For Ruhl's characters - some of them immediately, all of them eventually - are dead, and so they speak the language of the dead. "A very quiet language," as one of them explains, and the sly amusement of that line gives a shivery intimation of the humor/sorrow that suffuses Ruhl's writing in this play. "Like if the pores in your face opened up and talked": The image makes no sense, and yet it precisely conveys how Ruhl imagines the dead speaking. We don't know what she means; we know exactly what she means.
In short, "Eurydice" is poetry, poetry made play. It inhabits some dream world that is neither foreign nor familiar, a world that looks just like the one around us and a world that none of us has ever seen. It is a metaphor of memory and loss realized with such elegant simplicity, such unexpected but utterly right images, that it moves beyond metaphor and becomes real - even as it retains the shimmering aura of impossibility that reminds us it could be real only in a dream.
Like dreams, Ruhl's plays can seem at once banal and strange on paper; they become truly vivid only when a director, a design team, and a cast of actors enter into the dream and create their own vision of it onstage. In "Eurydice," for example, the title character (Orpheus's wife, who dies on their wedding day) arrives in the underworld via elevator - and, inside the elevator, it's raining. In the script this can just seem a little odd; onstage it's thrillingly strange.
Of course such a play calls for intense commitment and vivid imagination on the part of any company that produces it. New Rep rises magnificently to the challenge.
