Eurydice at 18: On the Off-Broadway Revival of Sarah Ruhl’s Beloved Play

Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice, an off-Broadway darling from 2007, is back in New York for the first time since its original run. Les Waters directed the first production at Second Stage, with Maria Dizzia in the title role, and he directs it again, 18 years later, this time for Signature Theatre and starring a beguiling and perfectly cast Maya Hawke.

The play reimagines the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, but rather than focus on Orpheus’ failure to restore Eurydice from the underworld (it is a brief, though climactic, plot point in this version), most of the action unfolds in Hades, where Eurydice stumbles upon her father and has a chance to reconnect with him, now that they’re both dead. The heartbreak in Ruhl’s version lies in the longing of the father-daughter relationship rather than that of the lovers; Ruhl wrote it as a tribute to her own father, who had died a few years before.

When Ruhl began work on the play, in 2001, she was something of a wunderkind: 26 years old, just finishing her MFA in Playwriting at Brown, and churning out highly original plays with a distinctively spare yet playful style. Eurydice made its way through a series of workshops and productions over the next six years, changing shape as it went, and eventually landed off-Broadway and became Ruhl’s second play to get a New York run. (The first was The Clean House, which was produced at Lincoln Center the year before and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist.)

Now, at age 51, Ruhl is closer to becoming one of the elders of the off-Broadway scene, with a long string of New York productions behind her (only one of them, In the Next Room, or the Vibrator Play, briefly ran on Broadway). In those years, Ruhl has also become a teacher and mentor to many young playwrights—she currently teaches at the Yale School of Drama—and has helped to shape a rising generation of theatre-makers, many of whom view her early plays as a high watermark for what contemporary theatre can look like.

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When Eurydice was first produced at Second Stage, it generated instant buzz. Critics weren’t universally enraptured, but they all seemed to sense that it wasn’t quite like anything they had seen before. In his New York Times review, Charles Isherwood said, “I suspect that Eurydice will get under your skin either in all the right ways or all the wrong ones” and confessed that both times he had seen it he had “staggered out of the theater… in a state of sad-happy disorientation.”

It’s not that Ruhl invented experimental theatre—her stylistic forebears were a whole generation of so-called “downtown,” avant-garde playwrights and pioneers, including Maria Irene Fornes, John Guare, Tina Howe, Charles L. Mee, and Mac Wellman. And, of course, this American gang was preceded by European boundary-breakers before them (Bertolt Brecht, Antonin Artaud, Eugene Ionesco). But to that experimental legacy, Ruhl brought her own stylistic rhythms, her own poetic forms, and her own feminist concerns.

Eurydice is, in many ways, the ur-Ruhl play: whimsical, quirky, made up of lightning-quick scenes with dialogue that is both elusive and allusive, and a story that might be called domestic (love, marriage, parents and children) but set against the backdrop of larger existential questions about life and death. And always asking how women feel, why women do what they do, what it means to be a daughter, wife, lover, artist, and female human person.

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When I saw the 2007 production of Eurydice, I was in a particularly vulnerable moment. I was living abroad in Germany at the time and was home in New York for the summer. I had been having some of the worst anxiety of my life, and now I was debating whether to go back to my adopted home of Frankfurt or stay in New York and try to heal myself. I ended up deciding the healing would go better if I left home, and I soon headed back for a second year.

I saw Eurydice during this interlude, and it felt both like a total surprise and like it was exactly the play I needed. Ruhl had ingenuously reinvented an ancient myth that I knew well (and had written papers about in grad school), but she had handed the story to Eurydice. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the original source material for the myth, Eurydice speaks only one word in the entire text: “Farewell.” Here Eurydice was a young, modern woman (which I also was at the time—I’m 18 years less young now) with a questioning, doubting mind and as much of a capacity for fear as for love. The play somehow reassured me that, like Eurydice, I was on a difficult journey but that I would find my way.

I loved the complexity of her character, I loved the lyrical language of the play, and, most memorably to me now, I loved the visual poetry of the set. I will never forget the first time that elevator to the underworld opened and revealed Eurydice inside, holding an umbrella and a suitcase, with the rain inside the elevator pouring down on her. It was an indelible image. I became an instant fan of Ruhl’s work.

None of the other Ruhl plays I have read or seen in the years since has quite touched me the way Eurydice did, but I always find her plays profound and delightful and edifying in various measure. Like most great artists, Ruhl both has a distinctive voice that remains consistent and she refuses to get stuck in place, always playing with new forms. (Her most recent play at Signature, Letters from Max, for example, was a theatrical adaptation of her correspondence with a Yale playwriting student who died of cancer.)

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As Ruhl’s reputation and stature have grown, her plays have been performed on increasingly bigger stages, and she has always been taken seriously by critics, if the work was not always lauded. Meanwhile, her plays have seeped into the theatrical vernacular, being assigned in playwriting and dramatic literature classes and performed at universities and small regional theatres across the country and the globe.

Eurydice, perhaps her most beloved play, lands differently now than it did back when she was just starting out. It inevitably feels a bit less fresh and surprising—not only because we have seen it before but, I think, because of Ruhl’s influence on other playwrights. There are those she has molded in her classes and others who she has simply made space for, legitimating their approaches by her very presence. The kind of play that seems to have started its life as a poem or visual image or metaphor, rather than being rooted in a conventional plot, is more commonly found on stage these days than it was twenty years ago, partly thanks to her. Meanwhile, Ruhl’s own voice has become familiar to our ears; in addition to her many plays, she has written for film and has published four books of non-fiction.

The central question the play is asking feels more familiar, too: Is it better to remember and therefore feel pain (specifically, the pain of grief) or to forget and become numb? It’s a perennial dilemma, which explains why the imagination of the ancient Greeks produced the River Styx: souls must cross it on their way to the underworld, and it has the effect of erasing their memories. Within this framework, the dead are granted forgetfulness, but the living must remember the dead, and therein lies their struggle. The characters in Eurydice do this dance between living and dying, between feeling and forgetting, throughout the play, and are thrust again and again into heartache as a result.

Eurydice somewhat resembles the Michel Gondry-Charlie Kaufman film from 2004, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, in which Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet have the option of wiping out their memories in order to avoid romantic heartbreak. (The film came out after Ruhl wrote Eurydice but before its New York premiere.) And you can see this same dilemma playing out on Broadway right now, in Maybe Happy Ending, a new musical, set, like Eternal Sunshine, in a near future that is almost our world but not quite. In the musical, two robots fall in love in spite of their planned obsolescence and must decide whether to erase their own hard drives so they won’t miss each other later. Eurydice, like these other works, seems to be imploring us to live, to love, to remember—but so acute is the pain of loss that the temptation to forget is strong, and so artists keep revisiting it, keep testing the waters.

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Seeing it this time around, the play felt somehow smaller—though no less beautiful. This may be partly owing to the fact that the Linney theatre at Signature is simply smaller than Second Stage’s Tony Kiser theatre. The rain inside the elevator is still gorgeous and resonant, but the set is a bit pared down, making do with less real estate and a simplified stage design.

It might also be that the play is dwarfed by other similar shows that loom large around it, such as Hadestown, the Tony-winner playing on Broadway just a few blocks north of the Signature. Hadestown is a modern retelling of the Orpheus myth but with a much bigger budget, a soundtrack of catchy folk-rock numbers, and starry names popping up in the cast (Andre De Shields, Ani DiFranco). Eurydice may have even been dwarfed by itself, since in 2021 it was turned into an opera, with a libretto by Ruhl and a score by Matthew Aucoin, and staged at the Met, making the original non-operatic version seem somewhat slight.

Or maybe I’m the one who’s changed. Now solidly in middle age, I stand in a different relation to the story of a lost young woman, just embarking on the adventure of marriage and discovering who she is. Perhaps it’s the theatrical corollary to how everything you remember from your childhood seems smaller when you go back to it as an adult.

Still, the emotions Eurydice conveys are as big as ever, and it is ultimately just as moving. In this production, the razor-sharp dialogue still hits all the right notes—both comic and serious—and the eternal sadness that lies at the heart of the play reverberates through the humble Linney space.

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There are also new dimensions brought out by placing the play alongside Ruhl’s recent book of essays, Lessons from My Teachers, published last month. Each chapter is a short essay about someone—or something—that has served Ruhl as a teacher or guide. Whether the release was purposely timed to Eurydice’s opening or not, the book now functions as a kind of companion piece to the play, revealing the parts of Ruhl’s life that found their way into this work.

Above all, it becomes clear how much she was mining her grief over her father’s death. In the book, Ruhl explains that, “desperate to have more conversations with my father, I wrote a play called Eurydice. I imagined the sort of letter my father might write on my wedding day.” The father character reads aloud this letter from the underworld: “Cultivate the arts of dancing and small talk. Everything in moderation. Court the companionship and respect of dogs. … Continue to give yourself to others because that’s the ultimate satisfaction in life.”

It also seems to me now, having gotten to know Ruhl better through her work over the years, including the new book, that she is both Eurydice and Orpheus. She is both the woman, the wife, the writer and reader (her Eurydice is in love with words) as well as the artist, the maker, the dreamer (Orpheus, in keeping with the Ovid text, is one of the world’s greatest musicians). When Eurydice muses on what it’s like to love an artist—“He is always going away from you. Inside his head there is always something more beautiful”—she echoes what Ruhl says in Lessons from my Teachers about the patience it takes for her husband to live with her, “an artist—a person who burns with imaginative fervor, and sometimes looks into the middle distance instead of at their surroundings.” I now hear this speech in the play as Ruhl apologizing to those who love her for always, in some sense, being just beyond their grasp.

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One question about this revival is why now? Why do we suddenly seem to need Eurydice again in 2025? It has become almost a trope at this point to say that these are dark times we’re living in (we keep saying it, but it keeps being true), and this play feels at this moment like a balm, a little light shining in the darkness, an affirmation of our humanity and our ability to love each other. It is also a reminder of the beauty and validity of art-making as a central pursuit at a time when art of all kinds is under attack by the federal government.

And then there’s the perpetual draw of the Orpheus and Eurydice story: we never tire of contemplating not only the fragility of life and the pain of losing someone you love but also the very relatable mistake at the heart of the story—Orpheus’s fallibility and failure—the way we are always our own worst enemy. In this version, though, it is Eurydice who “makes a decision” (according to the stage directions) and calls to Orpheus, causing him to turn around and see her—the one thing he must not do. She becomes the flawed hero of the story instead, the one who makes the fatal error, who chooses to run away from life.

Ruhl reminds us that women can have agency and power, that they can be at the center of the story, but also that they, too, are human and make mistakes. She also suggests that sometimes we just need to feel safe and loved, and we can’t be brave. Eurydice chooses the known love of her father over the unknown love of her husband. The play does not exactly suggest this was the “right” choice, but it was certainly where Sarah Ruhl’s heart was pulling her when she wrote it.

Especially in this troubled age, with the worst kind of tyrannical Hades-like figure lording it over all of us on a national level, many of us have felt the urge to run away, to retreat to a safe and cozy private realm, even if it means closing our eyes to reality. Eurydice holds us in a womb-like place and tells us that we can stay there with her, if only for a couple of hours.