Next on our stage: LIGHTS UP! FESTIVAL SILENT SKY CABARET NEW PLAYS, ART: APRIL 18-20 MAY 16-JUNE 16 JULY 18-AUGUST 25 HIGHLIGHTS A companion guide to Eurydice by Sarah Ruhl directed by Lisa Mallette supported by producers Scott Ellis and Rich & Sally Braugh March 14-April 14, 2019 A bilingual English/American Sign Language production Synopsis The myth has been told and retold for centuries. Grief-stricken Orpheus travels to the underworld, where he learns he can rescue his wife, Eurydice —if he doesn’t look back on the way up. Now, we see the story from the female perspective, following Eurydice into the underworld, where she finds her lost father and tries to remember all she’s left behind. City Lights’ innovative new production combines Sarah Ruhl’s strikingly fresh script with the beauty of American Sign Language, reflecting the characters’ efforts to communicate across worlds. A lush and moving tale about life, love and the enduring strength of memory. Eurydice premiered at Madison Repertory Theatre in Wisconsin in 2003, and next took the stage in 2004 at Berkeley Repertory Theatre. It opened Off-Broadway in 2007 at Second Stage Theatre, Above: Lauren Rhodes as Eurydice. Previous page: Orpheus (Robert Sean Campbell) tries where it was nominated for the Drama League to rescue Eurydice (Rhodes) from the underworld. Photos by Steve DiBartolomeo, taken Award for Distinguished Production of a Play. at La Rinconada Country Club. Characters Eurydice (Lauren Rhodes speaking English, Leah Cohen signing in American Sign Language): Playwright Sarah Ruhl has a delightful description of Eurydice and Orpheus: “a little too young and a little too in love.” Eurydice also has a love of books and a sweet innocence. Her Father (Brian Herndon*, English; Spencer Stevenson, ASL): Eurydice’s father has passed away, and she encounters him in the underworld. Though she doesn’t remember him at first, he patiently helps rebuild their relationship. Orpheus (Robert Sean Campbell, English; Stephanie Foisy, ASL): Young and in love, Orpheus is also a soulful, talented musician capable of communicating in notes and melodies. A Nasty Interesting Man / Lord of the Underworld (Erik Gandolfi, English; Dane K. Lentz, ASL): He’s got charm you should watch your step around. A Chorus of Stones: Big Stone (Dane K. Lentz, ASL; April Bennett, English); Little Stone (Spencer Stevenson, ASL; Jennifer Bradford, English); Loud Stone (Stephanie Foisy, ASL; Keenan Flagg, English): The production’s Greek chorus, presenting wisdom and often their own opinions. “When you were alive, I was your tree.” -Father Our director’s ‘Eurydice’ dream: two languages, all audiences About four years ago, City Lights executive artistic director Lisa Mallette began having a vision. She imagined taking the beauty of American Sign Language and weaving it into a play or musical: not by simply adding an interpreter off to the side, but by creating a truly bilingual production. Lisa doesn’t speak ASL, and she doesn’t have any speakers of the language in her family. But she’s always been drawn to it. “Sign language is inherently theatrical,” she said. “There’s a beautiful connection between ASL and acting. Acting is more about human behavior than speaking. There are a hundred different ways you can say one sentence. And there are so many different ways you can sign one line.” Her City Lights team was enthusiastic about the idea, so Lisa needed to choose the perfect play. That in itself took about two years of reading scripts, seeing shows and letting her imagination run free. She didn’t want a play that is usually done with ASL; she wanted to open up a script to this language for the first time. “I had to pick a play we would do anyway…the kind of story we like to tell,” Lisa said. Eurydice, with its gorgeous writing, female perspective and fresh Lisa Mallette adjusting Lauren Rhodes’ veil during a take on a classic, fit right in. Lisa met with playwright Sarah Ruhl in New York “Eurydice” photo shoot. and got her blessing for the bilingual production. The project was on. Lisa is also directing the show, and she says the process has been fascinating. Right away she knew she needed to cast more actors than the script called for, so that each role would be played by one actor speaking and one signing. (Ruhl also granted permission for this change.) That casting has led to an unusual web of relationships among the characters. While the speaking Eurydice and Orpheus certainly have their close moments, the speaking Eurydice and signing Orpheus might also interact. Or one Orpheus might look to another for support during a tough moment. These theatrical discoveries have been, as Lisa puts it, “joyous.” A creative challenge arose when the production team looked at the Eurydice stage directions. Many of them are audio. How do you create the mood of the underworld through the sounds of rain dripping and rusty water flowing, when some of your audience members are Deaf? In some cases, the language itself was the solution, with an actor coming on to sign the beautiful ASL words for “drip, drip” and others. This accentuates the evocative work already being done by sound designer George Psarras, who has other tools such as subwoofers that create vibrations everyone can feel. In the end, perhaps Lisa’s main goal is to make sure that Deaf, hearing-impaired, and hearing audiences all experience the same show and that no one feels Lauren Rhodes and Robert Sean Campbell are the English-speaking Eurydice and ushered to the side. Orpheus. At left is Leah Cohen, who signs as Eurydice, with Stephanie Foisy, signing as Orpheus, at right. Photo by Taylor Sanders, taken at the San Jose Museum of Art. “At its core,” she said, “the project is about equality of access.” About playwright Sarah Ruhl Caught up in the gorgeous, challenging, magical world of Sarah Ruhl’s plays, you would not be surprised to know that this playwright was first a poet. She has described her plays as “three-dimensional poems.” They have language you could hang on the wall and admire for days. And yet they are always strikingly true. “What happiness it would be to cry,” Eurydice says at one point, and who among us has not felt like that? We can thank fellow playwright Paula Vogel for ushering Ruhl toward the theater. While working toward her M.F.A. from Brown University in the ‘90s, Ruhl studied with Vogel. Ruhl’s ten-minute “Dog Play,” about her father’s death, made her professor cry, and the teacher convinced the student that her future was as a playwright. Today, Ruhl, who lives in Brooklyn with her family, has many lauded plays under her name. Titles include The Clean House and In the Next Room, or The Vibrator Play (both Pulitzer Prize finalists), Stage Kiss, Passion Play, Dead Man’s Cell Phone, For Peter Pan on her 70th Birthday and How to Transcend a Happy Marriage. Her works also include 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write, a book of essays about the theater and motherhood; and Letters From Max: A book of friendship, co-authored with Max Ritvo. Ruhl’s plays celebrate the imagination, and the pure kind of emotion that can spark up without warning, as a child’s does. “I like plays that have revelations in the moment, where emotions transform almost Sarah Ruhl in her element: a theater. inexplicably,” she told the New Yorker. Her stage directions can also be surprising, rich with imagery if not with detailed instruction. Directors and designers may find that liberating or vexing. “I remember a producer once paging through Eurydice and saying: ’This is impossible to do. There’s a raining elevator, and in the stage direction it says that he throws her up into the sky.’ And I said, ‘Oh well, this is all just literary suggestion and it’s all just trafficking in metaphor,’” Ruhl told The Interval. “He throws her up into the sky as a gesture. A raining elevator could be a sound cue and a light cue. It could be a child with a bucket pouring water. “I’m always intrigued by how you put up the same play in a black box or in a site-specific way or with students, and then see it fully produced someplace like Lincoln Center or Second Stage where you get the raining elevator and you get the whole scenic idea in a more expensive way.” When the Interval writer later asked Ruhl how much she thinks about visuals such as scenic design when she’s writing, her answer was characteristically poetic: “I don’t know how it will be imagined on stage, but I do see it all.” The “Eurydice” elevator at City Lights. The Orpheus & Eurydice myth elsewhere in arts & culture From the ancient writings of Virgil, Ovid and Plato to 20th-century works by Tennessee Williams and Salman Rushdie, from a Balanchine ballet to a Zooey Deschanel pop song, the myth of Orpheus & Eurydice continues to fascinate us. Here’s a small sampling of the many places this star-crossed love story has been told. Metamorphoses (8 AD): Within the 11,995 lines of this behemoth narrative poem by the ancient Roman poet Ovid is the tale of Orpheus & Eurydice (in Book X, if you’re counting). Here, Eurydice suffers a fatal snake bite on her wedding day. Orpheus travels to the underworld to rescue his bride, but in this telling — as in so many others — that plan doesn’t end well. Sir Orfeo (c.