertory Theatre, James Bundy, Artistic Director, Victoria Nolan, Managing Director. Produced by Second Stage Theatre, New York, 2007 Carole Rothman: Artistic Director Eurydice is produced by special arrangement with Bruce Ostler, BRET ADAMS, LTD., 448 West 44th Street, New York, NY 10036. Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree, The Andrews Sisters Tracks – Gold Legend Series Wedding March, Keiko Inoue – Wedding March published SLG, LLC 2008 cover illustration: the heads of state.
BACKGROUND NOTES
Playwright Sarah Ruhl is a theatrical adventurer. She’s an original: nimble, quirky, and achingly funny. Not for her the staid, composed pleasures that come with the conventional merry-go-round of neatly constructed realistic drama. No, she heads straight for the roller coaster. Her plays are complex, exhilarating experiences that call on our deepest emotions. New York Times critic Christopher Isherwood said her Eurydice had “the subliminal potency of music, the head-scratching surprise of a modernist poem and the cockeyed allure of a surrealist painting. It’s pretty funny too.” In the world of the original myth the border between our world and the afterlife, or what they called the Underworld, was porous, and so it is here too. Orpheus is still a brilliant musician but here Eurydice “hears the music in words.” As in the original she dies, and, mad with love and loss, Orpheus journeys to the Underworld to bring her back.
Love is one of the most powerful forces in our world and yet it is as fragile and easily destroyed as a filament of thread. Love, in Ruhl’s tender, fraught play, is a continual process of remembering and re-constructing, of looking forward with hope, and of contending with our sometimes overpowering urge to look back.
Playwright Biography Sarah Ruhl was born in 1974 in Illinois. She studied at Brown University and Oxford. Her breakout play was The Clean House, which won the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize in 2004 and was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize the following year. Eurydice was written in honour of her father who died of cancer in 1994. Sarah Ruhl is a MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant recipient.
Ruhl’s version unfolds like a dream; the events have a significance and a meaning beyond the reach of logic. Her brilliance lies in the subtle and overt ways she alludes to the original - the play is divided into movements instead of acts – while re-inventing the story for a modern audience. The writing is gutsy but Ruhl isn’t wholly dependent on words: some of the most spell-binding moments have no dialogue at all. At the centre of this play is love: romantic love and filial love. The joy we take from those we love, the lengths we’ll go for those we love, how passionately we hold on to them even after they are gone. Background Notes by 2015 Soulpepper Resident Artist Paula Wing
THANK YOU FOR ATTENDING!
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