Eurydice

‘The most moving exploration of the theme of loss that the American theater has produced’

‘Eurydice is a luminous retelling of the Orpheus myth from his beloved wife’s point of view. Watching it, we enter a singular, surreal world, as lush and limpid as a dream—an anxiety dream of love and loss—where both author and audience swim in the magical, sometimes menacing, and always thrilling flow of the unconscious… Ruhl’s theatrical voice is reticent and daring, accurate and outlandish’

‘As I watched the final minutes of the Yale Rep’s knockout production of Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice, tears came with the suddenness of grief… The heroine’s arrival in Hades (by elevator, accompanied by a stunning surge of rain) is memorable for technical reasons, but it wouldn’t mean a thing without this playwright’s singular voice… While Eurydice is certainly a play for our fearful times, it is about every death, every loss, every paralyzing pang of grief… Sarah Ruhl has looked into the heart of darkness and found an awful beauty’

Sarah Ruhl’s fifteen plays include the Pulitzer Prize finalists The Clean House and In the Next Room (or the vibrator play), also nominated for a Tony Award. Her awards include a MacArthur Fellowship, and her book of essays 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Eurydice, named one of the 25 best American plays of the past 25 years in 2018 by the New York Times, was developed into an opera with music by Matthew Aucoin, and performed at The Metropolitan Opera in 2021. Her most recent book, Smile: The Story of a Face, was published in 2021 by Simon & Schuster. Ruhl teaches at the Yale School of Drama, and lives in Brooklyn with her family.