“ said, The mind is a slide ruler. It can fit around anything. Words can mean anything. Show me your body, he said. It only means one thing.”

some dramaturgy for by

compiled by Fly Steffens, Dramaturg Director Claire Mannle Scoundrel & Scamp Fall 2018 Table of Contents

3 some dramaturgical thoughts

4 An introduction to the myth, the play, and the , University of Rochester

8 Selections from Navigating Sorrow in Eurydice, James Al-Shamma

10 Orpheus, Eurydice, Hermes, Rainer Marie Rilke

13 Lockean Memory Theory: A Chart, Fly Steffens

14 Visit to a Small Planet: Some Questions to Ask a Play, Elinor Fuchs “Nothing else is possible besides what is there.” “There should be actual evidence on the planet for what you report.” Elinor Fuchs, Visit to a Small Planet

19 More Invisible Terrains (Interview with Sarah Ruhl), Wendy Weckwerth

27 Surreal Life: The Plays of Sarah Ruhl, John Lahr

“Oh, come on, just ride it . . . I prefer an actor who says, ‘My character doesn’t have a backstory, so I won’t concoct one. I will live as fully in every moment as I can. I will let the language move me, as opposed to a secret backstory of my own’” Sarah Ruhl in Surreal Life: The Plays of Sarah Ruhl, by John Lahr

35 Navigating Sorrow in Eurydice, Full Chapter

2 some dramaturgical thoughts…

“The form, structure, and mood of an artistic statement cannot be separated from its meaning, its conceptual content; simply because the work of art as a whole is its meaning, what is said in it is indissolubly linked with the manner in which it is said, and it cannot be said in any other way. [...] [a] play itself remains the clearest and most concise statement of its meaning and message, precisely because its uncertainties and irreducible ambiguities are an essential element of its total impact” (44-45).

“And what passes in these plays are not events with a definite beginning and a definite end, but types of situations that will forever repeat themselves. [...] probing down to a depth in which individuality and definite events no longer appear, only basic patterns emerge” (75-76).

“Yet it is only natural that plays written in so unusual and baffling a convention should be felt tobe in special need of an explanation that, as it were, would uncover their hidden meaning and translate it into everyday language. The source of this fallacy lies in the misconception that somehow these plays must be reducible to the conventions of the ‘normal’ theatre, with plots that can be summarized in the form of narrative. If only one could discover some hidden clue, it is felt, these difficult plays could be forced to yield their secret and reveal the plot of the conventional play that is hidden within them. Such attempts are doomed to failure. […] Instead of linear development, they present their author’s intuition of the human condition by a method that is essentially polyphonic; they confront their audience with an organized structure of statements and images that interpenetrate each other and that must be apprehended in their totality, rather like the different themes in a symphony, which gain meaning by their simultaneous interaction. But if we have to be cautious in our approach […], to avoid the pitfall of trying to provide an oversimplified explanation of their meaning, this does not imply that we cannot subject them to careful scrutiny by isolating sets of images and themes and by attempting to discern their structural groundwork. The results of such an examination should make it easier to follow the author’s intention and to see, if not the answers to [their] questions, at least what the questions are that [they are] asking” (45-46).

Esslin, Martin. The Theatre of The Absurd. Vintage Books, 2004.

3 introduction to the myth, the play, and the playwright from the University of Rochester International Theatre program

“The basis for Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice is the Greek myth concerning the tragic love between . Orpheus, the deity of the arts of the song and lyre, was the son of Apollo and the muse, Calliope. He married Eurydice, a nymph, under the blessing of Hymen, who offered no happy omens for the couple at their nuptial. Shortly after the marriage, the shepherd, Aristaeus, saw Eurydice while she was wandering with fellow nymphs. He was struck by her beauty and made advances toward her. Eurydice fled from him, but in doing so, stepped upon a serpent that bit her. Shortly after, she died. Following Eurydice’s death, Orpheus played his lyre and sang, creating nothing but sad and mournful songs. Nymphs and other gods wept at his music and tried to give him advice. The only way for Orpheus to lighten his painful loss was to descend into the underworld where his wife resided among the dead. After finding his way in through a cave, he passed by many crowds of ghosts and presented himself before the throne of Hades and Persephone, god of the dead and queen of the underworld. There, he sang and played his lyre for them. Through his music, Orpheus softened their hearts. Being the only person to have ever softened their hearts, Hades and Persephone agreed to allow Eurydice to return to earth with Orpheus. However, her departure from the Underworld was based on one condition: that Orpheus must walk in front of Eurydice and not look back until he had reached the upper world. In his anxiety, Orpheus looked back, and Eurydice vanished. After this loss, Orpheus renounced the love of women and took only youths as his lovers. Before Sarah Ruhl’s adaptation, this Greek tale of love and loss had been adapted in many different forms and mediums. The story has been told in film, such as Marcel Camus’ 1959 feature, ; drama, including ’ ; and and musicals, such as Stravinsky’s Orpheus and Philip Glass’, Orphée. It is also suggested by some musicologists that the second movement of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto was modeled after the story. The myth can also be found in references in modern television, music, and various other art forms. However, the majority of these works tell the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice as the myth was told: from the point of view of Orpheus. Sarah Ruhl has taken the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, and included in it the character of Eurydice’s father. She explores the human qualities of the myth and investigates the

4 relationship beneath the surface of the two tragic young lovers. Ruhl delves further into the Eurydice character by allowing the story to enter the underworld with her. Down there, we meet Eurydice’s father, a figure not mentioned in the myth, but an integral part of Eurydice’s life. Ruhl retains much of the original story and has even included a Greek chorus of stones in the underworld. However, with her adaptation written in a poetic, yet modern language, she achieves more than a simple tragic story. Her play is concerned with love and loss and what it means to lose loved ones. It is also a highly personal story that builds on the myth and Ruhl’s own relationship with her father. The story of Orpheus and Eurydice is iconic in western art and literature. The list of artists that have taken on the doomed lovers’ tale reads like a who’s who of culture: Ovid, Anouilh, Cocteau, Rilke, Berlioz, Gluck, Haydn, Offenbach, Stravinsky, Weill, Rodin and Rubens. Most of these artists are male, and concerned more with Orpheus than Eurydice. “So many major authors felt the need to grapple with it,” says Chicago-born playwright Sarah Ruhl, “Orpheus became a metaphor for themselves.” Would it be fair, then, to consider Eurydice a metaphor for Ruhl? “The whole play is a prism which refracts and is in some ways transparent in terms of my life. But Eurydice has her own soul, which is separate from mine. We are different. For example,” she offers with understated humor, “I’ve never been dead before.” The transparent relationship of the play to Ruhl’s own life is centered on death: her father died of bone cancer when she was 20. “My father was a very gentle man. It was inspiring to see how gracefully he handled being sick. I partly wrote the play to have more conversations with him,” she says, “but I wasn’t consciously aware of that at the time.” She has given Eurydice’s dead father a prominent role in her re-telling of the myth and, as she wrote, she gradually became aware of art imitating life. Sarah’s father, like Eurydice’s, taught his daughter words, although the purpose and setting were very different. “My father would take me to a pancake breakfast every week and teach me some new complicated word. It probably warped me for life—a seven- year-old, knowing words like ‘ostracize’.” Ruhl uses the word “subterranean” several times in discussing the process of writing Eurydice. Her relationship to the original myth is intuitive, not analytical. “I kept thinking about that moment when Orpheus looks back—to lose so much in such a small moment.” Her most direct literary inspiration was the Rilke poem “Orpheus, Eurydice, and Hermes,” and she read

5 the section about them in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (see accompanying text), but mostly she was relying on the basic myth we all know from oral tradition. “There’s not a lot in the original Greek—Ovid has two pages, that’s it. There was a play, but it didn’t survive. There are a few mentions in Virgil. And of course there’s plenty about the cult of Orpheus, but Eurydice didn’t get much consideration in that.” Ruhl tried not to read any material that was reminiscent of the story while actually writing the first draft of the script; however, while rewriting, she saw Cocteau’s “brilliant, gorgeous” Orphée, and loved the “obvious, crude theatrical special effect.” She is also a fan of the Brazilian film, Black Orpheus, as well as Anouilh’s stage play. Ruhl is glad she did not read his version until after she had written her own, “or I probably would have been too daunted to write at all,” she says. Although she was not strongly influenced by other artists’ renditions of the myth, Ruhl had inspiration along the way. She wrote the first draft of the play in one month for a new plays festival at , and then spent two years rewriting it. It was during those two years, once her own relationship to the story was clearly established, that she reached out more consciously toward other sources. Her eye was drawn to anything touching on the myth; she absorbed what was useful and discarded the rest. […] Deciding that the physical reality of the play required a light touch, she re-read Alice in Wonderland because “it’s the world we live in turned upside down”—an inspiration she translated quite literally into the Underworld. She also found inspiration in Samuel Beckett. “How could one consider using a chorus of stones without thinking a little about Beckett…his understanding of silence, stillness and all at once.” But inspiration came in all forms, from the specific and spontaneous—like the tricycle, a found object added during a workshop—to the conceptual, in the form of Ruhl’s own musings upon “the nefarious category of ‘interesting’,” which led to the character of the Nasty Interesting Man. “There is a certain kind of person who forever delights in ‘interesting’ over ‘good’ or ‘bad’,” Ruhl observes. “It’s an empty category of intellectual experience. [In the play] Orpheus is more interested in dividing the world into ‘beautiful’ and ‘not beautiful’, but it’s harder for Eurydice to accept that. The Nasty Interesting Man is a projection of Eurydice’s desire. He uses the word ‘interesting’ to suck her in.” Sometimes the inspiration was subtler, less direct: the

6 string room, for example, was to Ruhl the image of building a nest—a parent creating an invisible, spiritual home for a child, “the ability to build security out of thin air.” (She speaks with amusement of talkbacks held during workshops of the play, when people would ask her shy she wanted to “work with string” when avant-garde director Richard Foreman “had already taken string to such extremes.”) Some sources of inspiration remain a mystery to her. She has no idea where the elevator came from, but it does strike her as a contemporary expression of approaching the Greek Afterlife, especially since traveling in elevators can be very disorienting—the door always opens in a place other than where it closed. Ruhl is now fascinated with elevators; whenever she sees one she wonders, “Would this elevator be in the Underworld?” If some of these images seem more symbolic or poetical, there’s a reason. Ruhl’s original life plan was “to get a Ph.D. and become a professor who wrote poetry.” With that in mind, she was studying English and Creative Writing at Brown, focusing on non-dramatic forms (“bad fiction,” she calls it). A graduate student instructor encouraged her to study playwriting and Ruhl quickly became smitten with the teaching and work of the renowned , who runs Brown’s playwriting program. After graduation and stints in both Chicago and New York, Ruhl returned to Brown to attend the graduate playwriting program there, where she studied with Mac Wellman. A year after grad school, she moved from Providence to L.A. for love; she “can’t think why else anyone would move to Los Angeles.” When asked if Los Angeles, the is a kind of Underworld for her, she replies, “Yes, without the moral and spiritual structure that an Underworld implies. But I’ve written two plays since I’ve been here. And I’m starting a third. The world seems to be generous in surprising ways when you try to do hard things for love. Which is not always the lesson that the Greeks teach us.” http://www.sas.rochester.edu/theatre/productions/past/2006/eurydice/assets/pdf/eurydice.pdf

7 selections from “Navigating Sorrow in Eurydice” Al-Shamma, James. Sarah Ruhl: A Critical Study of the Plays. McFarland & Company, 2014. note: the full chapter (25 pages) is included in this packet; it includes an overview of the original productions, an exploration of Rilke’s “Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes.”, conceptual dualities explored in the play (i.e. music/language, life/death, etc.), elements present in the play, and the psychology of grieving

Thematic Dualities in the Play Life / Death Music / Language Romantic Love / Paternal Love Lightness / Heaviness Overworld / Underworld Farmer / Artist Memory / Forgetfulness Child / Adult Father / Husband High / Low Internal / External Art / Nature

LANGUAGE

“Ruhl built jthe play around the image of Eurydice causing Orpheus to turn around by calling his name; to her, this represented language overcoming music” (20).

“Orpheus conceives of language as limited to the expression of ideas that are either right or wrong – another duality – and this ambiguity unsettles him. Eurydice finds stories and language ‘interesting,’ and her employment of the word connotes layers of complexity that further unnerve Orpheus” (20)

“Ruhl illustrates personality as a construct of language by standing her characters upon three separate occasions. During the first two, Eurydice reacquires language; during the last, Orhpeus loses it. […] The first event reconnects Eurydice with her husband, the second with her father. She develops personality and reformulates relationships through this (re)acquisition” (21).

ELEMENTS “The duality of high/low may be more precisely layered into the four elements of classical Greek cosmology, ordered from high to low as fire, air, water, and earth. Within Eurydice, the elements may be loosely mapped to corresponding concepts: fire: art or the artistic temperament air: life water: grieving/forgetting earth: death

8 “The overall movement of the play follows a downward arc form the highest to the lowest of these. Fire, the element of the heavenly bodies, is most often associated with Orpheus. […] Air occupies the stratum below fire. Within the play it represents life through association with the breath. The language of the dead is a practically silent one, one without breath, as described by the stones. Voiced language, as singing and speaking, is associated with life. […] Next down from air is water. The play overthrows with references to this element, in the dialogue, sound effects, and set pieces. […] Water is frequently associated with grieving in the play […] Eurydice is drawn to water: she leaves her wedding twice for the water pump, she asks the Nasty Interesting Man for a glass of water, and she requests a bath when she arrives in the underworld. As water is associated with tears and bereavement, her craving for it manifests a compulsion to attend to the unfinished business of mourning for her father. For all of the sorrowful imagery of water, little actual crying occurs. […] Ruhl associates water not only with grieving, but also with forgetfulness [i.e. the River Lethe in Greek Mythology erases memory]. […] Beneath water lies earth, here associated with death. [i.e. the Stones, mentions of earthen root vegetables like turnips, etc.]” (23-25).

GRIEF

Bowlby’s Phases of Greif:Grief

1. Numbness and Disbelief: A phase of numbness that may be interrupted by outbursts of distress and/or anger. 2. Yearning and Searching: Accompanied by anxiety and intermittent period of anger. 3. Disorganization and Despair: Feelings of depression and apathy when old patterns have been discarded 4. Reorganization: Recovery from bereavement (Archer in Al-Shamma, 33).

Orpheus’ Grief is in Yearning and Searching:

1. Restless movement about and scanning of the environment 2. Preoccupation with thoughts of the lost person 3. Developing a perceptual “set” for the lost person, namely a disposition to perceive and to pay attention to stimuli which suggest the presence of the person and to ignore those that are not relevant to this aim 4. Directing attention towards those parts of the environment in which the person is likely to be 5. Calling for the lost person (Murray in Al-Shamma, 35).

9 Orpheus, Eurydice, Hermes Rainer Maria Rilke translated from the German by Stephen Mitchell

That was the deep uncanny mine of souls. Like veins of silver ore, they silently moved through its massive darkness. Blood welled up among the roots, on its way to the world of men, and in the dark it looked as hard as stone. Nothing else was red.

There were cliffs there, and forests made of mist. There were bridges spanning the void, and that great gray blind lake which hung above its distant bottom like the sky on a rainy day above a landscape. And through the gentle, unresisting meadows one pale path unrolled like a strip of cotton.

Down this path they were coming.

In front, the slender man in the blue cloak-- mute, impatient, looking straight ahead. In large, greedy, unchewed bites his walk devoured the path; his hands hung at his sides, tight and heavy, out of the falling folds, no longer conscious of the delicate lyre which had grown into his left arm, like a slip of roses grafted onto an olive tree. His senses felt as though they were split in two; his sight would race ahead of him like a dog, stop, come back, then rushing off again would stand, impatient, at the path's next turn,-- but his hearing, like an odor, stayed behind. Sometimes it seemed to him as though it reached back to the footsteps of those other two who were to follow him, up the long path home. But then, once more, it was just his own steps' echo, or the wind inside his cloak, that made the sound.

He said to himself, they had to be behind him; said it aloud and heard it fade away. They had to be behind him, but their steps were ominously soft. If only he could turn around, just once (but looking back would ruin this entire work, so near

10 completion), then he could not fail to see them, those other two, who followed him so softly:

The god of speed and distant messages, a traveler's hood above his shining eyes, his slender staff held out in front of him, and little wings fluttering at his ankles; and on his left arm, barely touching it: she.

A woman so loved that from one lyre there came more lament than from all lamenting women; that a whole world of lament arose, in which all nature reappeared: forest and valley, road and village, field and stream and animal; and that around this lament-world, even as around the other earth, a sun revolved and a silent star-filled heaven, a lament- heaven, with its own, disfigured stars--: So greatly was she loved.

But now she walked beside the graceful god, Her steps constricted by the trailing graveclothes, uncertain, gentle, and without impatience. She was deep within herself, like a woman heavy with child, and did not see the man in front or the path ascending steeply into life. Deep within herself. Being dead filled her beyond fulfillment. Like a fruit suffused with its own mystery and sweetness, she was filled with her vast death, which was so new, she could not understand that it had happened.

She had come into a new virginity and was untouchable; her sex had closed like a young flower at nightfall, and her hands had grown so unused to marriage that the god's infinitely gentle touch of guidance hurt her, like an undesired kiss.

She was no longer that woman with blue eyes who once had echoed through the poet's songs, no longer the wide couch's scent and island, and that man's property no longer.

She was already loosened like long hair, poured out like fallen rain,

11 shared like a limitless supply.

She was already root.

And when, abruptly, the god put out his hand to stop her, saying, with sorrow in his voice: He has turned around--, she could not understand, and softly answered Who?

Far away, dark before the shining exit-gates, someone or other stood, whose features were unrecognizable. He stood and saw how, on the strip of road among the meadows, with a mournful look, the god of messages silently turned to follow the small figure already walking back along the path, her steps constricted by the trailing graveclothes, uncertain, gentle, and without impatience.

12 13 Elinor Fuchs

EF’s Visit to a Small Planet: Some Questions to Ask a Play

Since its origination as a classroom tool in the early 1990s, Elinor Fuchs’s essay has acquired a devoted following, with tattered photocopies circulating in literary offices and university departments. More recently it has inspired discussions in Internet chat rooms and garnered citations in scholarly journals, despite remaining unavailable to a broad readership. The time has come to publish “EF’s Visit to a Small Planet,” an essay that widens our perception of dramatic worlds. Like good plays, it grows more mean- ingful with each reading. —Editors

The following walk through dramatic structure is a teaching tool. For the past several years I have used it at the Yale School of Drama as an entry to Reading Theater, a crit- ical writing course for students in the MFA Dramaturgy Program. The “Questions” below are in part designed to forestall the immediate (and crip- pling) leap to character and normative psychology that underwrites much dramatic criticism. Aside from that corrective bias, the approach offered here is not a “system” intended to replace other approaches to play analysis; I often use it together with Aris- totle’s unparalleled insight into plot structure. Rather, it could be thought of as a tem- plate for the critical imagination. In a fine article on Hedda Gabler, Philip E. Larson described the nature of “a genuine performance criticism.” If criticism “is unwilling to rest content with the eval- uation of ephemera,” he wrote, “[it] must attempt to describe a potential object, one that neither the dramatist, the critics, nor the reader has ever seen, or will see.”1 These “Questions” are intended to light up some of the dark matter in dramatic worlds, to illuminate the potentialities Larson points to. No matter what answers come, the very act of questioning makes an essential contribution to the enterprise of criticism. —Elinor Fuchs

5 14 fuchs

We must make the assumption that in the world of the play there are no accidents. Nothing occurs “by chance,” not even chance. In that case, nothing in the play is without significance. Correspondingly, the play asks us to focus upon it a total awareness, to bring our attention and curiosity without the censorship of selective interpretation, “good taste,” or “correct form.” Before making judgments, we must ask questions. This is the deepest meaning of the idea, often-repeated but little understood, that the study of art shows us how to live.

I. The World of the Play: First Things First

A play is not a flat work of literature, not a description in poetry of another world, but is in itself another world passing before you in time and space. Language is only one part of this world. Those who think too exclusively in terms of language find it hard to read plays. When you “see” this other world, when you experience its space-time dynamics, its architectonics, then you can figure out the role of language in it. If too tight a focus on language makes it hard to read plays, too tight a focus on character creates the opposite problem: it makes the reading too easy. To look at dra- matic structures narrowly in terms of characters risks unproblematically collapsing this strange world into our own world. The stage world never obeys the same rules as ours, because in its world, nothing else is possible besides what is there: no one else lives there; no other geography is available; no alternative actions can be taken. To see this entire world, do this literally: Mold the play into a medium-sized ball, set it before you in the middle distance, and squint your eyes. Make the ball small enough that you can see the entire planet, not so small that you lose detail, and not so large that detail overwhelms the whole. Before you is the “world of the play.” Still squinting, ask about the space. What is space like on this planet? Interior or exterior, built or natural? Is space here confined or wide open? Do you see a long passage with many “stations”? Do you see a landscape of valleys and mountains? Sea and land? Are we on an island? In a cave? In a desert or a jungle? On a country road? Now ask about the time. How does time behave on this planet? Does “time stand still”? Is time frantic and staccato on this planet? Is it leisurely, easy-going time? How is time marked on this planet? By clock? By the sun? By the sound of footsteps? What kind of time are we in? Cyclical time? Eternal time? Linear time? What kind of line? One day? One lifetime? Ask about the climate on this planet. Do we have storms? Eclipses of the sun and moon? Do we have extreme heat? Paralyzing cold? Is the environment on this planet lush and abundant, sere and life-denying, airless and suffocating? What is the seasonal “feel” of this world? Autumnal? Wintry? What is the mood on this planet? Jolly? Serious? Sad? Ironic? Sepulchral? The mood is not just a question of plot (comedies are “happy,” etc.), “tone” also contributes to mood. What is the tone of this planet? Delicate or coarse? Cerebral or passionate? Restrained or violent? How are mood and tone created on this planet? Through music? Light, sound, color, shape? What shapes? Curves? Angles?

6 15 ef’s visit to a small planet

Remember, you can’t just decide the planet is wintry or dark because you think it would look more interesting in snow or smog, at least not yet. Make sure you’re alert to what’s there; there should be actual evidence on the planet for what you report. You’re not done. In most dramatic worlds there are hidden, or at least unseen, spaces. Ask questions about them as well. What are their characteristics of space, time, tone, and mood? How do they relate to the represented world, the world you can see? Finally, while you’re looking at this planet, listen to its “music.” Every dramatic world will have, or suggest, characteristic sounds—of mourning, celebration, chil- dren’s patter, incantation. It will alternate sounds of human and landscape, or sound and silence. Listen for the pattern of the sound.

II. The Social World of the Play: A Closer Look

You are still not ready to examine the beings who inhabit this world. Before you inquire into their individual traits and motives, there are other things you need to know. Keep squinting at the planet. Is this a public world, or private? What are its class rules? Aristocratic? Popular? Mixed? In what kinds of patterns do the figures on this planet arrange themselves? Do you see groups in action, isolated individuals, both? Is there a single central figure, sur- rounded by a group? Are figures matched off in conflicting pairs? Are you seeing (and feeling) the tension of interlocking triangles? How do figures appear on this planet? Are they inward or two-dimensional? Subtle? Exaggerated? Are they like puppets? Like clowns? Like you? (Are you sure?) How do figures dress on this planet? In rags, in gowns, in cardboard cutouts? Like us? (Are you sure?) How do figures interact? By fighting? Reasoned discussion? Who has power on this planet? How is it achieved? Over whom is it exercised? To what ends is it exercised? What are the language habits on this planet? Verse or prose, dialogue or mono- logue, certainly. But also, what kinds of language predominate—of thoughts or of feelings? And what kinds of feelings? Is language colorful or flat, clipped or flowing, metaphorical or logical? Exuberant or deliberate? And what about silences?

III. What Changes?

You have gotten a feel for this world. Now look at it dynamically, because it moves in time. Within the “rules” of its operation, nothing stays the same. What changes in this world? Look at the first image. Now look at the last. Then locate some striking image near the center of the play (the empty box in Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy is a good example). To give an account of destiny on this planet range over these three markers. Why was it essential to pass through the gate of the central image to get from the first to the last? 7 16 Diagram of the circles of the sphere, refraction, and parallax. Illustration: Sir Robert Stawell Ball

What changes in the landscape of this world? Does it move from inside to out- side? From valleys to mountains? From town to wilderness? What changes in time? Does time move from dusk to night? Night to dawn? Morning to midnight? Through four seasons of a year? Through the stages of a human life? Or the stages of eternal life, from to Last Judgment? What changes in language? In tone, mood, dress? All of the changes you discover will of course contribute to and reflect on char- acter, but each trajectory should be seen as a signifying system on its own. What changes in the action? Have we moved from confusion to wedding (the basic plot of romantic comedy)? From threat to peaceful celebration (the basic plot of [traditional] tragicomedy)? From threat to disaster (the basic plot of tragedy)? From suffering to rebirth (the plot of the Passion play)? From threat to dual outcome, suffer- ing for evil persons and vindication for good (the basic plot of melodrama)? What doesn’t change? Is there a stable or fixed point in this world? An absolute reality? God? The grave? Squint one last time. Putting together space, time, the natural world and the social world, elements that change and those that don’t, you are discovering the “myth.” Plays are full of archetypal places—castles, gardens, forests, roads, islands, green worlds, dream worlds, storms, night scenes, and on and on. If the play starts in a palace, goes on to a moonlit forest, and returns to the palace the next day or night (which is it? day or night?), what does that progression tell you? How is the final palace scene condi- tioned by the night journey into the forest? Is the world of the play at the end of the play a transformed world? Or is it the same world returned to “normal,” with minor adjustments? Worlds stand or fall on your answer.

8 17 ef’s visit to a small planet

IV. Don’t Forget Yourself

Seeking what changes, don’t forget to ask what changes in you, the imaginer of worlds. Ask, what has this world demanded of me? Does it ask me for pity and fear? Does it ask me to reason? To physically participate in the action on the stage? Does it ask me to interact with other spectators? To leave the theater and take political action? To search my ethical being to the core? Maybe this world means only to entertain me, why not? But how does it make this intention known?

V. Theatrical Mirrors

Important as these internal systems are, dramatic worlds don’t just speak to and within themselves; they also speak to each other. How many performances are signaling to you from inside this world? How many echoes of other dramatic worlds do they sug- gest? How do these additional layers of theatricality comment on what you have already discovered?

VI. The Character Fits the Pattern

Only now are you really ready to examine the figures who inhabit this world. Every assumption you make about a character must reflect the conditions of its world, including the way psychology functions in that world. You can arrive at the most inter- esting version of any question about character by first exploring the features of her theatrical planet. Characters mean only as they inhabit, enact, fulfill, engage a succes- sion of sites, actions, and objects under a specific set of conditions. They are constituents of a complex artistic pattern. Find the pattern first! Warning: Don’t permit yourself to construct a pattern that omits “singularities,” puzzling events, objects, figures, or scenes that “do not fit.” Remember, there is noth- ing in the world of a play by accident. The puzzles may hold the key. Assume that the dramatic world is entirely conscious, determinate, limited. Give an account of that world that attempts to consider the role of every element in that world—visual, aural, temporal, tonal, figural. Become curious as each element is revealed as a player in the play. Be someone who is aroused to meaning. Of course you can construct meaning in this world in many different ways. Con- struct it in the most inclusive way you can. There will still be more to see.

Note

1. Philip E. Larson, “French Farce Conventions and the Mythic Story Pattern in Hedda Gabler: A Performance Criticism,” in Contemporary Approaches to Ibsen (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget AS, 1985), 202.

9 18

More Invisible Terrains

Sarah Ruhl, Interviewed by Wendy Weckwerth

wendy weckwerth Eurydice has been pre- money to have a raining elevator. The set de- sented at Brown University, Vassar College, the signer, Narelle Sissions, was brilliant and trans- Children’s Theatre Company in Minneapolis, and lated every word onto the stage. But after the Madison Repertory Theater. How did those en- Minneapolis production, I also know that the counters with the play shape its development? play can be done in a really simple, bare kind of a way. sarah ruhl Its first professional production was at Madison Rep, directed by Richard Cor- In an early stage direction you describe the world of ley, and the others were workshop productions Eurydice as “more Alice-in-Wonderland than and readings. I certainly was rewriting after the Hades,” and you create a vivid visual world remi- workshop productions. It also had, I think, niscent of the associative logic of Alice in Wonder- fourteen staged readings. It was a long, long land. The raining elevator and the room of string road in development. By the thirteenth reading come to mind. I didn’t change a word. I don’t know how much the script actually changed between the seventh I honestly don’t remember where the raining reading and the thirteenth reading. Probably elevator came from. I remember seeing it clearly not a lot. But the artists I met along the way when I was first writing the play. I knew that definitely opened me up, opened up the pos- Eurydice arrived in this raining elevator. I think sibilities of how I thought it could be staged. it’s something about contemporary alienation: For example, at Children’s Theatre Company, the experience of going to the underworld in- Rebecca Brown and Darron West directed a volves an alienation or unfamiliarity. Not in a reading in the Jimmy Jingle Building with devilish or horrible way, but in a contemporary nothing but four red chairs and a door they way. Like when you go to a mall and you’re in an painted red. No lights. They did an amazing elevator. It smells funny and it’s tinny. Then you Orpheus in the production, but there was no budget. Madison walk out and you’re in a corporate hell. I was raining elevator in was the first time that people paid for their tick- thinking about that sort of moral neutrality in Eurydice, directed by Richard Corley. ets. When Rebecca and Darron did it in Min- the underworld I was creating. The Greek un- Madison Repertory derworld wasn’t really punitive; it wasn’t Dante’s neapolis, the Stones became a kabuki-style cho- Theatre, Madison, rus orchestrating everything that happened in Inferno. It’s not fun to be Sisyphus, but you Wisconsin, 2003. the underworld. The Stones made it rain in don’t have the same kind of Christian idea of Photo: Brent Nicastro the elevator by pouring water on people. In the damnation. Madison production, though, we actually had

29 20 weckwerth

In another stage direction, you ask the actors play- person arrives from her forgotten life. That ing Orpheus and Eurydice to “resist the temptation poem and myth have stayed with me for a long to play ‘classical.’” What idea of “classical” do you time. I’m also compelled by the questions the want them to avoid? myth raises about music and language. Mainly, though, I was caught with this idea of memory I guess playing it “classical” means playing the and language and the idea of Eurydice going idea of anything, which is always less fruitful into the underworld and meeting her father than playing the experience of it. Playing with there. The play is really dedicated to my father, your arms akimbo, or howling in a “Greek” way, who died when I was twenty and he was fifty- rather than just playing it truthfully, which is five. Eurydice is a transparently personal play. I what I would ask actors for with any of my wanted to write something where I would be plays. In the opening scene of Eurydice, for allowed to have a few more conversations with instance, there is a sense of epic. But I also him. A myth exploring the underworld and the think it’s important that they’re just two young connection between the dead and the living was kids at the beach playing a game. There is an a way to negotiate that terrain. intimacy or truth inside their grander epic nar- rative—the one that we’re so accustomed to. I The idea of memory as something that can be wanted to find a way into that sense of epic that washed away and painfully retrieved is a com- was more ordinary, more personal. So the style pelling idea in Eurydice. Would you address the is not Zoë Wanamaker wailing over a mask in a final moments of the play when we see Eurydice’s Broadway production, although that is amaz- grandmother, another occupant of the underworld ing in its own right. But because we have an idea who has experienced erasure of memory? of the Greeks that’s an arm’s distance away, I wanted the acting style to have ordinary inti- I was looking for metaphysical layering, so that macy among the actors and with the audience. we would see someone who has completely lost her memory. The grandmother takes walks What attracted you to Eurydice and her story? across the stage that are like little silent plays unto themselves and can be really specific. Some It’s such a powerful myth, and it has always actors would balk at not having her encoded in stayed with me, more than any other Greek language, not having a certain amount of lines. myth. I’d seen so many beautiful retellings from But having the grandmother make that last Cocteau to Black Orpheus, but rarely does any- cross gives the play emotional balance. It’s not one look at Eurydice’s experience. I always as tidy or as Greek as the tragedy would be if found that troubling—she’s the one who dies we just saw Orpheus coming down and the tri- and takes a journey before Orpheus, but we angle between Orpheus, Eurydice, and the don’t really see her experience. father. It’s larger, it’s continual—life does go There’s an exception, a beautiful 1904 on. The grandmother becomes an emblem of Rilke poem called “Orpheus. Eurydice. Her- memory loss as sort of a happy thing. I’ve seen mes.” Rilke looks at Eurydice’s experience, at some people lose their memory who have been the fullness of her death when Orpheus arrives, quite happy in the void they’re moving into, but with a kind of ambivalence. Rilke says she’s for other people who are aware of it, it’s so horri- become fuller, rounder, in her death. Then this

30 21 more invisible terrains ble and tragic and painful. For Eurydice and her In Eurydice you stage one view of hell, and in The father the pain comes out of their consciousness Clean House one of your characters opines about of memories, but the grandmother is less con- heaven, saying, “I think maybe heaven is a sea of scious of what’s slipping away. She’s more untranslatable jokes. Only everyone is laughing.” peaceful, which for me makes her less ambiva- What led you to dramatize these two unusual lently hopeful. visions of life’s end?

I was raised Catholic, although I’m not practic- I’ve read three of your plays: Eurydice, Melan- ing. But I was influenced by the sense of ritual choly Play, and The Clean House. They reveal a and staging the invisible that is done at a Cath- deep knowledge of theater history and an under- olic mass. I’m always interested in theater that standing of dramatic structure. I’m thinking explores that kind of territory. From Maeter- specifically of the chorus in Eurydice and the letters linck to Paula Vogel’s play The Long Christmas in both Eurydice and Melancholy Play (the let- Ride Home there’s the sense that theater is a ters being a vestige of the well-made play and a place where you can actually look at the invisi- descendant of Greek drama’s messengers). How ble. That’s what makes it close to poetry. would you characterize your debt to past forms? I’m interested in what theater can do Mac Wellman talks about ransacking theater metaphysically with religiosity. If you’ve got a history for forms to dredge up and reuse. That living room, as in The Clean House, I’m inter- fascinates me. What happens when you reuse a ested in what’s below it and what’s above it. form? Why do we reuse forms? When is it sub- There’s no hell in that play except the hell of versive and when is it a cliché? I love choruses, Lane’s own narrowness of mind, really. Stage and I think it’s almost as if you can’t end up space can be transformative, and there’s so with an untheatrical play if you have a chorus. I much beyond the living room walls. I guess I’m don’t tend to write in a realist mode. I’m inter- interested in those more invisible terrains. ested in things that automatically dig you out of that impulse. You can’t have realism with a cho- The Clean House trades on true love, marital rus, because automatically you’re in a world fidelity, class difference, and the apparent opposi- where people reflect theatrically on what they’re tion of career women and homemakers. How do experiencing. A chorus is very public: you can’t these large themes relate to your creation of indi- have a contained living room where everyone’s vidual figures? drama is interior. There’s something civic, I didn’t start out with a big theme that I wanted something that connects the experience of the to write about. That would paralyze me. Oddly chorus with the audience. enough, it started with a true story. I was at a When I was getting my MFA at Brown, party full of doctors. One of them came into I taught undergraduates, and they were so mar- the room, and someone asked her how she was ried to a rubric of believability—it drove me doing. She said that she’d had such a hard crazy. So I finally told them to write a play with month because her cleaning lady from Brazil a chorus. Once they found a way to use a chorus, was depressed and wouldn’t clean the house. So they were compelled to be theatrical; their she had her medicated, but the woman still worlds all turned around and became really wouldn’t clean. She said, “I’m sorry, but I didn’t interesting. I guess that’s why I do theater go to medical school so I could clean my own instead of any other form. It’s alive.

31 22 weckwerth

house.” It was all laid out right there, ready for “What it is, With all the Kinds causes symptomes the page. That statement is an amazingly effi- prognostickes & severall cures of it. In three Parti- cient, clear description of a woman’s psychol- tions with their severall Sections members and sub- ogy, but it also contains all kinds of other cul- sections.” You follow it up with the injunction, “A tural information. Here’s this woman who contemporary farce.” What tone do you want the thinks she’s transcended cleaning because of play to strike? her education. It’s as though liberal-minded I was worried that it would be played as a medi- career women are too good to clean their own tation when I was looking for something more house. That fascinates me on a political level, outward. That’s why I refer to Jacobean plays. but also on spiritual and psychological levels. In the plays of the Elizabethan and Jacobean What does it mean to be alienated from your periods melancholy is still an outward, yearn- own dirt? What does it mean for the upper ing, active thing. It’s not a depressive, internal, classes to be alienated from the exigencies of shaggy, filmic state. Even Hamlet’s melancholy everyday living, so that they’re not noticing is just partially internalized; it’s still very out- what accumulates over time? When I first ward. When I started doing readings of the play started the play I was mostly interested in the I realized that many people of my generation pure politics of it—this woman I met at the don’t think of melancholy in that Jacobean— cocktail party made me so angry. Then I real- or even 1940s-movies—way, where it can be an ized she had to become more human to me if I externalized longing. was going to write about her.

Aside from the subtitle and the seventeenth-century Would you talk about the unusual method of mercy definition of melancholy in the script, you also killing you dramatize in The Clean House? infuse formal elements of Jacobean drama, such as There’s something compassionate about humor; the triangulation of characters and the discovery of it has a saving power. It seemed to me that if a long-lost sibling. you took the most sublime version of a joke— I don’t know if Melancholy Play actually suc- the Platonic ideal of a joke—that it could ceeds as a farce on a formal level, but it should transport you somehow. I remember when my have the momentum of a farce. I was looking father was sick that humor was a form of grace for an outward framework that would give the in the household. Humor pushed to an extreme, play a sensation of flight but also allow it to be a like any emotion, has a transformative power. bit meditative within. The only playwright I’ve In the play the joke is abstracted, but we see the seen succeed at this strategy is Charles Mee in compassion of one woman killing another his play Wintertime: it works perfectly as a farce, woman with a form of euthanizing humor. with its fast exits and entrances and deaths that Mathilda is willing to do this for Ana without aren’t really deaths, and yet it’s all a meditation even thinking about it—she takes pity on Ana on love. There’s something atmospheric about and kills her with a joke, and that’s the emo- Melancholy Play, a tonal strangeness. It shifts tional heart of the play. from being rather presentational to a descrip- tion of internal states and relationships—and You give Melancholy Play an extensive subtitle then you get Frank longing for his lost Scandi- reminiscent of an Elizabethan or Jacobean play: navian sister.

32 23 more invisible terrains

“Melancholy” seems like a romantic term for de- vidual. If all we can talk about in our culture is Eurydice in the pression, a contemporary medical term with social depression, what happens to that other emo- Underworld. Photo: Brent Nicastro and pharmaceutical implications. How did con- tional quality? It’s actually quite important, temporary society’s preoccupation with this later because melancholy is about the passage of instantiation of melancholy influence you? time, about cycles and loss, which are real things. If we can’t mourn them together, we I feel we are losing a whole category of emotion lose a whole section of cultural life. thanks to the language of depression that sur- I’ve done a few readings of Melancholy rounds us. Depression is very clinical, and it Play with undergraduates, and the idea that isn’t generative. But melancholy is a state with melancholy could be good or delicious was so beautiful possibilities. Melancholy can be com- alien to them. They’re the Prozac generation, munal: like when you discuss the past with they grew up on Ritalin; for them, depression is other people, or the afternoon before twilight. just something to be excised like a tumor. I’m Depression is isolating; it’s all about the indi- interested in how that will affect our culture.

33 24 Eurydice. Alienation is a prominent theme in your work, as I get the sense that close relationships, intimate and Photo: Brent Nicastro you’ve already mentioned in connection with the otherwise, are difficult in your plays, hedging elevator in Eurydice. How do alienation or defa- toward impossible. The figures you dramatize are miliarization surface in The Clean House and both fueled by hopes of finding a human connection Melancholy Play? and oppressed by a sense of futility during their search. I don’t set out to write about characters who are alienated, but my characters do have a distance I believe in the possibility of true love—I think. from normal that allows them a different kind But there’s not much use in writing about it. of perception. In The Clean House Mathilda is Then we’d just be jealous of the people on an outsider looking into a culture that is strange stage. It’s like Mathilda’s view of her parents’ to her. In Melancholy Play Tilly is a European love in Melancholy Play: you can only see it in relic living in . They’re both displaced. flashback. You can only see it in a dance. You I’m fascinated by people who are deposited into can’t ever hear them speaking: what would strange landscapes. Theater can explore dis- those people have to say that we’d want to listen placement so well because the audience itself to? I think those states are possible but hard to has been brought into an unfamiliar landscape. look at artistically. I end up writing about doomed love.

34 25 more invisible terrains

It seems a bit surprising that, at your compara- What is your next project? tively young age, the loss of life and love feature so Right now I’m working on a commission for prominently in your plays. , a third part for a project I’ve Yes, I don’t know why. I went through a lot in already started. I have an obsession with Pas- my early twenties, but I was kind of like an sion plays. My first play, Passion Play, was about eighty-year-old when I was five. Hopefully I’ll a village in northern England that was perform- continue to become more lighthearted as I get ing the Passion in 1575. The man playing Pon- older. tius Pilate wants the role of Christ, which is played by his cousin. The play then jumps Which experiences have shaped your development to Oberammergau, Bavaria, in 1934—Hitler as a writer? loved the story of the Passion because of its anti-Semitism. Everyone in the town was a Paula Vogel is basically the reason I started Nazi by the end of the war except the actors writing plays at all. She’s amazing. She taught who played Judas and Pontius Pilate. I have me when I was an undergraduate at Brown and always wanted to write a third part set in the I was much more serious about writing poetry . It will concern the rhetoric of and fiction. the religious right in small towns, and what that My mom’s an actress, and I had grown means politically and theatrically. up going to her rehearsals, but the first time I wrote plays was with Paula. After my father died I came back to Brown and took a class with her. I was having trouble writing, and she found ways to get around that emotionally, to write indirectly about experience—which is what she does in her own work and teaching so beau- tifully. After Paula I studied with Mac Well- man, who’s also remarkable and so different from Paula. And with Nilo Cruz. So I had won- derful teachers. I first wrote Eurydice during a workshop with Mac, when we were supposed to write one-acts for a new play festival. I wrote it quickly, just the skeleton of it, and then went back and reworked it. I’ve written six plays—Passion Play, Orlando, Eurydice, Melancholy Play, Late: a cow- boy song, and The Clean House—but I don’t really write poetry anymore. Every so often I’ll be inspired to write a poem when reading other people’s work or based on some event. I used the poetry I was writing as source material for plays. Now I find myself starting with the play itself.

35 26 A Critic at Large March 17, 2008 Issue Surreal Life

The plays of Sarah Ruhl.

By John Lahr

hen the playwright Sarah Ruhl works at home, she sits at a desk in her young daughter Anna’s W bedroom, beside a window overlooking a paddletennis court amid a red brick apartment maze on the East Side of Manhattan. A white gate, like a picket fence, stretches across the width of the small room, dividing the toddler’s play area from her mother’s. Ruhl, who is thirty-four and has already won a half-million-dollar MacArthur Fellowship for her plays (which include “The Clean House,” a comedy that was a Pulitzer Prize nalist in 2005), writes in a poised, crystalline style about things that are irrational and invisible. Ruhl is a fabulist. Her plays celebrate what she calls “the pleasure of heightened things.” In them, sh walk and caper (“Passion Play”), stones talk and weep (“Eurydice”), a dog is a witness to and the narrator of a family tragedy (“Dog Play”), a woman turns into an almond (“Melancholy Play”). Ruhl’s characters occupy, she has said, “the real world and also a suspended state.” Her new play, “Dead Man’s Cell Phone,” now at Horizons, is a meditation on death, love, and disconnection in the digital age; like her other works, it inhabits a dramatic netherworld between personal suspense and suspended time. “Cell phones, iPods, wireless computers will change people in ways we don’t even understand,” Ruhl told me. “We’re less connected to the present. No one is where they are. There’s absolutely no reason to talk to a stranger anymore—you connect to people you already know. But how well do you know them? Because you never see them—you just talk to them. I nd that terrifying.”

Looming over Ruhl’s writing table is a poster of a photograph from Walker Evans’s late-nineteen- thirties series of New York City subway riders, a gift from her husband, Tony Charuvastra, a child psychiatrist. (They married in 2005, after a seven-year courtship.) The juxtaposition of photographer and playwright—both entrepreneurs of tone and atmosphere—is one of those unconscious visual provocations that Ruhl’s plays relish. “I like to see people speaking ordinary words in strange places, or people speaking extraordinary words in ordinary places,” Ruhl has said. Evans wanted to project, he wrote, the “delights of seeing”; Ruhl wants to project the delights of pretense, “the interplay between the actual and the magical.” Evans once wrote about the “dream of making photographs like poems.” Ruhl began her career as a poet—her rst book, “Death in Another Country,” a collection of verse, was published when she was twenty—and she sees her plays as “three-dimensional poems.” Evans’s subway photos were taken at furtive angles, with his lens hidden in the buttonhole of his coat and an operating cable up his sleeve; Ruhl’s narrative strategy is similarly oblique and cunning, and she aspires to a kind of reportorial anonymity. “If one is unseen, one has the liberty to observe and make things up,” she told me. “It’s very difficult to overhear a conversation if one is speaking loudly.” One night, at the Center production of “The Clean House”—a tale about an unhappy Brazilian maid looking for the

27 perfect joke in the midst of her employer’s family ructions—Ruhl sat unrecognized behind an elderly couple. “I didn’t not like it,” the woman said after the houselights came up. “I didn’t not like it,” her gentleman friend chimed in. “They turned to me,” Ruhl recalled, and asked, “ ‘What did you think?’ I said, ‘I didn’t not like it, either.’ ”

Ruhl, like her plays, is deceptively placid. She is petite and polite. Her voice is high-pitched, as if she had been hitting the helium bottle. She wears her auburn hair pinned back by a barrette, in demure schoolmarm fashion; in her choice of clothes, too, she favors an unprepossessing look—a carapace of ordinariness, forged out of her Illinois childhood and “the ability of Midwesterners to pulverize people who seem slightly precocious,” she explained. (“In third grade, somebody sent me a poison-pen letter,” Ruhl, who was bullied for being intelligent, said. “I corrected the punctuation and sent it back.”) Nothing in her modest mien indicates her steeliness, her depth, or her piquant wit. Ruhl is reserved but not shy, alert but not aggressive. She feels big emotions; she just doesn’t express them in a big way. “I had one boyfriend who really wished I would yell and scream at him,” she said. Even her laugh is just three short, unobtrusive intakes of breath.

But if Ruhl’s demeanor is unassuming, her plays are bold. Her nonlinear form of realism—full of astonishments, surprises, and mysteries—is low on exposition and psychology. “I try to interpret how people subjectively experience life,” she has said. “Everyone has a great, horrible opera inside him. I feel that my plays, in a way, are very old-fashioned. They’re pre-Freudian in the sense that the Greeks and Shakespeare worked with similar assumptions. Catharsis isn’t a wound being excavated from childhood.”

ightness—the distillation of things into a quick, terse, almost innocent directness—is a value on L which Ruhl puts much weight. “Italo Calvino has an essay that I think is profound,” she told me, scouting a oor-length living-room bookshelf until she found Calvino’s “Six Memos for the Next Millennium,” a series of posthumously published lectures on the imaginative qualities that the new millennium should call into play. Of his dening categories—among them quickness, exactitude, visibility, and multiplicity—lightness is foremost. “In the even more congested times that await us, literature must aim at the maximum concentration of poetry and of thought,” he writes. Ruhl, in her plays, contends with the pressing existential issues; her stoical comic posture is a means of killing gravity, of taking the heaviness out of her words in order to better contend with life. “Lightness isn’t stupidity,” she said. “It’s actually a philosophical and aesthetic viewpoint, deeply serious, and has a kind of wisdom—stepping back to be able to laugh at horrible things even as you’re experiencing them.” In “Melancholy Play” (2002), a farce about suffering, Ruhl dramatized the point. Among a group of sad sacks, who are gourmands of grief—they ght over “a vial of tears”—a bank teller named Tilly causes havoc when she pronounces herself happy. “I feel lighter and lighter,” Tilly says. “I am trying to cultivate —a sensation of—gravity. But nothing helps.”

Lightness, Ruhl said, was “probably a family style.” She grew up in Wilmette, Illinois, where she had “a wonderful family. I’m not like a lot of artists in that way.” Her father, Patrick, marketed toys for a number of years, a job that was a mismatch for his intellectual abilities. “He should have been a history 28 professor,” Ruhl said, though he loved puns, reading, language, and jazz. “I think Sarah’s appreciation of music comes from him,” her older sister, Kate Ruhl, a psychiatrist, told me. So, too, did her fascination with language. Each Saturday, from the time Ruhl was ve, Patrick took his daughters to the Walker Bros. Original Pancake House for breakfast and taught them a new word, along with its etymology. (The language lesson and some of Patrick’s words—“ostracize,” “peripatetic,” “defunct”—are memorialized in the 2003 “Eurydice,” a retelling of the Orpheus myth from his inamorata’s point of view, in which the dead Father, reunited with his daughter, tries to re-teach her lost vocabulary.) Patrick died of cancer in 1994, when Ruhl was twenty. That year, because he was ill, the family had to forgo its usual summer trip to Cape Cod; instead, as Kate recalled, “we brought Cape Cod to our house. We pretended we were away—we would watch dumb summer movies, get the kid food we ate on the Cape. We were a really good foursome.” Ruhl, recollecting her father’s last days, said, “He’d be making jokes about having radioactive urine. We’d all be laughing. It was so gracious.”

Ruhl’s mother, Kathleen, who now holds a Ph.D. in Language, Literacy, and Rhetoric, from the University of Illinois, added to the family’s sense of caprice. For most of her children’s growing up, Kathleen was a high-school English teacher who moonlighted as an actress and a director. She would come down to dinner—according to Ruhl, who calls her “vivid”—“doing the maid’s speech from Ionesco’s ‘Bald Soprano.’ ” Ruhl said, “We were encouraged to play at home, so that art-making didn’t seem like an escape from family or a retreat but very much a part of life.” Even Kathleen’s method of inculcating manners was a license to play. “We had Pig Night,” Kathleen said. “One night a week, the girls could be as horrible as they wanted. The rest of the week, they had to make an effort.” The Ruhl children knew all about performance. They were taken on summer pilgrimages to Stratford, Ontario, to see Shakespeare. Ruhl has memories of being bewildered and furious, watching “Julius Caesar” (“lots of white togas”) and going backstage after “The Tempest” to look at the ship (“That was magical”). Kathleen would also tote them to her rehearsals. Even as a girl, Ruhl, who was considered an “old soul” by her family, had a keen analytic eye. “One of the most intense theatrical experiences for her was when I directed ‘Enter Laughing,’ ” Kathleen said. “She got to know all the actors. By that point, people would ask her for her notes. She was six or seven.”

“When other kids were outside playing, Sarah would be wrapped in a comforter drinking tea and reading,” Kate said. “We used to joke that she had consumption.” Ruhl told me, “There was always a little part of me that stood apart and observed and made things up. My mom says that, even before I could write, I would tell stories and she would type them up for me.” Then as now, storytelling worked as an antidepressant for her. “If I’m sad in life, I’ll tell someone something strange and funny that happened to me to make myself feel better,” she said. The thrill of transformation is something she began learning at the age of ten, through improvisational games at the Piven Theatre, a seventy-seat venue in Evanston, Illinois, whose Young People’s Company, to which Ruhl briey belonged, can claim such accomplished graduates as John Cusack, Joan Cusack, Jeff Garlin, and Rosanna Arquette. Joyce Piven, the co-founder and artistic director, told me, “We acted stories, myths, fairy tales, folktales, then literary tales—Chekhov, Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, Salinger.” The theatre, Ruhl said, “didn’t use props, and didn’t have sets. Language did everything. So, from an early age: no fourth wall, and

29 things can transform in the moment.” As an improviser, according to Piven, Ruhl “wasn’t a standout— she’s not basically a performer.” (Ruhl concurs: “I don’t like being watched.”) But she began taking Piven’s scene-study class, and ended up teaching the work. “She hears the play in all its dimensions,” Piven said, adding, “She writes from a distance, so she can play. Even if you’re writing about a very serious thing and invested up to your eyes, intensity can kill a lot for the actor and the writer.”

VIDEO FROM THE N YORKER Lies and Truth in the Era of Trump

Apart from a courtroom drama about a land-mass dispute between an isthmus and an island, which Ruhl wrote in fourth grade, and which her teacher declined to stage—“Perhaps that’s why I’m writing plays now, to exorcize my psychic battle with Mr. Spangenberger,” Ruhl says—she didn’t start writing plays until her junior year at Brown University, in 1995. In “Dog Play,” her rst piece, a ten-minute exercise assigned by her teacher, the playwright Paula Vogel, Ruhl synthesized Kabuki stage techniques with a suburban American environment to evoke her grief over her father’s death. The Dog, whose baying “as though his heart is breaking” opens the show, says, “I dreamed last night that I could speak and everyone could understand. I was telling them that he is not dead, that I can see him. No one believed me.” Vogel, who later cited Ruhl in her award-winning play “Baltimore Waltz” as one of the people “who had changed the way I looked at drama,” told me, “I sat with this short play in my study and sobbed. She had an emotional maturity that no one else in the class had.” Vogel added, “I said, ‘I want to work with you,’ and she answered, ‘Well, I’m going to be a poet. I’m not gonna be doing playwriting.’ My heart kind of sank, but I went, ‘Well, O.K. Good luck.’ ” But Vogel’s appreciation of

30 Ruhl’s work prevailed. “I do think it’s important having someone say, ‘You could do this for life,’ ” Ruhl said. “Paula was that person.”

Ruhl spent the next year at Pembroke College, Oxford, where she studied English literature, and when she returned her sights were not on poetry but on playwriting. Her literary volte-face was due in part to her confusion about the confessional “I” of her poetic voice, which she felt had been exhausted in mourning her father. In “Dream,” for instance, she wrote, “I wake this morning and gather a mouthful of dirt— / words—with a teaspoon, that you may speak to me again.” “I didn’t know what a poem should be anymore,” she said. “Plays provided a way to open up content and have many voices. I felt that onstage one could speak lyrically and with emotion, and that the actor was longing for that kind of speech, whereas in poetic discourse emotion was in some circles becoming embarrassing.”

The turning point for Ruhl came in 1997, at a production of “Passion Play,” her rst full-length work, which Vogel had arranged at Trinity Repertory Company, in Providence, Rhode Island. Kathleen drove herself and Sarah to the event. They had an accident, and Sarah was briey knocked unconscious. Nonetheless, she managed to see her play. “At a visceral level, watching the play, I thought, This is it,” she said. “Some people stood. What whorish playwright wouldn’t be excited about that? It was momentous and strange.”

uhl’s theatre aspires to reclaim the audience’s atrophied imagination. “Now, some people consume R imagination, and some people do the imagining,” she said. “I nd it very worrisome. That should be one thing that people know they can do.” Ruhl writes with space, sound, and image as well as words. Her stage directions often challenge her directors’ scenic imagination as well. In “Eurydice,” the dead Father builds Eurydice a room of string in the underworld. The stage directions read, “He makes four walls and a door out of string. / Time passes. / It takes time to build a room out of string.” Ruhl’s goal is to make the audience live in the moment, to make the known world unfamiliar in order to reanimate it. Here the essential nature of the underworld—its sense of absence—is made visceral by the volumes of meticulously constructed empty space that the string denes.

“I’m interested in the things theatre can do that other forms can’t,” Ruhl told me. “So theatre as pure plumbing of self, in a psychological way, seems very readerly to me.” Her plays are distinguished by a minimum of backstory; the audience is submerged in a series of unfolding dramatic moments. “Eurydice,” for instance, opens, wittily, with Eurydice and Orpheus at the beach. When Orpheus offers her the world, it’s the real one. “All those birds. Thank you,” Eurydice says. “And the sea! For me? When? Now? It’s mine already? (Orpheus nods.) Wow.” The dialogue and the situation have precise, ironic resonances, but the audience has to work for them. The play coaxes the spectators to swim in the magical, sometimes menacing ow of the unconscious. Ruhl prefers the revelations of the surreal moment to the narrated psychological one. In the prologue to “Passion Play”—a triptych that uses for its dissection of faith, politics, and political icons the organizing conceit of the staging of Christ’s Passion in separate acts by the Elizabethans, Nazi-era Germans, and contemporary Americans—Ruhl announced her daring, playfully cajoling the public to focus on the moment and the mythic:

31 We ask you, dear audience,

To use your eyes, ears, your most inward sight.

For here is day (A painted sun is raised)

And here is night (A painted moon is raised)

And now, the play.

As a storyteller, Ruhl marches to Ovid’s drum rather than Aristotle’s. “Aristotle has held sway for many centuries, but I feel our culture is hungry for Ovid’s way of telling stories,” she said, describing Ovid’s narrative strategy as “one thing transforming into another.” She went on, “His is not the neat Aristotelian arc but, instead, small transformations that are delightful and tragic.” And she added, “The Aristotelian model—a person wants something, comes close to getting it but is smashed down, then nally gets it, or not, then learns something from the experience—I don’t nd helpful. It’s a strange way to look at experience.

“I like plays that have revelations in the moment, where emotions transform almost inexplicably,” Ruhl said. “The acting style isn’t explicated, either. It’s not psychological.” In “The Clean House,” for instance, one stage direction reads, “Lane cries. She laughs. She cries. She laughs. And this goes on for some time.” To Ruhl, this kind of emotionally labile performance is a “virtuosic” exhibition of behavior. “It feels true to me,” she said. “Children are certainly that way. I’m interested in these kinds of state changes. ‘I was happy, now I’m sad.’ ” She continued, “If you distill people’s subjectivity and how they view the world emotionally, you don’t get realism.” The irrationality of emotion is one of the themes to which Ruhl’s plays continually return. “I don’t want to smooth out the emotions to the point where you could interpret them totally rationally, so that they have a clear reference point to the past,” she said. “Psychological realism makes emotions so rational, so explained, that they don’t feel like emotions to me.”

In Ruhl’s plays, turbulent feeling can erupt at any moment, for no apparent reason; actors are challenged to inhabit the emotional moment without motivation. Sometimes, during rehearsal, an anxious actor will approach Ruhl to try and pin down the role. She thinks to herself, “Oh, come on, just ride it.” She told me, “I prefer an actor who says, ‘My character doesn’t have a backstory, so I won’t concoct one. I will live as fully in every moment as I can. I will let the language move me, as opposed to a secret backstory of my own.” She likes her actors to have “a sense of irony,” and to be “touched with a little brush of the irrational.”

ne afternoon in January, in the fth-oor rehearsal room of , Ruhl took a O seat beside the director Anne Bogart at the top of a horseshoe of white Formica tables. It was the second day of rehearsal for “Dead Man’s Cell Phone.” Behind them was the maquette of the play’s spare 32 proscenium set—its backdrop of sky and its sliding side panels painted in the deep, sombre blues, grays, and browns of Edward Hopper’s palette. The Hopper tones suggested the longing and the solitude that are the play’s internal weather and that the cavernous, mostly furniture-free space magnied. As an epigram to her script, Ruhl appended an observation by Mark Strand about the people who wait in Hopper’s paintings: “They are like characters whose parts have deserted them and now, trapped in the space of their waiting, must keep themselves company.”

“Dead Man’s Cell Phone” is a mad pilgrimage of an imagination as it is invaded and atomized by the phone, which transforms private as well as public space. At a café, when a man sitting next to the quirky Jean won’t answer the intrusive ringing of his phone, she answers it herself, realizing only slowly that the man is dead. In the moment of recognition, staring into his transgured face, which appears, the stage direction reads, “as though he was just looking at something he found eminently beautiful,” Jean falls in love. “I can be very medieval about love—like the notion that love is through the eyes and that it’s very immediate, as opposed to modern and neurotic,” Ruhl told me. Jean speaks to the corpse; the stage direction reads, “She holds his hand. She keeps hold of it.” In the image, Ruhl’s main thematic tragicomic preoccupations of being both disembodied and disconnected coalesce. To keep alive the reality of her newfound love object, Jean answers his calls and fabricates stories about his dying thoughts to lovers, business partners, and family, all of whom she eventually meets. (The Dead Man’s name, it turns out, is Gordon, and he sold body parts for a living.)

Of the many ghostly gures in this bright play—Jean, who declares, “I like to disappear”; Gordon’s termagant mother, who sees it as her job “to mourn him until the day I die”; Dwight, an unnoticed second son—the Dead Man is the only bona-de ghost. This being a Ruhl play, he is, naturally, heard from.

“Have a seat,” Bogart said to , the actor who was then playing the Dead Man. “Take your time. And see if we might help you, or not.” The Dead Man has a soliloquy at the opening of Act II, and Bogart was planting the seed of using the audience as an acting partner in the scene. Ruhl is a fan of direct address. In “Melancholy Play,” her production notes admonish theatricals: “The audience knows the difference between being talked to and being talked at. Talk to them, please.” Ruhl told me, “We’re in the theatre and people are speaking to us. You could say it’s more real.” She said to Camp, “There is charm in the monologue—the slow, easy charm of talking to an airplane partner in rst class. Don’t be afraid of it.”

“I love that image of being in rst class,” Bogart said. Then Camp got to work. “I woke up that morning —the day I died—thinking I’d like a lobster bisque,” he began. Ruhl cast out her sentences straight and true like a y line, their rhythms setting ideas down crisply and carefully for her listeners to catch. Sometimes she did it with a llip of observation (“I got onto the subway. A tomb for people’s eyes”); sometimes with a ick of humor (“It doesn’t really make your mouth water, does it, lentil soup?” Gordon asks. “Something watery—something brown—and hot carrots. Like death”); sometimes with the surprise of information (“Ate my sushi,” Gordon says, in a detour about a restaurant run by a former Chinese surgeon who did organ extractions. “You can tell with tuna whether they slice it from the belly 33 or from the tail end. He always gave me the belly. It’s the good part”). By the point in the soliloquy where Gordon arrives at the café, where he learns that the last bowl of lobster bisque has just been sold, the rhythm and command of Ruhl’s language have slyly let out a lot of the story line. “I’m thinking, That bitch over there ate all the lobster bisque, this is all her fault,” Gordon says as he begins to have a heart attack. “And I look over at her, and she looks like an angel—not like a bitch at all—and I think— good—good—I’m glad she had the last bite—I’m glad. Then I die.”

Afterward, parsing the soliloquy with Camp, Ruhl returned to the sushi-eating story. In the text, she said, it seems that the character is “talking about something important, like organs, when actually it isn’t that important in his moral structure. But sushi is the important part of what he’s talking about. There was something thrilling in the way you were talking about the ‘belly is the best part of the tuna.’ That was the place where you slowed down, even though it was parenthetical. That seemed really right to me.” She added, “This is a man who is used to talking at length and to having people listen. There’s a kind of condence. He’s allowed to improvise and to surprise himself with language the way most people aren’t, because people stop listening.”

Ruhl takes the same pleasure in language. On the way to a preview, eight weeks later, she worried about the calibration of the words in a rewrite of her ending. “I hope I’m not overarticulating,” she said, striding through the chill night air in bluejeans, backpack on her shoulders. In the lobby, the director Mark Wing-Davey, who will stage “Passion Play” at the later this year, swept Ruhl up against his massive body like a grizzly bear hugging a salmon. “She’s a playwright with a voice that thrums,” Wing-Davey told me as we took our seats. He went on, “You hear that voice and you think, That doesn’t come around that often.” Ruhl’s theatrical authority bred trust in the audience. In the game of hide-and-seek she played with it, there was always something to be found. It gave them permission to play. No matter how wild the zigzags of logic or the lampoon of conventional storytelling —what she called her “anti-money shots”—the audience was right with Ruhl’s ights of goofy fancy: a cell-phone ballet set to the chattering gab of the spheres, a rendezvous with Gordon on his rung of Hell, a redemptive nale. “I intend the ending to be an actual hymn to love,” she told me. Out of the atomized half lives of the characters, Ruhl’s tale, true to comedy’s mission, stage-managed wholeness: Jean says to Dwight, Gordon’s brother, “Let’s start loving each other right now, Dwight—not a mediocre love, but the strongest love in the world, absolutely requited.”

In the lobby after the preview, I talked to Wing-Davey about the oddness of the play’s ironic detachment and its unabashed optimism. “Why shouldn’t it be?” he said, adding, “Right now Sarah’s life is great—a young child, newly married, the darling of the American theatre scene, her plays are done.” Nonetheless, for good luck at each opening night, Ruhl comes armed with an amulet, a small pink Ganesh-type elephant. If her sister or her husband is beside her in the theatre, as the lights come down, Ruhl’s ritual is to whisper the words of a young, excited, theatregoing Minnesota girl from her favorite childhood series, the “Betsy-Tacy” stories, words that to Ruhl signal “the experience of opening and of forgetting.” “The curtain goes up! The curtain goes up!” she says. ♦

John Lahr has been the senior drama critic for since 1992. Read more » 34 I

Navigating Sorrow in Eurydice

Even the Stones Wept

Time and again since its premiere at Madison Repertory Theatre in Sep- tember 2003 under the direction of Richard Corley, Ruhl’s Eurydice has wrung strong emotion from its audiences. Symbolic of grief, the images of the downward flow of water evoked by the play’s dialogue and realized onstage in many of its productions have unleashed rivers of tears even amongst that most obdurate group of theatergoers, the critics. In the San Francisco Chronicle, critiquing the 2004 Berkeley Repertory Theatre pro- duction as directed by , Robert Hurwitt rhapsodizes that “pangs of longing strike heartbreaking chords”; furthermore, the scenes between father and daughter are “rich in beautifully observed tenderness” and the conclusion is “as poignantly rewarding as it is luminously ambiguous” (Hur- witt). In the East Bay Express, Lisa Drostova finds the production “beautifully sad” and notes that the father’s “wistful dancing provoked sniffling from the audience,” while the actor playing Orpheus “does his share of tear- jerking too.” Overall, she rates the production as “assured, powerful, [and] heart- wrenching” (Drostova). Michael Scott Moore observes, in the SF Weekly, that at the conclusion, “half the audience was crying” (Moore). The East Bay Express unequivocally states, “there wasn’t a dry eye in the house at the end of each show” (“Most Memorable”). The 2006 Yale Repertory Theatre production, also directed by Waters, evoked similar responses. Although Frank Rizzo of Daily Variety found the production “not a fully satisfying experience,” he nevertheless discerned

Copyright © 2014. McFarland & Company, Incorporated Publishers. All rights reserved. rights All Publishers. Incorporated Company, & McFarland 2014. © Copyright “individual scenes of exquisite beauty” and “moments of aching beauty”

13

35 Al-Shamma, James. Sarah Ruhl : A Critical Study of the Plays, McFarland & Company, Incorporated Publishers, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uaz/detail.action?docID=665218. Created from uaz on 2018-08-23 19:47:08. 14 Sarah Ruhl

(Rizzo, “Eurydice”). In The Stamford Advocate, Jonathan Rougeot puzzles, “I’ve never laughed so much at a production that I left feeling so devastated,” and concludes that, “‘Eurydice’ offers a heartbreaking exploration of the theme of loss” (Rougeot). Anita Gates of the New York Times was startled by its sudden impact: I cry at the theater, sometimes even when the play isn’t very good. But nor- mally I know when it’s coming; it starts with a little mistiness, allowing me time to dig out the Kleenex. But on Tuesday night, as I watched the final minutes of the Yale Rep’s knockout production of Sarah Ruhl’s “Eurydice,” the tears came with the suddenness of grief [Gates]. She praises its universality, asserting that “it is about every death, every loss, every paralyzing pang of grief ” (Gates). Her colleague at the New York Times, Charles Isherwood, exalts, “devastatingly lovely—and just plain dev- astating.” He hypothesizes that it might “just be the most moving exploration of the theme of loss that the American theater has produced since the events of September 11, 2001,” and that he “fought off tears for half the play, not always successfully” (Isherwood, “A Comic Impudence”). In The Boston Globe, Louise Kennedy details her intimately personal reaction after the curtain fell. She leaves the theater excited about the review she is to write, but her mood changes suddenly when she reaches her car: I get in, put the key in the ignition, and break down into heaving, wracking sobs. All I can think about is the image of Eurydice’s father.... I saw this play on Oct. 3; my father had died Sept. 7. Ours was a compli- cated relationship—whose isn’t?—and though I had gone through the rituals of mourning I have been troubled by finding myself unable to cry more than about five tears at a time. But now ... I cry for a long time.... [T]his play, more than most I have seen this year, continues to haunt me [Kennedy]. She speculates that the play’s impact may owe something to the public mourning for strangers that followed the collapse of the World Trade Center, and the ensuing struggle between “remembering and forgetting, between turning back and moving on” (Kennedy). As argued below, the lachrymose effect of Eurydice owes more to the playwright’s skill than the aftermath of 9/11. Ruhl conveys the process of bereavement while artfully balancing a series of thematic dualities, sweeping her characters ever downward only to arrest them in a final tableau that captures the finality of death. Before examining the thematic complications and psychological dimensions of

Copyright © 2014. McFarland & Company, Incorporated Publishers. All rights reserved. rights All Publishers. Incorporated Company, & McFarland 2014. © Copyright the play, it will be situated within a brief history of the origins and stagings of the myth, and the playwright’s debt to a poem by Rilke will also be explored.

36

Al-Shamma, James. Sarah Ruhl : A Critical Study of the Plays, McFarland & Company, Incorporated Publishers, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uaz/detail.action?docID=665218. Created from uaz on 2018-08-23 19:47:08. I. Navigating Sorrow in Eurydice 15 Orpheus Ascending

In Descent and Return: The Orphic Theme in Modern Literature (1971), Walter A. Strauss chronicles the origins of the myth of Orpheus. Scholars generally agree that the poet- god dates to the sixth century B.C., appearing as a shaman- musician capable of subduing all of nature. Associated with the cult of Dionysus, he founds his own so- called Orphic cult. The myth receives its first, albeit brief, written confirmation in Euripides’ Alcestis (438 B.C.). Virgil and Ovid provide full versions, the former in his Fourth Georgic (29 B.C.), the latter in books 10 and 11 of Metamorphoses (c. 2–8 A.D.). The Roman poets relate that Orpheus’s wife, Eurydice, dies of a snake bite on her wed- ding day. Grief- stricken, the groom descends to the underworld where, moved by his exquisite, musical lamentation, Hades and his wife Persephone allow him to retrieve his bride. They prohibit him, however, from glancing back at her on the way out; the urge, of course, proves irresistible and Eurydice is whisked back to the underworld. In some versions, Orpheus is then imme- diately torn apart by the Maenads (Bacchantes), female followers of Diony- sus; in others, he first eschews the company of women and introduces homosexuality to Greece. Ultimately, his head floats down the river Hebros, singing and prophesying, accompanied by his lyre, until both wash ashore on the Isle of Lesbos. Strauss divides the myth into three parts: “(1) Orpheus as a singer- prophet (shaman) capable of establishing harmony in the cosmos ...; (2) The descent into Hades [to retrieve Eurydice] ...; (3) The dismember- ment theme ...” (6). Most adapters, including Ruhl, have been drawn to the second part. The story has been retold numerous times in literature, poetry, opera, and theater. It has proved an attractive subject for opera due to its musical and romantic subject matter—indeed, it inspired the very first three . Jacopo Peri and Giulio Caccini both composed their 1600 versions on Ottavio Rinuccini’s libretto; Claudio Monteverdi adopted Alessandro Striggio’s libretto in 1607. In “ and Eurydice, the First Two Operas” (1982), Tim- othy J. McGee dismisses Caccini’s as an inferior attempt. As the operas were written for happy occasions, they required upbeat endings. Accordingly, both librettos resolve in visions of connubial bliss. In Striggio, Apollo reunites the couple in heaven whereas in Rinuccini, Orpheus easily succeeds in res- cuing his bride because he is allowed to look back (McGee, 163–5). One particularly noteworthy operatic version is that of Christoph Willi-

Copyright © 2014. McFarland & Company, Incorporated Publishers. All rights reserved. rights All Publishers. Incorporated Company, & McFarland 2014. © Copyright bald Glück. Glück began his reformation of opera with Orfeo ed in 1762. He broke from the serious Italian opera of his time, introducing such innovations as integrating the overture into the dramatic structure of the work

37 Al-Shamma, James. Sarah Ruhl : A Critical Study of the Plays, McFarland & Company, Incorporated Publishers, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uaz/detail.action?docID=665218. Created from uaz on 2018-08-23 19:47:08. 16 Sarah Ruhl

and abandoning unaccompanied recitative (Howard). Glück’s librettist, Cal- zabigi, follows the precedent set by Striggio, reuniting the couple through the intervention of a deus ex machina, in this case personified love (Amor). On the journey from the underworld, Orpheus and Eurydice are allowed to speak to one another on the condition that Orpheus must not mention the prohibition. Feeling neglected, she eventually convinces him to turn around (Krieger, 295). Thus, blame for the failure is shifted onto her, although this blame is somewhat obviated by her ignorance of the conditions; a parallel may be drawn with Eve’s temptation of Adam (297). Non- operatic versions have been staged by Jean Anouilh, Tennessee Williams, and , and a recent operatic version by Rinde Eckert premiered in 2006. In Eurydice (Legend of Lovers) (1952), Anouilh has added a parental figure, in his case the father of Orpheus rather than Eurydice. Itinerant musicians, father and son play in cafés for pocket change. Allowed to visit Eurydice in the afterlife, Orpheus gazes into her eyes in order to determine her faithfulness, and thereby loses her. A mysterious stranger grants him a second chance to be reunited with his love in the after- life, an opportunity that he pursues, presumably by committing suicide. In Williams’s Orpheus Descending (1957), a young, guitar- toting man alights in a moribund Southern town, bringing sexual rebirth to the proprietress of a dry- goods store. Her husband shoots and kills her upon discovering that the stranger has impregnated her; in the meantime, the local authorities attack the stranger with a blowtorch. The poet- musician has temporarily enlivened his Eurydice in, while failing to remove her from, a metaphoric underworld. In Metamorphoses (1998), Zimmerman retells the moment of the backward glance in two different ways, first as found in Ovid, then as in Rilke’s poem, “Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes” (1904). Robert Woodruff directed the premiere of Eckert’s operatic Orpheus X at American Repertory Theatre in 2006. Orpheus is a rock star whose cab runs over Eurydice, a poet and a stranger to him. As in Ruhl, Eurydice acts as the agent that foils Orpheus’s plan, in Eckert’s version by ripping off his blindfold at the critical moment. Although Eurydice appears as a fully- developed character in Anouilh and Williams, Eckert and Ruhl grant her greater agency as the spoiler of Orpheus’s plan. Zimmerman retells the story through direct quotation of her sources, Ovid and Rilke, and therefore mirrors their handling of Eurydice. In Ovid, she serves merely as Orpheus’s love interest, cryptic and without personality. In Rilke, she assumes greater importance; the poet describes her inner state as one of fullness and completeness. She no longer needs or even

Copyright © 2014. McFarland & Company, Incorporated Publishers. All rights reserved. rights All Publishers. Incorporated Company, & McFarland 2014. © Copyright desires Orpheus, and has even forgotten who he is by the time he turns around. As reviewed by Terry Byrne in the Boston Herald, the Eurydice of Orpheus X actually becomes more powerful in the underworld and ultimately

Al-Shamma, James. Sarah Ruhl : A Critical Study of the Plays, McFarland &38 Company, Incorporated Publishers, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uaz/detail.action?docID=665218. Created from uaz on 2018-08-23 19:47:08. I. Navigating Sorrow in Eurydice 17

chooses to remain there. Nevertheless, although Orpheus must share the power of art with Eurydice- as- poet, he remains the central figure. Finally, in Ruhl, Eurydice claims the role of active protagonist.

Rilke and the Fullness of Death

Although, unlike Zimmerman, Ruhl does not quote directly from Rilke’s “Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes.,” she nonetheless looks to it for inspiration. In an interview with Caridad Svich, she identifies the poem as the single adaptation of the myth in which Eurydice has “anything” going on inside her head and she follows Rilke’s lead in that death has altered Eurydice’s perception by the time Orpheus arrives (Svich, 36). Ruhl also evokes the pastoral quality of the poem by lacing her dialogue with words that reference nature and agriculture. Furthermore, she borrows the characterization of Orpheus’s physique, a contrast of senses of perception, and peculiar hair imagery. In Rilke’s poem, Orpheus, Eurydice, and Hermes pass through a pastoral landscape on their way out of the underworld. The German poet describes woods, a lake, a rain-filled sky, soft meadows, and a shadow world of grief that arises out of Orpheus’s song of lamentation. The generative quality of the music refers to the first stage of the myth as outlined by Strauss—that of the “singer- prophet capable of establishing harmony in the cosmos.” Indeed, early sources not only associate Orpheus with harmony in the cos- mos, but with the very origin of the cosmos. As examples, a parody of a religious Orphic cosmogonic poem occurs in Aristophanes’s Birds, and Apol- lonius of Rhodes places Orpheus on the Argos, where he quiets the drunken sailors with a song describing the origin of the world (Segal, 8). Rilke’s poem inspires the creation of a pastoral world in Ruhl’s play, not so much in its setting, but through the dialogue. This imagery consists of sky, clouds, and stars, farming and hunting, dirt, fruit and vegetables, duck hunting, and all manner of animals: birds, dogs, fish, bulls, bees, elephants, reindeer, worms, horses, and gazelles. In Ruhl, the pastoral landscape has been fragmented and dispersed, hinted at rather than openly displayed. The language carries a promise of nature, or a nostalgia for it. Eurydice dwells in the shade of her father, who is imagined as a tree only briefly, before the dripping emptiness of the underworld reasserts itself. One can trace nature through the dialogue,

Copyright © 2014. McFarland & Company, Incorporated Publishers. All rights reserved. rights All Publishers. Incorporated Company, & McFarland 2014. © Copyright but its insubstantiality renders it uninhabitable. It is as if the cosmos has been dispersed, rather than distorted, by grief; or as if nature, rather than Orpheus, has been torn apart and scattered in an act of sparagmos.

39 Al-Shamma, James. Sarah Ruhl : A Critical Study of the Plays, McFarland & Company, Incorporated Publishers, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uaz/detail.action?docID=665218. Created from uaz on 2018-08-23 19:47:08. 18 Sarah Ruhl

Rilke seems to have influenced Ruhl’s characterization of Orpheus as well. Rilke describes him as “gazing in dumb impatience” as he leads Hermes and Eurydice out of the underworld; the god stands mute at the beginning of Ruhl’s play as well, gesturing to Eurydice his offer of the sky and the stars. When Orpheus does speak, in Rilke, to reassure himself that the two are following, he “[says] it aloud and [hears] it die away,” an action that sug- gests the impermanence of language. Ruhl couples memory with language, demonstrating the transient nature of both. As language and memory “die away,” so does life. Rilke’s description of Orpheus as a “slender man” (stanza 4) also appears in the play. As the Nasty Interesting Man attempts to seduce Eurydice, he contrasts his own robustness with Orpheus’s slim fragility: You need to get yourself a real man. A man with broad shoulders like me. Orpheus has long fingers that would tremble to pet a bull or pluck a bee from a hive ... a man who can put his big arm around your little shoulders as he leads you through a crowd ... a man with big hands, with big stupid hands like potatoes, a man who can carry a cow in labor [355]. The Nasty Interesting Man positions himself as a farmer or herder to Orpheus’s artist. Here Ruhl has gone outside of Rilke to draw upon Virgil’s depiction of the god Aristaeus. Aristaeus is the would- be rapist of Eurydice who chases her along the river, driving her towards the fatal snakebite. When his bees mysteriously die after the incident, Aristaeus forces Proteus to pre- scribe a remedy for his bad fortune. Proteus instructs him to sacrifice four bulls and four heifers; out of their rotting carcasses burst clouds of bees. One finds references to a bull, a cow, and bees in the above quotation from the Nasty Interesting Man. Ruhl synthesizes Rilke’s depiction of the slim poet with Virgil’s portrait of the beekeeper to create a contrast between farmer and artist. Ruhl’s creative use of Eurydice’s hair may also be traced back to Rilke. Rilke refers to Eurydice as “that blonde woman, / who’d sometimes echoed in the poet’s poems” (stanza 8), and then uses similes of hair and rain to describe her condition after death: She was already loosened like long hair, and given far and wide like fallen rain, and dealt out like a manifold supply [stanza 9]. In Ruhl’s opening scene, Orpheus imagines Eurydice’s hair as an orchestra that flies her into the sky. Later, after her death, he dreams of her hair becom- Copyright © 2014. McFarland & Company, Incorporated Publishers. All rights reserved. rights All Publishers. Incorporated Company, & McFarland 2014. © Copyright ing water: Last night I dreamed that we climbed Mount Olympus and we started to

40 Al-Shamma, James. Sarah Ruhl : A Critical Study of the Plays, McFarland & Company, Incorporated Publishers, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uaz/detail.action?docID=665218. Created from uaz on 2018-08-23 19:47:08. I. Navigating Sorrow in Eurydice 19

make love and all the strands of your hair were little faucets and water was streaming out of your head and I said, why is water coming out of your hair? And you said, gravity is very compelling [371–2]. What Rilke employs as two separate similes—those of Eurydice being “loos- ened like long hair” and “given far and wide like fallen rain”—Ruhl combines into a single image of hair as faucets streaming water. First imagined to serve as an orchestra, hair later becomes the channeling of water (nature) through the art of plumbing. In Rilke, Eurydice’s “deadness” fills her “like fullness.” In Ruhl, this fullness comes from her association with her father in the underworld. Rilke’s Eurydice “could take nothing in” (stanza 6); at the ending of the play, Ruhl’s Eurydice has difficulty recognizing Orpheus. As in Rilke, “her pale hands had grown so disaccustomed / to being a wife.” What Ruhl has added is a separating force in the personage of the Father. In Rilke, Eurydice returns to her abundance-filled death, unconcerned with Orpheus’s grief. Similarly, in Ruhl, Eurydice shrugs off Orpheus’s panicked entreaties with a trite apho- rism (398). Although clearly indebted to Rilke, Ruhl ventures far beyond his influence, freely adapting the myth to suit her needs. She limits the populace of the underworld to only the Lord and the three Stones and adds the character of the Father as a surrogate for her own. Ruhl was motivated to “have one more conversation with” her father (“Turning the World”), who died of cancer at the age of 55 when Ruhl was just 20, and to this purpose employs Eurydice as her alter ego. The play eulogizes her father and provides a powerful study of the process of bereavement within a thematic structure composed of a complex series of interrelated dualities.

Fatal Synthesis

Charles Segal sketches, in Orpheus: The Myth of the Poet (1989), a tri- angular relationship between art, death, and love. The balance between these varies from version to version. For example, in Orpheus’s failed attempt to recover Eurydice, art and love prove unable to overcome death. In Ovid, the Maenads’ attack on Orpheus is arrested when their spears and stones halt in mid-flight, charmed by the poet’s music. In this instant, art triumphs over death, if only momentarily (Segal, 2). In an earlier version dating to the mid-

Copyright © 2014. McFarland & Company, Incorporated Publishers. All rights reserved. rights All Publishers. Incorporated Company, & McFarland 2014. © Copyright dle of the fifth century B.C., this victory of art, coupled with love, occurs more convincingly, as Orpheus successfully retrieves Eurydice from the underworld (8). The mention in Euripides’s Alcestis implies success as well, according

41 Al-Shamma, James. Sarah Ruhl : A Critical Study of the Plays, McFarland & Company, Incorporated Publishers, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uaz/detail.action?docID=665218. Created from uaz on 2018-08-23 19:47:08. 20 Sarah Ruhl

to Emmet Robbins in “Famous Orpheus” (1982). The title character’s husband, Admetus, wishes for Orpheus’s musical ability so that he might bring his own wife back from the dead (Robbins, 16). Although art, death, and love certainly figure in Ruhl’s version, they are integrated into a complex series of thematic dyads. The concepts of love and art are each split in two—love into that for husband and father, and art into music and language. Traditionally, Orpheus is skilled in music, poetry, and rhetoric as “composite, virtually indistinguish- able parts of the power of art” (Segal, 2). Ruhl confines his talent to music. Ruhl has balanced not only the dualities of life/death, music/language, romantic love/paternal love, but many others as well: lightness/heaviness, overworld/underworld, farmer/artist, memory/forgetfulness, child/adult, father/husband, high/low, internal/external, and perhaps most importantly, art/nature. Art in the last pair refers not to the modern understanding of the fine arts, but rather to the classical Greek concept of art as the totality of human endeavor. Robert E. Wood references Aristotle, in Placing Aesthetics: Reflections on the Philosophic Tradition (1999), in distinguishing between nature as the “fundamental framework of our existence” (14), and art as that which arises out of human choice: “The whole of culture is thus arti-ficial [sic] in the literal sense; that is, it is made by art” (15). Ruhl built the play around the image of Eurydice causing Orpheus to turn around by calling his name; to her, this represented language overcoming music (Svich, 36). The music/language duality is expressed through the pair- ings of Orpheus and the father, and Orpheus and Eurydice. Orpheus’s apti- tude for music is offset by a distrust of language, and the father and daughter’s love of language by an incapacity for music. Orpheus conceives of language as limited to the expression of ideas that are either right or wrong—another duality—and this ambiguity unsettles him. Eurydice finds stories and lan- guage “interesting,” and her employment of the word connotes layers of com- plexity that further unnerve Orpheus. Eurydice reports to her father that Orpheus regretted that “words can mean anything,” preferring a concrete thing, such as the human body, which means “only one thing at a time” (385). Orpheus shows little interest in Eurydice’s books and she, in turn, proves incapable of carrying even one of the 12 tunes that Orpheus is orchestrating in his head, or of clapping out a rhythm. Eurydice and her father invite the horror and disgust of the Stones when they vocalize the melody to “I’ve Got Rhythm.” Even the two of them confess their ineptitude (379–80). Love of language is passed down from generation to generation, and music heralds the intrusion of the groom. Father and daughter are only alive to the extent

Copyright © 2014. McFarland & Company, Incorporated Publishers. All rights reserved. rights All Publishers. Incorporated Company, & McFarland 2014. © Copyright that they are able to associate with the overworld, the language of which they must recuperate in order to reconstruct memory. Music proves useless to this task.

42

Al-Shamma, James. Sarah Ruhl : A Critical Study of the Plays, McFarland & Company, Incorporated Publishers, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uaz/detail.action?docID=665218. Created from uaz on 2018-08-23 19:47:08. I. Navigating Sorrow in Eurydice 21

Ruhl illustrates personality as a construct of language by standing her characters upon written materials on three separate occasions. During the first two, Eurydice reacquires language; during the last, Orpheus loses it. Just arrived in the underworld, and freshly dipped in the River of Forgetfulness, Eurydice stands on a letter from Orpheus thinking the melody to “There’s No Place Like Home.” She associates the object with Orpheus, but is unable to articulate the concept of home. Her father then uses the letter to teach her language, reestablishing the memory of her husband in the process (368–71). Later, Eurydice stands upon the Collected Works of Shakespeare. When osmo- sis fails, she hurls the book in frustrated rage. Her father intervenes and teaches her how to read, and starts with a passage out of Lear that expresses the love between father and daughter (377). These events demonstrate the transmission of spoken and written language from parent to child. The first event reconnects Eurydice with her husband, the second with her father. She develops per- sonality and formulates rela- tionships through this (re)acquisition. Having estab- lished this visual trope, Ruhl applies it to powerful effect at the close of the play when the amnesiac Orpheus encounters Eurydice’s farewell letter. He stands on it, closes his eyes, and hears only by the sound of water followed by silence (411). Lacking a teacher, Orpheus irredeemably loses both mem- ory and self. Water as an agent of oblivion erases individuality as it blurs and dissolves the writing on the letter. As language draws Eury- dice to her father, music pulls Orpheus (David Andrew McMahon) attempts Copyright © 2014. McFarland & Company, Incorporated Publishers. All rights reserved. rights All Publishers. Incorporated Company, & McFarland 2014. © Copyright her husband away from her. to lead Eurydice (Laura Heisler) out of the She describes a bittersweet sen- Underworld. Eurydice. Madison Repertory sation: Theatre, 2003 (courtesy Brent Nicastro).

43 Al-Shamma, James. Sarah Ruhl : A Critical Study of the Plays, McFarland & Company, Incorporated Publishers, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uaz/detail.action?docID=665218. Created from uaz on 2018-08-23 19:47:08. 22 Sarah Ruhl

This is what it is to love an artist: The moon is always rising above your house. The houses of your neighbors look dull and lacking in moonlight. But he is always going away from you. Inside his head there’s always something more beautiful [385].

This drift is physically staged when Orpheus moves away from Eurydice as he attempts to lead her out of the underworld. It manifests as early as the opening scene in which, on two occasions, Eurydice is disappointed to learn that Orpheus is thinking about music rather than her. Ruhl carefully keeps music and words separate, except for the newly- wed’s rendition of “Don’t Sit under the Apple Tree (With Anyone Else but Me).” The lyrics of this upbeat song belie the impression of a romantic, har- monious union of word (Eurydice) and music (Orpheus), suggesting as they do a jealous possessiveness. Significantly, the Father appears onstage during this scene, dancing the jitterbug with an invisible partner. Midway through the song, he checks his watch and rushes off (347–8). Ostensibly the most harmonious point in Orpheus and Eurydice’s relationship, the shared song stresses the Father’s absence. Ruhl injects an element of camp with this song. Popularized by the Andrews Sisters, it was one of the biggest hits of World War II (Sforza, 66). It plays on the anxieties of soldiers over the faithfulness of their wives and girlfriends back home while at the same time providing great dance music, no matter who the partner. In “Notes on ‘Camp’” (1964), Susan Sontag defines camp as valuing style over substance. The camp sensibility is alert to a double meaning of things: “between the thing as meaning something, anything, and the thing as pure artifice” (281). The lyrics of “Don’t Sit under the Apple Tree” certainly would have meant something to soldiers abroad, if they had given them some thought, and yet it was the style and delivery of the Andrews Sisters’ rendition, with its high energy and close harmony, that made the song so appealing. Sontag contends that the passing of time is likely to increase an object’s camp appeal, as “[t]ime liberates the work of art from moral relevance” (285). Divorced from its wartime context, the social significance of the song recedes and style predominates. Sontag offers camp as a means of “going beyond straight seriousness,” as an alternative to irony and , which, to her, “seem feeble today” (288). Although it is highly debatable that irony and satire are played out, camp no doubt counters seriousness. Ruhl uses it, in this instance, to create a moment of lightness. As discussed in the introduction to this study, Ruhl admires

Copyright © 2014. McFarland & Company, Incorporated Publishers. All rights reserved. rights All Publishers. Incorporated Company, & McFarland 2014. © Copyright Calvino’s thoughts on lightness, which involve “the subtraction of weight” (Calvino, 3). Yet even as the song removes weight, its lyrics foreshadow Eurydice’s impending departure. The element of camp lightens, but it does

44

Al-Shamma, James. Sarah Ruhl : A Critical Study of the Plays, McFarland & Company, Incorporated Publishers, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uaz/detail.action?docID=665218. Created from uaz on 2018-08-23 19:47:08. I. Navigating Sorrow in Eurydice 23

not nullify the force of gravity. Noting that “all camp objects, and persons, contain a large element of artifice,” Sontag claims that “nothing in nature can be campy” (279). Following this line of reasoning, camp aligns with art in the duality art/nature, as offering a respite from nature’s final, inescapable act—that of death. Camp enables one to forget that, ultimately, one must for- get. In all other instances in Eurydice, music plays without lyrics. In the first scene, the melody that Orpheus tries to teach Eurydice is wordless. Later, Eurydice and her father sing “I’ve Got Rhythm” on meaningless syl- lables, as neither can remember the lyrics. Ruhl mutes Orpheus’s lamentation even, having him sing without sound (389). Later, after he has lost Eurydice a second time, he confides to her that he was singing her name over and over again (399). He loses her because music cannot name; her father reclaims her because language can. The first thing the Father says upon Eurydice’s arrival in the underworld is her name. He makes a point of explaining that, of all his children, he named only her. The letters of her name, falling in the rain, trigger the return of language and memory (365). The Father stakes the original and irrefutable claim to Eurydice as the one who named her and taught her language.1 The duality of high/low may be more precisely layered into the four ele- ments of classical Greek cosmology, ordered from high to low as fire, air, water, and earth. Within Eurydice, the elements may be loosely mapped to corresponding concepts: fire: art or the artistic temperament; air: life; water: grieving/forgetting; and earth: death. The overall movement of the play follows a downward arc from the highest to the lowest of these. Fire, the element of heavenly bodies, is most often associated with Orpheus. He offers to Eurydice “the sky and the stars” (334) and Eurydice associates him with the moon when weighing the merits of being married to an artist. Eurydice’s grandmother, also a musician, is asso- ciated with fire as well. According to Eurydice’s father, she was “extremely animated” and bore the nickname, “Flaming Sally” (375), which suggests a fiery temperament. Air occupies the stratum below fire. Within the play it represents life through association with the breath. The language of the dead is a practically

Copyright © 2014. McFarland & Company, Incorporated Publishers. All rights reserved. rights All Publishers. Incorporated Company, & McFarland 2014. © Copyright silent one, one without breath, as described by the Stones (359–60). Voiced language, as singing and speaking, is associated with life. Orpheus attempts to sing (albeit silently) Eurydice back to life and the Father restores memory

45 Al-Shamma, James. Sarah Ruhl : A Critical Study of the Plays, McFarland & Company, Incorporated Publishers, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uaz/detail.action?docID=665218. Created from uaz on 2018-08-23 19:47:08. 24 Sarah Ruhl

through the spoken word. Eurydice’s fall to the underworld culminates with “sounds of breathing” (356) in the darkness, an indication that she is not yet completely dead. In the passage from Shakespeare read by the father, Lear compares himself and Cordelia, imprisoned, to birds in a cage. Eurydice and her father, also suffer as trapped creatures of the air. Next down from air is water. The play overflows with references to this element, in the dialogue, sound effects, and set pieces, which include “rusty exposed pipes,” a water pump, and the two rivers of Hades (331). In his design for all three Les Waters productions, Scott Bradley extends the metaphor by pumping the elevator full of 100 gallons of water that flood the stage when the door slides open (“Production Notebook,” 36). Bradley gives the set the appearance of the bottom of a Victorian- era swimming pool (“Turning the World Upside Down,” 5); water drips down the walls to complete the effect (Hurwitt). Water is frequently associated with grieving in the play. In Orpheus’s dream, the water coming out of Eurydice’s hair suggests a torrential out - pour ing of sorrow, and the salty lake into which they fall, a pool of tears (372). Eurydice is drawn to water: she leaves her wedding twice for the water pump, she asks the Nasty Interesting Man for a glass of water, and she requests a bath when she arrives in the underworld. As water is associated with tears and bereavement, her craving for it manifests a compulsion to attend to the unfinished business of mourning for her father.2 For all of the sorrowful imagery of water, little actual crying occurs. The Stones weep at the sound of Orpheus’s music, but with a seemingly generic sadness. Eury- dice comes close to crying on several occasions—for example as she crosses the River Styx and when her father escorts her to her room. It is only after her father has dipped himself in the river, and lies still upon the floor, that finally, like a saturated cloud, she releases her watery load. Ruhl associates water not only with grieving, but also with forgetfulness. Two rivers figure in the classical Greek underworld: The boatman Charon ferries the deceased into Hades across the River Styx, whereafter a dip in the River Lethe erases memory. Ruhl’s stage directions call for the inclusion of the River Lethe as “an abstracted River of Forgetfulness” (331), in which both Eurydice and the Father dip themselves as they seek oblivion. The hand- operated water pump from the First Movement doubled as this river in the Les Waters productions. The raining elevator combines the functionality of both rivers, providing passage and erasing memory. Through its association with both the River Styx and grief, water links the transition from life into

Copyright © 2014. McFarland & Company, Incorporated Publishers. All rights reserved. rights All Publishers. Incorporated Company, & McFarland 2014. © Copyright death with the process of bereavement. The act of grieving consists, to a great extent, of a repetitious inventory of past events. In a sense, the grieving individual remembers in order to for-

46 Al-Shamma, James. Sarah Ruhl : A Critical Study of the Plays, McFarland & Company, Incorporated Publishers, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uaz/detail.action?docID=665218. Created from uaz on 2018-08-23 19:47:08. I. Navigating Sorrow in Eurydice 25

get: it is necessary to undertake an “obsessive review” in order to release emotion. Eurydice must first reconstitute her memories before she can review them, which she does with the aid of her father. Her final dip in the River of Forgetfulness signals the completion of the act of grieving. The Father per- forms obsessive review as he deciphers Eurydice’s name in the rain, remem- bering and grieving simultaneously. Beneath water lies earth, here associated with death. If the overworld is the realm of breath and life, then clearly the underworld is that of, if not suffocation, at least silence, and death. As the Lord of the Underworld’s pres- ence or agent in the overworld, the Nasty Interesting Man associates himself with farming and the earth. In the underworld, the Stones are, by definition, of the earth, and the Big Stone links potatoes to dirt and sleep. The Lord/ Child reinforces the association between root vegetables, earth, and death when he brags that he grows downward, “like a turnip” (381). The action of the play flows in a downward arc through the four ele- ments. The image of Eurydice falling from life, associated with air, into grief, associated with water, or into death, associated with earth, occurs three times. In the opening scene, Orpheus fantastically describes Eurydice’s hair as an orchestra that will raise her into the sky. He reassures Eurydice that the clouds will become heavy with water and cushion her fall. In this instance Eurydice passes from air through water, by association with the clouds, and back down to earth. Next, Eurydice’s death occurs after she ascends the 600 steps to the Nasty Interesting Man’s loft, high in the air, only to fall a much farther distance to the underworld beneath the earth. Finally, Orpheus dreams that he and his lover topple from the summit of Mount Olympus, again high in the air, into a salty lake, in a recapitulation of his fantasy from the first scene, in a minor key. Instead of emitting levitating strains of music, asso- ciated with fire as they bring Eurydice closer to the heavens, Eurydice’s hair pours forth streams of water, and the clouds cut rather than cushion. Orpheus drowns in his grief; he can only dream of arresting Eurydice’s death- plunge in a pool of tears. Down below, the Child promises to snuff out air with earth when he takes Eurydice as his bride. He envisions a silent wedding with “a dirt-filled orchestra” (409). Death, through the medium of the earth, extin- guishes music, associated with fire, and displaces air, linked to life. Another significant duality is that of adult/child. Eurydice longs for her father to give her away at her wedding, defining it as the moment at which a father and daughter “stop being married to each other” (345). The absence of her father prevents the successful completion of the ritual and Eurydice’s

Copyright © 2014. McFarland & Company, Incorporated Publishers. All rights reserved. rights All Publishers. Incorporated Company, & McFarland 2014. © Copyright passage into adulthood. The stage directions describe the lovers as both too young and too in love (332). Her death and passage to the underworld func- tion as a regression in which her father parents her as a young child, looking

47 Al-Shamma, James. Sarah Ruhl : A Critical Study of the Plays, McFarland & Company, Incorporated Publishers, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uaz/detail.action?docID=665218. Created from uaz on 2018-08-23 19:47:08. 26 Sarah Ruhl

after her, building shelter for her, and teaching her how to speak and write. When her husband comes to reclaim her, she balks at walking down the aisle with him again to assume the responsibilities of adulthood. The duality of child/adult dovetails into that of life/death, partly through the agency of the Nasty Interesting Man and the Lord of the Underworld. These two characters, if not representing a single entity, are at least strongly linked. Both are to be played by the same actor, and when the Lord of the Underworld claims Eurydice as his bride, stage directions indicate that he is to sound like the Nasty Interesting Man (408). Furthermore, the Nasty Interesting Man demonstrates an uncanny prescience worthy of his counterpart. For exam- ple, he seems to know more than he should about the musician- groom, such as his obsession with the music in his head (354). If not the Lord of the Underworld him- self, then certainly the Nasty Interesting Man functions as his agent, for he is the means by which Eurydice meets her death. In the person of the Nasty Interesting Man, Death woos Eurydice as he does Everyman and Everywoman. She resists him briefly, but her tumble down the stairs only brings her closer to his alter ego. As the Child- Lord on his tricycle, he expresses a prurient interest in her, seductively asks her to whis- per in his ear, blows in her face, and announces his inten- tion to be her lover. When he returns, he has grown to ten Eurydice (Laura Heisler), her Father (John Copyright © 2014. McFarland & Company, Incorporated Publishers. All rights reserved. rights All Publishers. Incorporated Company, & McFarland 2014. © Copyright Lenertz), and the Nasty Interesting Man (Scot feet tall, still a child but Morton). Eurydice. Madison Repertory The- approaching adulthood. He atre, 2003 (courtesy Brent Nicastro). asserts that he is “ready to be

48 Al-Shamma, James. Sarah Ruhl : A Critical Study of the Plays, McFarland & Company, Incorporated Publishers, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uaz/detail.action?docID=665218. Created from uaz on 2018-08-23 19:47:08. Top: The Lord of the Underworld (Scot Morton) welcomes Eurydice (Laura Heisler) to his realm. Eurydice. Madison Repertory Theatre, 2003. Bottom: The grown- up Lord of the Underworld (Scot Morton) returns to claim Eurydice Copyright © 2014. McFarland & Company, Incorporated Publishers. All rights reserved. rights All Publishers. Incorporated Company, & McFarland 2014. © Copyright (Laura Heisler) as his bride, with the Chorus of Stones (left to right: Karlie Nurse, Polly Noonan, and Judy Reiss) in the foreground. Eurydice. Madison Repertory Theatre, 2003 (both photographs courtesy Brent Nicastro).

49 Al-Shamma, James. Sarah Ruhl : A Critical Study of the Plays, McFarland & Company, Incorporated Publishers, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uaz/detail.action?docID=665218. Created from uaz on 2018-08-23 19:47:08. 28 Sarah Ruhl

Polly Noonan as Little Stone. Eurydice. Madison Repertory Theatre, 2003 (cour- tesy Brent Nicastro).

a man now” (408) and claims her as his bride. The Lord’s maturation signals the approach of Eurydice’s ultimate end in stillness and quiet; the consum- mation of their relationship marks the completion of her life. The maturation process eventually and inevitably culminates in death. The life/death polarity may be expressed as a continuum, along which Orpheus represents the living, Eurydice the newly- dead, her father the recently dead, and the Stones, the contented and long- dead. Meg Neville’s costumes in the Les Waters productions at Berkeley Repertory, Yale Reper- tory, and Second Stage support this placement of the Stones. San Francisco Chronicle critic Robert Hurwitt describes them as “zombie- pale” and clothed in “ghostly Edwardian costumes,” Charles Isherwood as “Victorian ghouls.” Their pale, ghoulish appearance suggests that they are ghosts of the once- living, as supported by the dialogue. When Eurydice threatens to dip them in the river, the Big Stone deflects her with, “Too late, too late” (410), imply- ing that their memories have previously been erased.3 They strive for quies- cence and advocate the nearly silent language of the dead. A parallel may

Copyright © 2014. McFarland & Company, Incorporated Publishers. All rights reserved. rights All Publishers. Incorporated Company, & McFarland 2014. © Copyright be drawn to the Angel in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. In Part Two: Perestroika, she commands Prior, the chosen prophet, to “stop moving” (Kushner, 44). She opposes the forward avalanche of human progress.

50 Al-Shamma, James. Sarah Ruhl : A Critical Study of the Plays, McFarland & Company, Incorporated Publishers, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uaz/detail.action?docID=665218. Created from uaz on 2018-08-23 19:47:08.

I. Navigating Sorrow in Eurydice 29 Copyright © 2014. McFarland & Company, Incorporated Publishers. All rights reserved. rights All Publishers. Incorporated Company, & McFarland 2014. © Copyright The Chorus of Stones (left to right: Ramiz Monsef, Gian- Murray Gianino, and Carla Harting). Eurydice. Yale Repertory Theatre, 2006 (courtesy Joan Marcus).

51 Al-Shamma, James. Sarah Ruhl : A Critical Study of the Plays, McFarland & Company, Incorporated Publishers, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uaz/detail.action?docID=665218. Created from uaz on 2018-08-23 19:47:08. 30 Sarah Ruhl

Suffering from AIDS, Prior resists. He explains to the Permanent Emergency Council in Heaven:

We can’t just stop. We’re not rocks—progress, migration, motion is ... moder- nity. It’s animate, it’s what living things do [130]. ... I want more life. I can’t help myself. I do [133].

Eurydice and her father as well want more life, and resist the Stones in their effort to claim it. Another crucial duality is that of art and nature. Ruhl portrays the tem- porary and ultimately futile domination of nature by art through watery imagery, which is not restricted to the underworld with its two rivers, but occurs frequently in the dialogue of the overworld as well. As early as the second line of the play, Orpheus is offering Eurydice the sea, and by scene’s end they are running into it. Water images fall into two categories: natural and channeled. The natural includes the sea, clouds, lakes, and rivers; chan- neled, the water pump, various sound effects such as a whistling tea kettle and water running through rusty pipes, and Orpheus’s shower at his wedding. Natural water represents nature; channeled water, in the form of plumbing, the triumph of art over nature. As the father traces his steps back to the River of Forgetfulness, place designations follow a progression from art, in the sense of human culture in general, to nature, and also from language to forgetfulness. He leads with the abstract mathematics of numbered highways, then transitions through the ambiguously geometric Middle Road on his way to the definitely pastoral Duck Creek Park, harkening back to his father’s hunting exploits and demise in a duck pond, in a farewell nod to his parents. After the bucolic Fernwood Avenue and Forest Road, the streets no longer have names, as the father’s capacity for naming diminishes. He passes through a red brick house, pre- sumably his childhood home, and out to the Mississippi River.4 He observes through a child’s eyes a good climbing tree and sleeping catfish, rolls up his jeans, and steps into the river and oblivion. He lies now curled up on the ground, unresponsive to his daughter (402). Man has become child, nature has overcome art, oblivion has washed away memory, and death has taken life. The raining elevator represents the inseparability of art and nature. The mechanical device carries the deceased to the underworld, which serves as a waystation on the journey to ultimate death. Inside of this device, nature

Copyright © 2014. McFarland & Company, Incorporated Publishers. All rights reserved. rights All Publishers. Incorporated Company, & McFarland 2014. © Copyright flows as rain that erodes the structures of memory. The elevator follows the general direction of the entire work, which is downwards. It represents the movement from the first to the second term of many dualities: life/death,

52 Al-Shamma, James. Sarah Ruhl : A Critical Study of the Plays, McFarland & Company, Incorporated Publishers, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uaz/detail.action?docID=665218. Created from uaz on 2018-08-23 19:47:08. I. Navigating Sorrow in Eurydice 31

Father (John Lenertz) and Eurydice (Laura Heisler). Eurydice. Madison Reper- tory Theatre, 2003 (courtesy Brent Nicastro).

high/low, lightness/heaviness, and memory/forgetfulness. Other dualities align with that of life/death as well: artist (fire)/farmer (dirt), child/adult, husband/father, and art/nature. Gravity pulls Eurydice down towards death, away from her artist husband and towards the Lord of the Underworld/Nasty Interesting Man who is associated with dirt and farming, and towards her father who is, after all, already dead. A loss of memory accompanies her fall, and the maturation of the Lord of the Underworld associates aging with death. Water, as a force of nature, overcomes the art of plumbing, just as death overcomes the individual personality that has been built up through the art of language. Not only memory, but time as well depends upon language. Death is a timeless state, and the father only reclaims temporality when he reads Eury- dice’s name in the rain and reacquires language. Then, he claims, “Time poured into my head. The days of the week. Hours, months...” (365). Later, a temporal compression accompanies the collapse of language as the play concludes. A triangular relationship established by Eurydice in her farewell

Copyright © 2014. McFarland & Company, Incorporated Publishers. All rights reserved. rights All Publishers. Incorporated Company, & McFarland 2014. © Copyright letter, between herself and Orpheus and his future wife, disappears almost as soon as it arises. After writing, Eurydice dips herself in the river and lies dormant. Almost instantly, Orpheus appears in the elevator, the remainder

53 Al-Shamma, James. Sarah Ruhl : A Critical Study of the Plays, McFarland & Company, Incorporated Publishers, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uaz/detail.action?docID=665218. Created from uaz on 2018-08-23 19:47:08. 32 Sarah Ruhl

At the conclusion of the play, Orpheus (Joseph Parks) arrives in the raining ele- vator as Eurydice () and Father (Charles Shaw Robinson) lie on their sides. The Chorus of Stones stands to the left. Eurydice. Yale Repertory Theatre, 2006 (courtesy Joan Marcus).

of his life compressed into a matter of minutes. The architecture of time rests upon that of language.

Searching the World Over: The Psychology of Loss

Through her firsthand experience, Ruhl has captured many of the psy- chological aspects of bereavement. In Bereavement and Health: The Psycho - logical and Physical Consequences of Partner Loss (1987), Wolfgang Stroebe and Margaret S. Stroebe differentiate between grief, mourning, and bereave- ment: Grief is “the emotional (and affective) response to loss,” mourning is “acts expressive of grief,” and bereavement is “the objective situation of an

Copyright © 2014. McFarland & Company, Incorporated Publishers. All rights reserved. rights All Publishers. Incorporated Company, & McFarland 2014. © Copyright individual who has recently experienced a loss of someone significant through that person’s death” (7). Simply put, mourning is the outward expres- sion of grief.

54 Al-Shamma, James. Sarah Ruhl : A Critical Study of the Plays, McFarland & Company, Incorporated Publishers, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uaz/detail.action?docID=665218. Created from uaz on 2018-08-23 19:47:08. I. Navigating Sorrow in Eurydice 33

Sigmund Freud pioneered the study of grieving. In “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917), he describes mourning (which would now be referred to as grieving) as the process by which the “libido shall be withdrawn from its attachments to that object” (244), “that object” here referring to the lost love object. John Archer explicates Freud’s essay in The Nature of Grief: The Evolution and Psychology of Reactions to Loss (1999). Archer reads “libido” as “emotional attachment,” and thus interprets the work of mourning as the painful withdrawal of this attachment (16). He asserts that the psycho- analytic framework established by Freud remains influential (17). Nevertheless, since Freud many advances have been made in the psy- chology of grief, and numerous models developed. Archer identifies John Bowlby’s model, which divides bereavement into four phases, as a widely accepted one. He presents these phases, set forth in Bowlby’s Attachment and Loss, Volume III (1980), in slightly modified form as: 1. Numbness and Disbelief: A phase of numbness that may be inter- rupted by outbursts of distress and/or anger. 2. Yearning and Searching: Accompanied by anxiety and intermittent periods of anger.... 3. Disorganization and Despair: Feelings of depression and apathy when old patterns have been discarded. 4. Reorganization: Recovery from bereavement [Archer 24]. Bowlby cautions that the phases “are not clear- cut, and any one individual may oscillate for a time back and forth between any two of them” (Bowlby, 85). Archer also describes the non- phasic analytic model, which identifies aspects of grief such as numbness and disbelief; anger and aggression; guilt, self- blame and self- injury; distress and anxiety, yearning and preoccupation; delusions, hallucinations and ghosts; the urge to search; identification with the deceased; changes in self- concept; and hopelessness and depression (see Archer, Chapter 5). These two models overlap to a great extent. Traditionally, and in accor- dance with Freud, both attempt a recovery of the bereaved individual through the withdrawal of emotional attachment. More recently, researchers are com- ing to the conclusion that it is normal for this attachment to persist, and that the process should be one of ongoing adjustment rather than recovery, as reported by Wortman and Silver in “The Myths of Coping with Loss Revis- ited” (418), published in 2001. Nevertheless, a reorganization of the survivor’s psyche is considered essential. The three main characters in Eurydice pass

Copyright © 2014. McFarland & Company, Incorporated Publishers. All rights reserved. rights All Publishers. Incorporated Company, & McFarland 2014. © Copyright through, to varying degrees, the first three of Bowlby’s phases, and also exhibit various symptoms from the analytic model. Here, however, death forecloses the possibility of working through the fourth phase. The process

55 Al-Shamma, James. Sarah Ruhl : A Critical Study of the Plays, McFarland & Company, Incorporated Publishers, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uaz/detail.action?docID=665218. Created from uaz on 2018-08-23 19:47:08. 34 Sarah Ruhl

of bereavement, termed “grief work” (Archer, 16), fails to result in recovery or adjustment. Eurydice’s wedding triggers the grieving process for both herself and her father. Archer notes that significant events may reawaken feelings asso- ciated with bereavement (81). Eurydice notes the importance of her father to the wedding ceremony (345). She enters the first phase of grieving, “numb- ness and disbelief,” upon her arrival in the underworld. Disoriented, she believes she has disembarked at a train station in France. She also exhibits the outbursts of distress and anger typical of this phase. Upon discovering that she is unable to speak, she throws a tantrum that will not be her last (359). During the grieving process, anger is frequently directed at those seen as responsible for the loss or “people who bring home its reality” (Archer, 71) such as, in Eurydice’s case, the Stones. Indeed, the first scene of the sec- ond movement ends with another outburst, directed at the Stones (366). Her third tantrum occurs when, frustrated at her inability to read the Collected Works of Shakespeare, Eurydice hurls the volume at the Stones. Her fourth and final outburst takes place when she returns to the underworld and dis- covers that her father has dipped himself into the river. She screams at the Stones and strikes at them in vain (407). Eurydice’s time with her father falls under the second stage, “yearning and searching.” Preoccupation with the deceased is significant during this phase, which includes “obsessive review” of both happy and unhappy mem- ories. The grieving individual may feel the need to repeatedly talk about past events (Archer, 76–7). The obsessive review shared by father and daughter involves memories from the father’s youth, which, although they predate Eurydice’s birth, nevertheless reconstruct the family history. Although osten- sibly humorous, the father’s childhood memories are filled with foreboding. He is shot at with a BB gun and spanked by his mother and a stranger. His father dies and his mother never recovers from the loss. He abandons the piano after his mother humiliates him at a recital for forgetting how to play “I’ve Got Rhythm” (378). Although she shares in obsessive review with her father, Eurydice fails to do so with her husband. When Eurydice finally remembers Orpheus to her father, it is in a wistful and ambiguous way. She does not mourn Orpheus, from whom she has been separated not by his death, but by her own. For his part, Orpheus most certainly mourns his bride, demonstrating primarily the second phase, that of yearning and searching. He exhibits characteristic behaviors of this stage, include writing letters to the deceased, the recovery

Copyright © 2014. McFarland & Company, Incorporated Publishers. All rights reserved. rights All Publishers. Incorporated Company, & McFarland 2014. © Copyright of the lost person in dreams, and the urge to search (Archer, 76–7). Dreams of the deceased, although often happy, typically contain an indication that something is amiss and the dreamer often awakes to an empty feeling (86–7).

56 Al-Shamma, James. Sarah Ruhl : A Critical Study of the Plays, McFarland & Company, Incorporated Publishers, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uaz/detail.action?docID=665218. Created from uaz on 2018-08-23 19:47:08. I. Navigating Sorrow in Eurydice 35

In “The Course of Normal Grief ” (1993), Shuchter and Zisook report that, in one common dream, the deceased is alive and fulfilling the survivor’s ulti- mate wish (36). Orpheus’s dream of Eurydice follows the patterns described above. It begins happily enough with the deceased quite possibly fulfilling the sur- vivor’s ultimate wish, as they begin to make love on Mount Olympus. How- ever, Orpheus quickly notices that something is awry when water begins pouring out of Eurydice’s hair. The dream takes a turn for the worse when they fall out of the sky. He awakens disoriented, sorrowful, and frightened. Awake, Orpheus experiences the numbness and sense of unreality charac- teristic of the first stage. The room begins to float, his blankets assume a menacing aspect, and he questions what people are and who he is (372). In this moment, Orpheus struggles to come to terms with the very notion that Eurydice is no longer living. However, Orpheus’s grieving mostly manifests as the urge to search, or seeking and finding. In “‘Seeking’ and ‘Finding’ a Lost Object: Evidence from Recent Studies of the Reaction to Bereavement” (1970), C. Murray Parkes documents a strong desire to find the deceased, in spite of the recog- nition that the search is futile. This behavior consists of the following: 1. Restless movement about and scanning of the environment. 2. Preoccupation with thoughts of the lost person. 3. Developing a perceptual “set” for the person, namely a disposition to perceive and to pay attention to stimuli which suggest the presence of the person and to ignore those that are not relevant to this aim. 4. Directing attention towards those parts of the environment in which the person is likely to be. 5. Calling for the lost person [189]. Orpheus’s behavior coincides with this list. He is certainly preoccupied with Eurydice. He moves about and scans the environment for her, or for a way to reach her. He vows in a letter, “I’m going to find you” (368) and sees her in his dream. He calls for the lost person, literally, over the telephone. When this fails, he immediately turns to the globe and a “scanning of the environ- ment.” As a mythical being, Orpheus takes “seeking and finding” farther than any actual person possibly could. However, his reunion with Eurydice, as staged by Ruhl, does not differ in essence from the experience of the bereaved of Parkes’s study. The third item listed above involves “developing a perceptual

Copyright © 2014. McFarland & Company, Incorporated Publishers. All rights reserved. rights All Publishers. Incorporated Company, & McFarland 2014. © Copyright set for the person,” which may predispose the bereaved to hallucinate that person’s presence. In a study cited by Parkes, “9/22 widows described actual illusions of the lost person at some time during the first month of bereave-

57 Al-Shamma, James. Sarah Ruhl : A Critical Study of the Plays, McFarland & Company, Incorporated Publishers, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uaz/detail.action?docID=665218. Created from uaz on 2018-08-23 19:47:08. 36 Sarah Ruhl

ment” (191). More commonly, “A comforting sense of the presence of the lost person was experienced by 15/22 widows.” A few of the widows in the study were convinced that they perceived the deceased in a state of what Parkes terms “hypnagogic hallucinations” (194). Other studies chronicle sensations and visions of the deceased as common occurrences (Archer, 79). Parkes asserts, “It almost seems that for these people the search has been successful” (194). The myth of Orpheus depicts this archetypal phenomenon. Although Orpheus finds Eurydice, he is unable to keep her. Like the psychological subjects, Orpheus momentarily reclaims the deceased only to acutely reexperience losing her. Although Orpheus only finds and loses Eury- dice once, in actuality “seeking and finding” parallels obsessive review in that the lost object must be repeatedly found and lost.5 One widow’s expe- rience uncannily matches Orpheus’s final moment with Eurydice. This woman repeatedly gazed over her right shoulder, claiming, “He [my husband] was always on my right” (qtd. in Parkes, 190). Presumably, when she looked, he “disappeared.” The process of grieving is abruptly cut off at the conclusion of the play. Both the father and Eurydice have symbolically returned to their childhood homes, Eurydice by rejoining her father and the father by revisiting the Mis- sissippi, but in the end they lie silently on the ground. The mourning process detailed above has failed to reach the fourth stage, that of reorganization, which represents recovery from bereavement. None of the characters has detached from the original love- object; the disorganization of phase three has simply lead to disintegration.

A Wistful Desire

As noted above, Charles Isherwood relates Eurydice, with its theme of loss, to the events of September 11, 2001. Although such a grandiose claim may seem misdirected against such an intimately personal play, the Western tone to the father’s memories suggests a nostalgia not just for him and his daughter, but for the country as a whole. Seen against the wider canvas of post-9/11 America, the invocation of the West suggests a nationalistic remem- bering. Ruhl did not, however, implant those stories with the destruction of the World Trade Center in mind; indeed, the play was completed before the attacks occurred. Rather, the duck hunting and Western stories derive from

Copyright © 2014. McFarland & Company, Incorporated Publishers. All rights reserved. rights All Publishers. Incorporated Company, & McFarland 2014. © Copyright her family history. In “Surreal Life: The Plays of Sarah Ruhl” (2008), John Lahr reveals the source of Eurydice’s vocabulary lessons: every Saturday, from the time that Ruhl was five years old, her father took her and her sister

58 Al-Shamma, James. Sarah Ruhl : A Critical Study of the Plays, McFarland & Company, Incorporated Publishers, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uaz/detail.action?docID=665218. Created from uaz on 2018-08-23 19:47:08. I. Navigating Sorrow in Eurydice 37

to breakfast at the Walker Bros. Original Pancake House and “taught them a new word, along with its etymology” (Lahr, “Surreal”). Ruhl confirms that all of the stories told by the Father, even the one in which he swallows a nail, come from her own father’s experience. One of the duck hunting stories is taken directly from a transcript recorded by Ruhl before her father passed away (Ruhl, “Re: Eurydice”). The play commemorates not only Ruhl’s father but her grandparents as well, through the stories told about them and asynchronous elements dating back to the 1930s. Orpheus and Eurydice first appear in swimming outfits from the 1950s. Orpheus consults “an old- fashioned glow- in- the- dark globe” (321). Eurydice arrives in the underworld in a 1930s suit (359), and her imag- ined train station suggests the past as does the stage direction that describes her departure from her father, involving as it does a gangplank and steamship (394). These elements suggest three generations of family history. An earlier version included Eurydice’s grandmother, who silently crossed the stage from time to time, memory erased. Although her presence had the potential to deepen the sense of family history, Ruhl dropped her when director Les Waters complained that he did not understand the character (A Conversation). Eurydice and her father’s remembering qualifies as nostalgia, defined as:

A wistful desire to return in thought or in fact to a former time in one’s life, to one’s home or homeland, or to one’s family and friends; a sentimental yearning for the happiness of a former place or time [“Nostalgia”].

This definition shares, with Archer’s description of obsessive review, the desire to revisit memories of happier times. Bereavement may thus be posited as inclusive of a nostalgia for the deceased. Eurydice belongs to a troika of Ruhl’s plays that deal directly with death and bereavement. They are, in chronological order, Dog Play, Eurydice, and The Clean House. Ruhl has subtracted progressively more weight from the latter two. The first depicts the aftermath of a father’s death and questions the existence of an afterlife, the second works out a process of bereavement in an imaginary hereafter, and the third exorcises the ghosts of deceased par- ents and suggests a positive spirit world. The dominant tone of the first is one of loss and despair, that of the second, loving sorrow, and of the third, hopefulness in the face of death. Melancholy Play is omitted from this group because it deals with sorrow in a generalized rather than specific sense. Dead Man’s Cell Phone escapes this category as well, in spite of the inclusion of an afterlife, since the farcical tone and unsavory personality of the deceased

Copyright © 2014. McFarland & Company, Incorporated Publishers. All rights reserved. rights All Publishers. Incorporated Company, & McFarland 2014. © Copyright obviates any need for bereavement. Whereas Eurydice grieves alone, in The Clean House Ruhl provides a community of women to share the burden of caring for, and seeing off, the terminally ill Ana.

59 Al-Shamma, James. Sarah Ruhl : A Critical Study of the Plays, McFarland & Company, Incorporated Publishers, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uaz/detail.action?docID=665218. Created from uaz on 2018-08-23 19:47:08.