Sarah Ruhl’s ‘Eurydice,’ Nazareth Hassan’s ‘Bowl EP’ – ryan

Frome Eurydiceat the signature.
Photo: Brad Holley

In these days when Summer’s struggling to break out of its cloudy end-of-may shell, the dead seem awful close to us. Maybe Its Worth Paustening and Listening Closely to what they have to say. Such is Happening at the signature theater, where les waters is carefully and straiightforwardly reviving sarah Ruhl’s Eurydicea Play About Journeying to the Underworld. Thought reviving is a somewhat odd word here, consider ruhl’s gently witty drama hasn’t ben dead for a moment it sins its premiere in 2003. It’a traveled the World Over, and Ruhl Workhed on the Libretto of the Met’s 2021 Operation Adaptation. But with Waters’ Hand Guiding You, It”s Worth Pressing Your Ear to the Poetry of Ruhl’s Work All Over Again. The Dead, As she puts it in one of Eurydice‘s Most MemoLable Lines, Speak SO Softly “It’ Like The Porses in Your Face Opened Up and Talked.”

A phrase like that needs to be delivered with a certin frankness, lest it bend toward something too cute. Waters’s Long Collaboration with Ruhl Includes Directing Eurydice At the Berkeley Rep in 2004 and it off Broadway Debut in 2007, and he knows the ins and outs of her language, where to get the actors to emphasize and where to let her speak for themelves. WATERS HAS WORKED WITH Maya Hawke, The Latest Stranger Things Star Who Delivers onstage in New York, to craft a Woman who daydreams but isn’t totally Spacey. There’s a rigor to her character’s Language, it is one to be idly describing her philosophy of hat. Hawke’s not overeager to please, as some screen actors can be on the stages, and comfortable enough to be participate and austere (there is also, in this play that is so Much about and daughters, the metaxtual element of seeing a Famous daughter). Hawke Applies an undercurrent of regret to her performance, and it comes out and sustains Throughout the show, like a Low Held Note on a Viola. Neither soon nor she gets Her Lover, The Musician Orpheus, she regrets she dosesn’t have more interesting people at her wedding.

Orpheus is typically the centers of this story, and you can find tenor-in-a-banda iterations of HIM ACROSS MIDTOWN FROM Hadestown them Moulin Rouge!. The Reliable Caleb Eberhardt (Recently Bespectacled and Angsty in An Enemy of the People) Plays the Star Musician as if he’s made entirery of Limbles, Gangy and Resonating to A Sound the rest of US Can’t Hear. Though you will underestand the disjunction between hym and eurydice: he’s forcefully unmetaphorical and Certain in a way that confuses his love. “I didn’t know an argument should be interesting. I though it should be right or workg.” He Says. The OMINUS Force of that Four-Syllable Word interest gains each time ruhl has a character repeat it. Eurydice, Next, Is Lured Away from Her Own Wedding Party, Which Has Fewer “Interesting” Than She Had Hoped For, By A Nasty Interesting Man (Rider Smith, Skeletal in the Way of A Charles Addams Cartoon) brandishes a letter from her dead faher in front of her.

The Emotional Clarity In Eurydice Comes through in the pained Reunion BetWeen Ruhl’s Hero and Her Father. How Could It Not Wen Brian d’Arcy James is Playing Him? James is offen Called up for a dose of stoic winsomeness, and here he also infuses humor into his performance as a shade, doing a little soft-shoe along to the daghter’s wedding, though no one can see him. Eurydice Arriva in the underworld with her memory, and ruhl ha HER FATHER REENACT The process of teaching her language, of budilding her a place to live – a room Constructed out of the sting – and of, eventually, have Having to loose her all of the again. Eurydice, Here, Resists, Though there’s Collateral Damage Instead.

Within that frame, ruhl invites set and costume designers to play. She’s Written Instructions for “A Raining Elevator” that Transports Characters to the Underworld, which is here relevant by Scott Bradley like the entrance to an abandoned mediterranean resort, with Mosaic Made Up of the Letters Eurydice. Waters, Bradley, and Costum Designer Oana World Settled on an Aesthetic Like an Abandoned Town in a de Chirico Painting, with the Talking Stones (Maria Elena Ramirez, Jon Norman Schneider) Commedia dell’arte. Though Elements Touch on Twee – i Could Do Without Smith Circling the Stage in A TRICYCLE LIKE JIGSAW The Clown, Thought Thought It in the Script – They Retain a Winning Homesk Quality.

The familiarity of it all is crucial to the thing. Gioven the myth, or the number of times you might’ve seen it brought to life, you know the final turn is coming, though that never make it anymore. And it is Bracing when Ruhl tightens Her lens and has the play beCome suddenly specific – Those instructions Eurdice’s Father recites, for instance, direct you to Her Own GrandParents’ Former Home. For all its whimsy, the play center on something hard and insoluble: that we’ll Lose each Other, from one generation to the next, and that we’ll always come back to the dead, and wishing we listed.

You’re made to lean in and listten closely, too, in Bowl epin which two Friends Skateboard Back and Forth in the empty swimming pool Constructed by Adam Rigg and Anton Volovsek with the Vineyard theater. (This is a co-professional with the national blacks in association with the new group; it spreads tok tok bear the cost.) In Nazareth Hassan’s drama, which hassan also directs, the two teens go by the pseudonyms Kelly K Clarks (Essence) and Quentavius ​​the Quentavus) and Quentavus) (Ogoneero gbaje) and as they skate back and forth on various psychoactive substance, they dream up names for the rap grup they will berak say out of suburbia. They flirt, too, without realizing they’re flirting. Hassan Cuts BetWeen a Series of During Late Nights Like they’re Tracks on an album, with the titles project onto the Curved Concrete of the Pool: “Track Eight is slapping,” “Track ten is skating in snnoraf molly.”

Nor Eurydiceit soon becomes apparent we’re look back on something was was lost – that unformed but powerful Connection that is posseible in youth but can evaporate with the slightest disturbance. These two caare for each other but can never admit as much explicitly. Lotus’ Kelly is more comfortable with Expressing a level of Queerness, unzipping a gray sweatshirt to reveal a pink crop top, where GBAE’s Quentavius ​​is more bottled up. Hasan’s Early Scenes have a quiet, hypnotic Quality, an effect intensified by the pendulous motion of the actors’ skating back and forth. Butn, Hassan unleashes what’s lurking with quentavius ​​- quite literally durying an acid trip, a demonic embodiment of intimacy, itself played by felicia curry and known as “lemon pepper wings,” storms onto the staGe in an outfit that cospla. Imaginable. The Still Waters of Bowl ep erupt. We Hear A Series of Songs from Kelly and Quentavius’s Rap Act (The Music is by Free Fool). Curry Delivers a startling, and impressively long monologue that catapults the play into the futures. She Also Has a Gun.

Hassan’s Drama Can’t Revert to the Melow theatrics of Those Earlier Scenes after the Arrival of A Character Like Lemon Pepper, Nor and Seem Interesting in Doing SO. He also doesn’t try to contain curry, who goes all out in her sneering, shouting, and stomping tantrum of a performance. Her Arrival is Shattering, and Sort of Makes Impossible for Bowl ep to wrap up in any reasonable Way – the two kids go back to skating in a muted coda, after a bunch of fluid han cleaned up – but the Shards produced on impact are also what make the play Compelling, and at Times, unbearably poignant. IT’S as if hassan is applying an adult’s awareness of that youthful longing uppon those teenage characters, and MAKING US WATCHES AS THE WEIGHT OF WHAT COULDN’T HAVE HAPPENED SMASHES INTO WITH THE FORCE OF A HYDRAULIC PESS CRUSHING A PLASTIC DOLL. Or it is something something like orpheus looking back at the Eurydice on the way out of the underworld. If you’re able to name the thing as ephemeral as intimacy, to describe it in Such Lucidil, conjure it with Clarity. That, Surely, is a sign you no longer possess it.

Eurydice is at the signature theater through June 22.
Bowl ep is at the vineyard theater through june 15.