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The Eurydice Mixtape

Music from the show and some of our cast and crew’s favorite songs, for your listening enjoyment.

Track List:

1. My Shot from Hamilton 2. Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree by The Andrews Sisters 3. Agua De Beber by Astrud Gilberto 4. You Will Be Found from Dear Evan Hansen 5. Contradiction by Mali Music 6. Self-Control by Frank Ocean  7. Same Drugs by Chance the Rapper 8. Glitter and Gold by Barns Courtney 9. King Kunta by Kendrick Lamar 10. Undisclosed Desires by Muse 11. Bite by Troye Sivan 12. If I Believe You by the 1975 13. Robbers by The 1975 14. Blue Dress by Depeche Mode 15. In the Valley of the Dying Sun by House of Heroes 16. Loving Someone by The 1975 17. Me and Your Mama by Childish Gambino 18. Daddy Lessons by Beyonce

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Audience Review

The show was SO AMAZING! From the live music from actors to the incredible lighting to the STUNNING sets, I was breathless the whole show. Congrats to everyone, you all are so wonderful and the show is the product of your incredible hard work and it was so wonderful!!

Submit your own review

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Letters in the Underworld

The Off Broadway production of Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice featured a set “wallpapered in letters from the dead to the living.”

At the Bruce Davis theater, we’ve provided paper and pens for audience members who would like to imagine what relatives, friends, or others who have passed on might write from the underworld, or would like to write out their own letter to someone they’d like to have one more conversation with.

We’d like to extend this to the blog as well. Whether you are unable to come see the show, or you would simply prefer to write your letter privately, letters can be sent through this blog’s submit option and we’ll print them out and post them to our bulletin board.

After the show, we’ll give the letters to a worm. Hopefully, they’ll be delivered.

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Saw the show?

Submit a review!

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Opening Tonight!

If you’re in the area, Eurydice is opening tonight in the Bruce Davis Theater at 8 pm.

Free admission for smcm students, staff, and faculty for this special opening performance.

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Interview: Kyndall Rhaney

Tell us about your character/role in the show.

My character in the show is a Loud Stone; nasty bratty, annoying characters who taunt Eurydice but also keep things in check down in the underworld.

What did you know about the Orpheus and Eurydice myth before getting involved in this play?

Before getting involved in the play I did not know much about the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. I only knew that Orpheus was a person who traveled down into the underworld to demand for his wife back.

What do you think makes our production special?

As cliché as it sounds, it is OUR production that what makes it special. It is our own interpretation of Eurydice. Our director Amy Steiger, the crew and the cast make the underworld and the upper world a beautiful place.

What’s your favorite song/ What type of music do you like?

This is a difficult question for me, I am known for having a very eclectic musical taste.  My musical range goes from heavy rock/metal like The Ghost Inside or my favorite band Motionless in White to Musical such as Hamilton or Phantom or Little Shop, back to Jazz like Herbie Hancock, Ella Fitzgerald, and New Age Jazz back to the top 40 charts of Pop. My favorite song as of right now would be Loving Someone by the 1975.

Who would you want to encounter in or bring back from the underworld?

If I was able to bring someone back from the Underworld I would bring back any one who was an activist in the Civil Rights Movement. Lorraine Hansberry, Nina Simone, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcom X.

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Interview: Daekwan Jacobs

Tell us about your character/role in the show.

I am Lord of the Underworld/ Child/ A Nasty Interesting Man.

What did you know about the Orpheus and Eurydice myth before getting involved in this play?

The only thing I knew about the myth was that Orpheus could not look back at Eurydice when he was coming back from the underworld.

What do you think makes our production special?

I think this production is special because of how it is set up. The costumes, the lights, the sets, etc. everything about this is beautifully made and being used in this production.

What’s your favorite song/ What type of music do you like?

My favorite songs are Contradiction by Mali Music, Self-Control by Frank Ocean, and Same Drugs by Chance the Rapper.

Who would you want to encounter in or bring back from the underworld?

I want to encounter Michael Jackson because this man literally is my idol. I live for Michael *praised hands emoji*

Eurydice mentions something she always wanted to ask her father about. Is there something you’ve always wanted to ask someone but never (or haven’t yet) gotten the chance to?

Something that I always wanted to ask is how have I impacted your life? Was it for the better or worse, but more importantly, did I leave an imprint on someone and/or the communities I’m a part of?

What else do you want to say to our audiences?

I really hope you all enjoy this production. We all have been working really hard and I think this is a wonderful play that has its funny moments as well as its heart felt moments. The set and costumes are great and the live music is amazing!

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Let’s talk about me. Hi! I’m Lydia. I’m dramaturg, assistant director, and your guide to the wacky world that is Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice.

I’m also queer and proud of it. How does that connect to all this? As you may or may not be aware, Orpheus and Eurydice in modern culture is incredibly heteronormative. The quintessential story of doomed heterosexual love.

Let’s start with a definition. For my purposes, heteronormative here means “portraying heterosexual desire as default or ‘normal’ state of being” as well as “enforcing stereotypical gender roles in romantic and/or sexual relationships.” So, for example, Li Shang and Fa Mulan in Disney’s Mulan would not qualify as heteronormative, despite the relationship being between a man and a woman, because Mulan actively defies stereotypes of how a woman should behave.

I’ll be spending a lot of time talking about the differences between the adaptations I’ve looked at, but let’s first talk about the similarities. Every single adaptation I looked at, with one exception (The Hip Hop Waltz of Eurydice), features not only a romance between a male Orpheus and a female Eurydice, but more or less conforms to stereotypical gender roles.

Eurydice’s agency can mean the difference between her being a sock puppet and an actual person, but let’s look at how the story as its understood in popular culture is almost inherently heteronormative, and why.

Extremely influential in western understandings of heteronormative love throughout the ages is the medieval tradition of courtly love, most notably encapsulated in the poetry of Petrarch, where he speaks of his desire for a beautiful woman named Laura, who never returns his feelings and is out of reach because she is already married. Laura is the ideal woman: beautiful, unattainable, and silent. Her side of the story is never told. This illustrates the ideal of courtly love: a man in love with a woman who remains out of reach. While Petrarch was already being parodied and subverted by Shakespeare’s time (Romeo and Juliet being the most famous example), the ideal has greatly influential in western culture.

So here we create a vision of an ideal heteronormative romance: A man who goes to great lengths for the woman he loves and suffers without her, and a silent woman whose most characteristic trait is her beauty and who seems unattainable.

Eurydice has long been seen as either a symbol or a quest object, sometimes both. In many ways, she’s become an Ideal Woman: silent and out of reach. Being killed on her wedding day, Eurydice retains the “purity” of her virginity, while still giving Orpheus claim to her. What could be more unattainable than death? And what could be a more noble and doomed quest for love than following her into the underworld in an attempt to restore her to life?

In earlier versions of the myth, Persephone was often the one who gave Orpheus the “don’t look back” stipulation. In many modern adaptations, the role of Persephone is altered or left out entirely. Beginning with Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld, the tradition of Hades as the “other man” has become somewhat common in adaptations. Often, the roles of Hades and Aristaeus become inextricable. Male insecurity about being unable to control women’s sexuality leads to adaptations where Hades is no longer Eurydice’s jailer, but instead Orpheus’ rival for her affections, and Orpheus’ failure to bring her back to the world of the living is a manifestation of a man’s fears that his wife will leave him.

Like the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, Romeo and Juliet has also been assimilated into this courtly love tradition in popular culture. Consider the role of the balcony scene in popular imagination (iconic) versus the scene where Romeo and Juliet, having just consummated their marriage, struggle with their desire to stay together in the face of Romeo’s banishment (almost forgotten). Consider how the ending is commonly watered down to “and then the teenagers killed themselves because they loved each other so much” without considering the context of the toxic world created by the feud, which made death their only option.

Perhaps because Romeo and Juliet has a solid source material that actively refutes these cultural misinterpretations, there are several examples of people turning back to the original play and pushing back against the heteronormative mold of courtly love that it’s been shoved into, and even against heteronormativity entirely. For example, the film Private Romeo uses Romeo and Juliet to critique homophobia and the toxic masculinity of a military training academy.

However, there is no equivalent for Orpheus and Eurydice. Even The Hip Hop Waltz of Eurydice, for all its exploration of gender, ends with compliance to heteronormativity.

The strange thing about Orpheus and Eurydice is that there have been plenty of chances to queer the story, and yet no one has done it. Gluck’s opera Orfeo ed Euridice was written with the intention of Orpheus being played by a castrato, a male singer castrated at a young age to stop his voice from changing. Which might in itself seem queer, however, castrati were actually considered quite masculine and commonly played kings and heroes on the stage. As the practice was made illegal in the mid-nineteen century, the role has been played mainly by women ever since.

A perfect opportunity for the sapphic Orpheus and Eurydice of my dreams? Definitely. Sadly, modern opera companies have not delivered. Instead of acknowledging the female body filling the role, they choose to gloss over it, presenting Orpheus as male and carefully avoiding any implications of homosexuality.

Now, let’s take a minute to look back at the Orpheus and Eurydice story in one of its earliest versions. Ovid provides a few interesting elements that are almost universally forgotten in all subsequent adaptations. The first, that Orpheus, after his failure to rescue Eurydice, turned his love to boys. The second is that, after his death, Orpheus’ head washed ashore on the island of Lesbos, most famously home to the poet Sappho, who often speaks of her love for women in her poetry. As Sappho was considered one of the greatest Greek poets, on the same level as Homer, this is most likely intended to imply that she was a spiritual successor to Orpheus. Well, that all sounds very queer. So what happened to all this? Why were these elements dropped, when so much of the rest of the story survived almost completely intact? The answer probably has a lot to do with the subject of this post: heteronormativity. But a better question might be this: why has no one gone back and put these elements back in?

While still a somewhat new trend, there is a history of queering heteronormative stories. Collections of gay erotica based on fairy tales, crossgender casting in Shakespeare productions to create productions such as Private Romeo, and, of course, fanfiction (free fiction stories posted on the internet using already existing characters and worlds. A popular subset known as “slash” consists of stories about characters in queer relationships.) For many queer people, presenting queer versions of traditionally heteronormative stories is not a matter of lack of imagination, but of claiming a place in a society that has shut them out and of fighting the heteronormativity these stories often enforce.

As one of these queer people, I want to make sure our production of Eurydice fights heteronormativity rather than reinforcing it. I want to acknowledge the queer elements that have been stripped from the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, and find ways to reintegrate them into the story.

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Interview: Victoria Chang

Tell us about your role in the show.

I am the assistant stage manager for this show and so I mostly take notes for Maia, the stage manager, and get the props from the back. Otherwise, I just add my feedback to the show from an audience perspective.

What did you know about the Orpheus and Eurydice myth before getting involved in this play?

So I actually love Greek mythology, so I was very familiar with the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. However, it was very exciting to learn and see the myth in a different light rather than the more commonly told version.

What do you think makes our production special?

I think that the group of actors is very cohesive and so it makes for a show with good group dynamics. In addition, I love the set design with the incorporation of musical items in the underworld.

What type of music do you like?

I really enjoy alternative/indie music, but I will mostly listen to anything. However, I only enjoy rap if it is in the form of Lin-Manuel Miranda.

Who would you want to encounter in or bring back from the underworld?

I think that I would be very interested in going down to the underworld and just having those final words with everyone I lost suddenly. I’m not sure if bringing them back would be a good idea, solely because I know that it would just be a more difficult transition. Like the play says, I’ve already mourned them once, too many times is excessive.

Eurydice mentions something she always wanted to ask her father about. Is there something you’ve always wanted to ask someone but never (or haven’t yet) gotten the chance to?

I have always wanted to ask my birth parents about why I was given up for adoption, but that is mostly out of morbid curiosity.

What’s another myth you’d like to see rewritten from a feminist/queer perspective? Tell us about your ideas.

I think that Shakespeare plays could be a very interesting endeavor. I think that because of the way they were written, they could be manipulated to make it from a feminist or queer perspective.

What else do you want to say to our audiences?

I just really hope that the audience recognizes the small moves that we have made and the quips that the script possesses to make it such a wonderful play.

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Tech night! We’re working on setting up our lighting and sound cues before incorporating the actors tomorrow.

Enjoy this sneak peek of our (almost finished!) set :) 

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Interview: McKenna Johnson

Tell us about your character.

I play Eurydice, a girl who loves letters, Orpheus and interesting things.

What did you know about the Orpheus and Eurydice myth before getting involved in this play?

I knew a fair amount about the myth, but not much about the productions surrounding it. I learned about it from my Greek Mythology phase after reading Percy Jackson and the Olympians for the first time, and then fall semester we talked about Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo in freshman seminar, so I was familiar with the story from Orpheus’s point of view, at least.

What do you think makes our production special?

I think that was have a cast and crew dedicated to making this production the best that we can. Our director is phenomenal and our dramaturg’s endless research and knowledge of this play and the myth it’s based on has given this show so much depth.

What type of music do you like? What’s your favorite song?

I’m a really big fan of music with a cinematic, epic quality to them. Songs with a sense of urgency or that feel like they play into a larger narrative. Musicals, of course fall under this category, as do songs that have been used to score movies or television shows. Also, anything written by Ed Sheeran. My favorite song is Glitter and Gold by Barns Courtney

Who would you want to encounter in or bring back from the underworld?

Outside of family members who have passed on, I would really like to encounter Emily Dickinson. I would love to just have long conversations with her.

Eurydice mentions something she always wanted to ask her father about. Is there something you’ve always wanted to ask someone but never (or haven’t yet) gotten the chance to?

I want to ask my grandmother about what her life was like. With all three of my grandparents who have passed, I made the mistake of not realizing they had identities outside of being my grandparents until it was too late to hear them tell their stories themselves. I want to hear about their lives and what they were like before I entered the picture.

What’s another myth you’d like to see rewritten from a feminist/queer perspective? Tell us about your ideas.

I would donate every extra penny I had into a feminist retelling of the myth of Odysseus, preferably from the perspective of his wife Penelope. Like he cheats on her with three different women, all of whom get villainized even though he’s no better than they are, and she remains completely loyal to him by refusing all of the dozens of suitors who just show up at her house and just decide to stay. Penelope deserves a feminist retelling.

What else do you want to say to our audiences?

Just that I hope they enjoy the show and reading about the process that lead up to putting this production on stage. This has been a really fun process, despite the challenges and I hope they enjoy it.

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Look at our fabulous poster!

Featuring show information for anyone planning to come see us :)

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A Brief History of Orpheus and Music

Our first music rehearsal! 

Music is, unsurprisingly, deeply embedded in the history of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth. 

For the Greeks, Orpheus was the first and greatest musician, whose music had the power to control nature.

In medieval Christian imagery, with music becoming synonymous with the word of God, Orpheus took on a Christ-like appearance. 

In Renaissance art, with the revived interest in the Greek gods, Orpheus was frequently portrayed interchangeably with Apollo, the god of music. 

The first opera was Caccini's Euridice (1600) and the story has remained a popular subject for many operas since, including Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld, the source of the (in)famous tune generally referred to as the Can-can.  

Opera's successor, musical theatre, also has its Orpheus and Eurydice adaptations, most recently Anais Mitchell's Hadestown, which premiered at the New York Theatre Workshop in 2016. 

Even modern music abounds with songs directly inspired by Orpheus and Eurydice, such as Sleepthief’s Eurydice, Arcade Fire’s Awful Sound (Oh Eurydice), and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ The Lyre of Orpheus.

And then, of course, there’s our production of Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice, featuring original music composed by an SMCM student and performed by our amazing actor-musicians. 

(Pictured: Jamie (Loud Stone) on cello, Alex (Loud Stone) on piano, and Miranda (Orpheus) on violin)

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Eurydice and the Sexy Lamp test

How many of you have heard of the “Sexy Lamp Test”?

For those of you not in the know, the Sexy Lamp Test is a method of examining female representation in media. Basically, you ask yourself “Could this woman be replaced by a sexy lamp without changing the plot?” If the answer is no, the piece of media passes. Obviously, like with any other test of this sort (the Bechdel Test being the most famous), this isn’t an infallable test for feminist works. Works that pass may not be feminist, it’s even possible (though unlikely) that works that don’t pass may be feminist. It’s simply the test I felt was the most useful for examining how Eurydice has been portrayed over the years.

Okay, everyone on the same page? Let’s look at some adaptations

Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Virgil’s Georgics

Only original in the sense that all previous (likely oral) versions have since been lost, these two versions can be lumped together because they both portray Eurydice the same way: a classic Sexy Lamp. Orpheus goes to get his lamp repaired. Hades fixes it but warns him to carry it with both hands all the way home. Orpheus shifts the weight to onge hand to open his door. The lamp falls and shatters to bits. See? Exact same story.

Christoph Willibald Gluck’s Orphèe et Eurydice 

Despite that Eurydice is constantly treated as a quest object in this opera, she does actually have a small degree of agency. Her anger at Orpheus’ refusal to look at her eventually leads to the infamous look back which dooms her. Other than that, however, she pretty much exists as the object of Orpheus’ affection, even being regularly referred to as “object of my love.” So… a sexy lamp who can talk?

Jean Anouilh’s Eurydice

For all its cringeworthy obsession with purity culture and Eurydice’s virginity (or lack thereof), this play’s Eurydice is undeniably her own person whose choices impact the plot in huge ways, from her rejection of her previous lover, which leads to his suicide, to her decision to leave town, which ultimately results in her first death. Not a sexy lamp, but not very feminist by modern standards.

Reza Abdoh’s The Hip Hop Waltz of Eurydice

Okay. Okay you know what? I don’t even get this one enough to decide. I’m not even sure who qualifies as a female character, given that the entire play deconstructs gender through cross-gender casting. Let’s just get an abstract art interpretation of a lamp in here and call it a day.

Anais Mitchell’s Hadestown

Guess what? Guess what?! This musical has not one, but TWO female characters with agency! Eurydice and Persephone both influence the plot through their actions and decisions and are NOT sexy lamps!!

And last, but not least, the play that this blog is all about:

Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice

As we can guess by the title, Ruhl’s play is focused on the character of Eurydice, who is at the center of the play’s story. As such, the character is complex and a very important part of the plot, not just a device to keep the story moving. She has her own interests, and a relationship with her father that’s given equal weight to her relationship with Orpheus. Not a sexy lamp!

Bonus:

Terry Cavanagh’s Don’t Look Back

This minimalist pixel game features a Eurydice who fits the Sexy Lamp profile to a tee. Of course, since the player completely controls Orpheus, and there’s no dialogue or cut scenes, you can argue that no one else in the game has any agency either.

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Production Update

Rehearsals just started up. Our AMAZING cast has been working hard on reading through the scenes and analyzing the play. It’s been such a pleasure to work with them and hear their thoughts about their characters. 

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Research Notes

Orpheus Aux Enfers composed by Jacques Offenbach

This comic opera is perhaps the only adaptation where Orpheus and Eurydice are not only not in love, but don’t even like each other. Famous for the “Infernal Galop” (commonly known as the can-can), the opera is dominated by the figure of Public Opinion, and Orpheus and Jupiter’s obsessive desire to be thought well of. This opera is of interest because of how it presents almost an inverse of the original myth.

-          Eurydice is daughter of a nymph and a demigod

-          Bored of Orpheus music

-          She loves Aristaeus, he loves a sheperdess

-          As an opera it's inherently on Orpheus side/the side of music

-          Orpheus and Eurydice have been married for a while

-          This particular production includes crossdressing chorus members

-          Orpheus goes to Mount Olympus to ask Jupiter for her return, rather than Hades, and only because Public Opinion demands it of him

-          Cuckoldry anxiety

-          Eurydice requites every man who desires her

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Research Notes

Eurydice by Jean Anouilh

Another play adaptation of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, this 1921 adaptation set in modern (at the time) France features a Eurydice who doesn’t quite live up to the ideals of purity expected of women. However, Orpheus’ anxieties over her virginity (or lack thereof) prove equally disastrous. This play is useful in that it seems to have influenced Ruhl’s play, and it (to some degree) interrogates the heteronormative model that Orpheus and Eurydice normally play into.  

-          Eurydice promising to be every woman in one for Orpheus

-          Love at first sight, they don’t know each other’s names until the end of act one

-          Orpheus’ father and Eurydice’s mother

-          Metatheatricality (Orpheus and Eurydice analyze the characters around them)

-          “When you play your accordion […] I turn into a little snake”

-          Orpheus’ obsession with her sexual purity

-          Death anthropomorphized as feminine (and Good)

-          Orpheus has to look at her to see if she’s telling the truth

-          Orpheus commits suicide to be with Eurydice again