About the Play:

Eurydice has become a favourite of acting teachers for Female Monologues, Male Monologues, and Female/Male Scenes.

Eurydice is a full-length dramatic comedy by Sarah Ruhl. On the day she is to marry her true love Orpheus, Eurydice unexpectedly falls to her death and descends into the Underworld. There she has a surprising reunion with her departed father and sets off on a journey to remember – and reclaim – the life and love she lost. This tenderhearted love story solidified Sarah Ruhl as one of the most important voices in American theatre.

Eurydice is an inventive take on the Greek myth of Orpheus that presents the tale through the eyes of its heroine. Eurydice is in love with Orpheus. Her dead father has advice for her wedding but his letters can't get through to the land of the living. At last one does. With her father's words in her hand, she crashes down a flight of stairs and wakes in the underworld, her memory wiped. How will she ever get home? With a style that is light and precise, but also wildly imaginative, this play sees Alice in Wonderland meet Greek myth. With contemporary characters, plot twists, and a script written to be a playground for designers, Eurydice is a fresh look at a timeless tale of loss, grief and redemption.

Eurydice premiered in 2003 at Madison Repertory Theatre in Madison, Wisconsin and made its New York premiere off-Broadway at Second Stage Theatre in 2007. The play has become a favourite scene study vehicle in acting classes and workshops and is regularly performed in regional, high school, college, and community theatre productions.

Cast: 2 female, 5 male

What people say:

"Rhapsodically beautiful. A weird and wonderful new play - an inexpressibly moving theatrical fable about love, loss and the pleasures and pains of memory." — The New York Times

"Exhilarating!! A luminous retelling of the Orpheus myth, lush and limpid as a dream where both author and audience swim in the magical, sometimes menacing, and always thrilling flow of the unconscious." — The New Yorker

"Ruhl's wild flights of imagination, some deeply affecting passages and beautiful imagery provide transporting pleasures. They conspire to create original, at times breathtaking, stage pictures." — The New York Times

"Touching, inventive, invigoratingly compact and luminously liquid in its rhythms and design, "Eurydice" reframes the ancient myth of ill-fated love to focus not on the bereaved musician but on his dead bride -- and on her struggle with love beyond the grave as both wife and daughter." — The San Francisco Chronicle

About the Playwright:

Sarah Ruhl is an award-winning American playwright, author, essayist, and professor. Her plays include the Pulitzer Prize finalists The Clean House and In the Next Room (or the vibrator play), also nominated for a Tony Award. A MacArthur "Genius" Fellowship recipient, she is known for charting complex currents of desire and broaching weighty topics such as bereavement with a light, whimsical touch. Her plays have been produced on Broadway and across the US as well as internationally, and translated into fourteen languages.