The young couple on the beach are coltishly enamored — snuggled up close, their long limbs entangled. When he ties a string around her left ring finger, to remind her of his love, she squeak-squeals with pleasure and agrees to marry him.
She is Eurydice and he is Orpheus, legendary musician nonpareil, and the handed-down myth about them says their union will be short. She will die abruptly, he will be bereft, and it will not go well when he descends into the underworld and tries to lead her back to the land of the living.
Their relationship does figure in “Eurydice,” Sarah Ruhl’s tear-dappled masterwork, yet the play’s primary grief is Eurydice’s own — for her dead father, a gaping, missing presence on the day she and Orpheus wed. In this poetic, heightened comedy of mourning and oblivion, the surest, most steadying love is between parent and grown child.
Les Waters’s marvelously burnished revival, which opened on Monday night at Signature Theater, stars an instantly likable Maya Hawke as a self-possessed Eurydice, cerebral but with a romantic streak, and a beautifully understated Brian d’Arcy James as her mild father, funny here in a dadly way and immensely moving, too. Caleb Eberhardt plays Orpheus, gentle and determined, pouring his misery into music and writing to his dead wife.
“I’ll give this letter to a worm,” he tells her, signing off. “I hope he finds you.”
Waters’s breathtaking 2006 staging of “Eurydice” was my introduction to Ruhl’s slender play, which she and the composer Matthew Aucoin have more recently adapted into an opera. This Off Broadway revival is similar to that earlier Waters production, yet even more eloquent in execution — the work of a director who by now knows the play’s every ripple and depth.
Crucially, he has brought along two members of the crack creative team from that production: Scott Bradley, whose glamorous, slant-walled set is all watery blues and greens, part painted tiles, part forlorn grid of handwritten letters; and Bray Poor, whose often delicately musical sound design evokes the near-omnipresence of water in this very liquid play.
Water is what Eurydice asks for when she encounters A Nasty Interesting Man (played by T. Ryder Smith like a demon in a skin suit), who claims to have a letter for her from her father.
Water is what her father mentions, alongside his love and advice, in the letter he indeed does compose — but has no idea how to send to Eurydice — in honor of her wedding.
“I am one of the few dead people who still remembers how to read and write,” he confides, adding: “If anyone finds out, they might dip me in the River again.”
Eurydice’s own death happens quite by accident. One moment she is a festive vision in a tiered fuchsia off-the-shoulder dress with accordion pleats, which I can only assume are a sartorial nod to her groom’s music-making. (Costume design is by Oana Botez.) The next moment, she is emerging from a rainstorm inside an elevator into the strange, off-kilter realm of the underworld, where her tender father becomes her protector and guide.
Eurydice, too, has been dipped in the river that erases the dead’s memories; when she first encounters her father, she has forgotten names, language, him. Part of the play’s poignancy is watching him reteach her what she lost, the two of them delighting in intellectual companionship and taking comfort in family stories. All of this is forbidden.
Ruled by the leering bully-child Lord of the Underworld (Smith again), and watched over by a chorus of stones (Maria Elena Ramirez, Jon Norman Schneider and David Ryan Smith), the sphere of the dead has the feel of a fever dream — though the stones are dressed smashingly, like Victorian clowns. (Lighting design is by Reza Behjat, with hair, wigs and makeup by Krystal Balleza and Will Vicari.)
And yet Eurydice and her father have constructed for themselves a tiny paradise. In their devotion, they are like Cordelia and Lear, if there had never been a rift. When Orpheus finds his way to the underworld, Eurydice isn’t sure she should follow him out.
“It’s for the best,” her father reassures her.
Is it? Bring tissues, by the way.
Eurydice
Through June 22 at Signature Theater, Manhattan; signaturetheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.
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