Eurydice

I'm just back from seeing Eurydice, a contemporary adaptation of the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, which moves it's focus from Orpheus' struggle, to Eurydice's experience in the 'underworld'; it was written by Sarah Ruhl, and directed by Les Waters. Now I haven't had much time to think it all over, so there won't be a well written and coherent analysis of the play, I'm just gonna write what I'm thinking about it as it comes to me. First off, I very much recommend that you go and see this play, it's beautifully done; the acting is wonderful, Orpheus and Euridice have a sort of strange and akward chemistry rarely encountered in a love story, and the Chorus is a riot. The first thing that struck me in the structure of the play is the difference in Orpheus and Eurydice's natures; Orpheus is a distracted artist with his mind always on music and song, Eurydice, it is made apparent, loves books and reading, but to Orpheus it seems that she's fallen into the trap of not thinking for herself and letting her books think for her. So at the beggining of the play I am led to think about the differences in philisophical validity of educating oneself, but possibly to a fault where one cannot think for oneself - something I am obviously very opposed to in todays culture - and living and thinking in such a lofty manor as Orpheus does and in no way considering other opinions or sides of thought, which in ways is inhibiting to the mind, because one may not reach the full potential of his own mind if he cannot consider things from different ways of thought than his own. Once the first scene ended, I sort of lost that thoughtful vibe, and the emotional aspect of the performace kicked in. The play was visually and emotionally enthralling, and the casting was just perfect. In the end, whereas I thought that the play may hav been more surrounded with the ideas I mentioned before, it seems that the biggest question was that of consciousness. Eurydice, in this adaptation, chooses to take Orpheus' attention in order to go back to see her father, who both - her and her father - decide to free themselves of their own memories and consciousness by dipping themselves in the lake of the underworld - which wipes the memoris of the dead. In essence, they choose to part from their consiousness - not an advocate for suicide, they were already dead, but more an advocate for the necessity for the acceptance of our own mortality and the ways in which it is what we ultimately want. The play also deals with the difficulty of the first issues I mentioned and how people who think as people and conscious beings can get along and accept what life is and where it takes them and their minds. Those are just my initial thoughts, just writting down what I think, but I figured I'd get it out there tonight while it was fresh in my mind.