The Underworld on Eighth Avenue

Second Stage Theatre on Manhattan’s 43rd street held Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice (Yoo-RID-a-cee) over just long enough for yours truly to attend. While larger scale than the usual fare, the bizarre house, odd infrastructure and surly box-office attendants left a strangely familiar feel. Not familiar is Scott Bradley’s vertigo-inducing set – oddly and truly the star of the show. Somehow a modern retelling of the classic Orpheus in the underworld story gets a shower-stall tile / nymphaeum / caldarium with pitched floors, walls of an even more severe pitch, floor grates, and a manhole. Impressive, though, is not how it looks, but what it does: things drop from the flys, rise up out of the grates, and open and close; with the help of some remarkable lighting design tiles become plastered letters, letters glow and move, string does excellent service as a dynamic piece of set (please, please, more people should steal this idea,) and throughout it all water, water everywhere as cascades of the real stuff flow across the set and from a working pump whenever dramatically necessary. Somewhere out there is a very happy mechanical engineer.

The star, but not the story. The story is an off-kilter version of the basic Orpheus story: Boy meets girl, girl gets kidnapped by the king of the dead, girl meets dead father, boy composes music good enough to get him admitted to the party, boy gets girl back, boy loses girl again when he looks back (sort of like Lot’s wife, only without the thing with the daughters) breaking the only rule and producing the tragic ending. Your standard fare. Two things make this retelling stand out. The first is Ruhl’s fascinating (if not always fantastic) script. There are layers and layers of issues rolled up into almost free-verse like dialogue. It’s almost as if she didn’t have the space to roll together all the complexity of paternal vs. romantic love, language vs. music, the desire to vs. the fear of forgetting (listening to RadioLab?) matrimony / coming of age, and expressed vs. understood affection, so she chose rather to imply much of it with dense, elliptical inference that leaves you to work it out on your own. There’s an intense love of the language here. Wonderful imagery sprinkles throughout the dialogue, whether assisted by the action or not.

If the text is inconsistent, the performances are more so. The standout is Charles Shaw Robinson’s Father character. He inhabits the character so fully (and quietly!) the he becomes the focus of every scene he’s in and makes you wish he were in the others. The titular Eurydice (Maria Dizzia) fades in and out of wonderful, believably vulnerable one moment and cartoonish in the worst screaming-and-yelling school way the next. A joy to watch – a lot of the time. Our hero Orpheus (J. Parks) never seems quite comfortable in his own skin. While maybe an attempt to seem distant (and inspired?) it really only achieves awkward. Admittedly, he has some pretty awkward lines. Beyond that, the strange and poorly developed Lord of the Underworld character and a pseudo-greek-chorus of “stones” are useful, but little more than that, and trip occasionally over dialogue that was better as text. Much of the movement and pacing seem to fall on their face, especially the climactic walk. If only everything could be as interesting as string.

Fascinating ideas, wonderful language, there are worse ways to watch this amazing set.