Eurydice

Whimsically tragic. Yes, that is the most concise way of putting it. A tale of loss and longing, the power of words, and family bonds that echo through eternity.

     Eurydice marks the beginning of the 69th Greystone Theatre season (and the 7th that I have had the privilege to witness). Our fair troupe tackles Sara Ruhl's modernised version of the old Orpheus myth. It's a poignant travelogue to the depths of Hades where the titular character finds herself cut off from the land of the living, fighting to retain her identity.

     The traditional Orpheus myth involves the most legendary singer in Greece, Orpheus, and his beloved bride, Eurydice. When Eurydice dies tragically on their wedding night, Orpheus ventures deep into the underworld, playing his music, to bargain for her release. But he finds her freedom is not without a catch.

     In Ruhl's adaptation, the couple are young lovers in the 1960s (ish?). When tragedy strikes, Eurydice finds herself cast down to Hades where she makes the long trip to her final resting place, first on a boat, then down a raining elevator, and then on a train that is not a train but rather the opposite of a train (we're not told what that is, but we're also not told that it isn't a giraffe). Nonetheless, after her abstract journey through the underworld, Eurydice arrives with no knowledge of who she is. There she unknowingly encounters her father, who uses his secret knowledge of the language of the living to restore her identity to her. I won't go into specifics about the play's ending, but I'll ask everyone to remember that we're in the realm of Greek tragedy where it's considered a happy ending if someone turns into a plant.

     Sara Ruhl's script brings an ethereal quality to the character interactions. She refers to her plays as "3D poems". It's a provocative concept, but upon examination it's not particularly useful. It's a vague description, but this play capitalises on vague. It spends time discussing the word "interesting", which is interesting, because I also have a habit of overusing the word interesting, interestingly enough. Beginning with the discussion between Orpheus and Eurydice on the subject of interesting arguments, and then leading up to Eurydice's fateful encounter with the Interesting Man on her wedding night, our sense of language becomes fuzzy. "Interesting" does not pass judgement of something being either good or bad; it's just a term we throw around when we feel that something is worth talking about, but we aren't sure why. Eurydice starts off pursuing this vague sense of the "interesting" and it takes her to a place where nothing seems to mean anything.

     The journey through Hades brings travellers to stop at the River Lethe, where they wash away the knowledge of their previous lives and begin their existence as the dead. Eurydice's father, for reasons that are not entirely clear, managed to avoid the river and retain all of his living knowledge, including the understanding of how to read and write. After we see his poignant lamentations in the early part of the play, it is heart-breaking to see Eurydice arrive and look at her father without any idea who he is. From there we move into an exploration of the nature of death, language, and memory. The true death represented in Eurydice is not physical death, but it is the moment the spirit is dipped in the River Lethe and is divorced of their memories.

     The power of language is a running theme throughout the play, the way it unites and separates us. Eurydice and Orpheus have trouble communicating in the first scene of the play, with Orpheus never quite getting the meaning behind Eurydice's words. Eurydice starts to feel distance between them, and she is tempted by the words of the Interesting Man before realising they didn't mean what she thought they did. When she arrives in the underworld her language becomes so limited that interaction involves a confusing web of talking around things (such as the "opposite of a train"). When her father is trying to explain who he is, the closest word he can get to "father" that she understands is "tree". In one darkly comic but terribly haunting scene, Eurydice finds a book in Hades but, without memory of how to read, she angrily throws it down and screams "What are you?!" Language is ally and enemy; its circumspect nature is used to both nurture and injure. But when they don't have language they don't have anything to make them human. They become as "stones".

     Ruhl's script has the resonance of verse. Her 3D poem wrangles this hyperreal, weighty rhetoric loaded with pathos where no word means precisely what it seems at first. The play is a whirlwind of abstract symbolism but still anchored in this very physical and immediate connection between family members. The dialogue isn't without fault, though. The first scene with Orpheus and Eurydice on a beach has the same unrealistic sense to the dialogue without sliding  into the emotional gravitas, so it comes across as half B-movie, half children's book, and half philosophical musing (yes, that's three halves, and you should count yourself lucky if that's the strangest thing you read in this review). By the time Eurydice arrives in Hades and meets her father, the dialogue slides in and out of metaphors with much greater ease and builds to a forlorn emotional intensity.

     Dwayne Brenna helms this production as director. He gives it a disturbed, dream-like feel similar to what he did with Woyzeck in 2011, but also plays with the classical Greek work he did in Love of the Nightingale. He blends the 1950s/60s aesthetic with dark fantasy and a little tinge of ancient Greece. What results is a tragic and enchanting play that feels something like a Hayao Miyazaki movie filtered through the lens of Edgar Allen Poe. Dark and tragic, but still with a very magical quality.

     Bev Kobelsky's costuming starts off light and airy, getting darker as we travel into the underworld. Eurydice's wedding dress is slim and sleek, which gives her wispy and ghost-like feel. However, most of the imagination in the costume department went to the three "stones", our play's twisted Greek chorus. They appear onstage dressed ostentatiously in a Victorian disco pirate gothic chic, with rigid and ruffled jet black costumes and ghoulish makeup, looking very much like they just stepped off the set of a Catalyst Theatre production.

     The set is remarkable. Collin Konrath's design plays on both the abstract and the grounded planes. Large picture frames contain the Stones as they stand vigil over the unfolding narrative. A large, ominous gate is fixed in the centre of the stage, used only seldom, but remaining as this focal point to make the whole stage seem a little oppressive. The aesthetic changes going from right to left, where we have the train station and elevator, which has actual rain pouring inside it when Eurydice arrives (my hat goes off to that trick). Then a curving staircase on stage right creates a bridge to a second level; the differing heights are used to great effect to emphasise the separation between the living and the dead. So the whole set creates a series of barriers: physical, like the different heights, or abstract like the picture frames or the "room" that Eurydice's father constructs for her. Our sense of security, longing, and alienation are all bound up in the subtle shifts between these constructs onstage.

     Robert Grier is an endearing Orpheus. He starts off bright and shining with innocence, although not that bright. He's the free-spirited counterpart to Eurydice's more intellectual nature. In his grief he is lost and child-like, and creates a delicate balance with the sombre reflection going on below him. Connor Brousseau plays the opposite. When he shows up as the Interesting Man, he appears mature and intellectual, but with something very menacing underneath. He succeeds at playing both charming and threatening. When Brousseau shows up later as Hades (or perhaps he was Hades all along), he is dressed like a small child, in a morbid parody of Orpheus' genuine innocence. Hades acts with the emotional immaturity of a child, but still feels very evil. The two actors complement each other very well, representing opposing facets of Eurydice's anti-intellectual plane. They also have their share of comedic moments, but Grier makes the comedy endearing, while Brousseau makes you so uncomfortable you're not sure what else to do but laugh.

     The three Stones embody the dark humour of this play. On one hand, they make the most insane Greek Chorus ever to grace the stage, but on the other they represent something very tragic and sinister: the oppressive nature of death itself. They spend most of their time railing against the attempts of Eurydice and her father to reclaim pieces of their living selves, but the Stones are so over-the-top they're fun to watch. Jenna Berenbaum is shrill and Banshee-like as the Little Stone, maintaining an implausibly rigid poise and always hovering in line of emotional intensity between lamenting mother and angry crow. Kashtin Moen as the Big Stone seems less smart than the other stones, but he has a tremendous command of the stage that always makes his lines ring out. And Mikael Steponchev as the Loud Stone is the most powerful voice of the trio. He sustains a huge amount of energy through the entire play and can rattle the audience to their bones. The whole dark, Burtonesque threesome do an excellent job of delivering comic relief and dark thematic material.

      Torien C Cafferata plays Eurydice's father, a bit of a dry intellectual but with a profound sense of heart underneath. He begins the play in a state of sadness, writing mournful letters that he doesn't know how to send. Upon meeting Eurydice, he pauses in a moment of defeat, seeing her lack of recognition. But small bits of vibrancy well to the surface as he begins to get through to her. More than any single element of the production, Cafferata evinces the sad, whimsical Miyazaki nature of Eurydice. So much emotion exists in small, quiet moments, such as when he is imagining walking his daughter down the aisle, or the sustained scenes of him wrapping twine around four posts to give Eurydice a makeshift room. One moment in particular where he places his hat on Eurydice's head, like she's a little girl, captured the balance of enchanting and heart-breaking. A scene near the end where he remembers the directions to the river is probably the most delicate and profound delivery of Ruhl's subtle verse.

     And then, of course, there is Ciara. Ciara Richardson takes the helm of Eurydice as the title heroine. On one level, she plays a socialite princess, frustrated with Orpheus, demanding a bellhop when she arrives in the underworld. But it's clear that underneath that veneer is a sense of sadness and loneliness which Richardson carries around with her in the weight of her step. This sadness occasionally spikes into anger, which she needs to ramp up to in a very short time to bust out of the general slowness of the rest of the play. But she does it. And she really opens up in those enchanting scenes with her father, where she is reawoken to child-like delight and innocence (in constrast to Orpheus' increasing grief). It's a vulnerable performance always weighted by tragedy but lightly flitting through an array of emotions.

     The music is very good. It was all performed live in a darkened corner of the stage by the musical director Rodolfo Pino-Robles and Jesse Fulcher Gagnon (who alternates with Grier to play Orpheus). The music is soft with a few spikes in it, emulating the whimsical and tragic nature of the play as a whole. My complaint would be that the music should have been brought forward more into the play itself. Considering that Orpheus is such a legendary musician, the actor's musical talents should have been put to use in the character, instead of just on nights when he wasn't acting.

     Eurydice is a full play, which has the power to drag us down into the depths of despair. But for all its sadness, it is a magical experience which highlights our own humanity and reminds of those things that make us who we are - our language, our memories, our connections - and why we hold them dear.