Curiouser and Curiouser! Ruhl Wrecks Eurydice With Whimsy
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At the Theater
It was the mighty Kenneth Tynan who said that among the things he could live without in the theater are Everyman characters with pretentious names like “Mr. Adam” or “Mr. Zero.”
I wonder how he might have felt about Sarah Ruhl’s interpretation of the Orpheus/Eurydice myth with its “The Nasty and Interesting Man,” and its Greek chorus of human stones named “Loud Stone,” “Big Stone” and “Little Stone.”
Methinks I see the rakish Tynan making a dash for the exit the moment he finishes reading his playbill. When it comes to anthropomorphic fantasies (not to mention a “Nasty and Interesting Man”), I confess I’m of like mind, though Ms. Ruhl’s Eurydice has already received critical acclaim as a poetic masterpiece.
Tynan also maintained that he could live without all plays in which circus tents symbolize the human condition, and Ms. Ruhl’s drama offers us today’s avant-garde equivalent—a symbolic bathhouse (as in the watery productions of Mary Zimmerman), with sound effects and exposed pipes (as in David Leveaux’s Electra), together with pseudo-Beckettian characters imprisoned in a wasteland, or hell (as in artsy-fartsy shows too numerous to mention).
Ms. Ruhl also throws into her Eurydice mix a pastiche of Lewis Carroll, a fairy-tale intrusion of the Big Bad Wolf (her junior Lord of the Underworld), outtakes from The Wizard of Oz and more than an echo of Caryl Churchill’s magic realism and Edward Albee’s absurdism.
That’s an awful lot of dramaturgy for one Greek myth. Ms. Ruhl’s previous New York outing was with the award-winning The Clean House, an anemic social comedy with serious undertones about love, passion, cancer, housecleaning and Matilde, a wise Brazilian maid who’s in search of the perfect joke—“The perfect joke,” she muses, “is somewhere between an angel and a fart.”
You could have fooled me. But this is the way Ms. Ruhl thinks.
In re-imagining what is one of the greatest love stories, she’s keeping company with Titian, Monteverdi, Balanchine and Cocteau. And Updike, too. The myth of Orpheus and Eurydice touches all hearts. When Eurydice suddenly dies, the heavenly music of her bereft lover moves even stones to tears as Orpheus woos the gods to return her to him. They’re both given a second chance. But Orpheus is warned not to look back at Eurydice as she follows him out of Hades and back to life. He looks back and loses her forever.
This is surprising and disappointing news to relate: I’m afraid that not even for an instant does Ms. Ruhl convey a sense of the eternal, aching love of the myth. Sad to say, she reduces everything—including anguish—to whimsy.
A harsh verdict was inevitable from the outset, when her two charmlessly coy protagonists (Joseph Parks’ Orpheus and Maria Dizzia’s Eurydice) first appear, romping in 1950’s swimming costumes. Why the 50’s? Well, why not? Weren’t those innocent times (sort of)? At the lovers’ wedding, they sing the Andrews Sisters’ song with the lyric “Don’t sit under the apple tree / with anyone else but me.” It’s meant to be fun and quirky, though neither cute quirkiness nor straining jokes are the point of the original story.
The atmosphere of Ms. Ruhl’s vulgarized version is relentlessly “off-beat”—just as the set designed by Scott Bradley is deliberately off-kilter. The two lovers reveal surprisingly trivializing differences for tragic heroes: Eurydice adores books, but Orpheus doesn’t see the point of them. He lives for music; she can’t carry a tune, and so on. Worse: The two actors playing them have been encouraged by the playwright or the director, Les Waters, to act like children. Next Page >
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Thank you, John Heilpern, for having some discernment and an independent head on your shoulders. Ruhl is a winner (one of oh so many winners) of my Naked Emperor Award. THe play is puerile, thin, shallow, and just plain bad. Can so many people be deluded and fooled by "good press"? Yes, alas.
Hurrah for independent thinkers! But not the ones who condemn other independent thinkers with different opinions. I saw Eurydice before it got press and was the first thing in a long time that completely took me out of myself. I love this play. No problem that a critic doesn't like it. Get the facts right though instead of passing it all off. The whole point is that Eurydice caused Orpheus to look back because she wanted to stay with her father. There was no indication that she was just a dumb ass. That's this critics own personal issues.
Review of "Curiouser and Curiouser! Ruhl Wrecks Eurydice With Whimsy"
John Heilpern strikes me as the kind of person who is different just for the sake of being different. While almost everyone else seems to adore Eurydice, Heilpern decided to hate it mainly for the sake of hating it. To justify his unjustified disgust, he nitpicks about names of characters, babbles about the lameness of plot moments that he clearly wasn't paying enough attention to understand, and gets his facts wrong on four or five occasions.
Critics who are panning something should at least get their facts straight. From minor errors such as misnaming the Nasty Interesting Man as "Nasty and Interesting Man" to larger gaffs, Heilpern missed the mark with this review entirely.
The column starts off by going on for half a page about Kenneth Tynan, leading one to believe that Heilpern has no actual ideas of his own. Later on, he makes a big deal about the characters' differences:
"The two lovers reveal surprisingly trivializing differences for tragic heroes: Eurydice adores books, but Orpheus doesn’t see the point of them. He lives for music; she can’t carry a tune, and so on."
Is there not a saying, 'opposites attract'? I wouldn't call this exposition trivializing in the least.
That same paragraph and on to the next page, Heilpern makes an enormous fuss over the director (and the playwright)'s decision to have the characters act young and coy. He states, "How old are they again? Ten? The infantilization of tragic adult love is at one with our juvenile times, encouraging easy, easy tears."
Someone should have told Heilpern that the characters are in their mid-teens (sixteen, seventeen-ish). Hardly adult love. And as one who has seen teenage 'love', I can see that there can be quite a lot of the slightly sickening infantility. Maybe Heilpern has forgotten what it's like to be a child.
And then, growing less and less factually correct, Heilpern states: "...Eurydice not only dies twice; she has a father complex."
A father complex?! Is Heilpern serious, or is this supposed to be a joke? Maybe Heilpern isn't capable of imagining what it's like to lose someone you love and then have the opportunity to be with them again.
For the biggest missing of the mark, Heilpern ends the article with a laughably inaccurate version of Eurydice's final death. In Ruhl's play, Eurydice is torn between staying with her father in the underworld and going back to the real world with Orpheus. On the way out of the underworld, she makes her decision and calls out to Orpheus, causing him to turn and look, sending her back to the underworld for good to be with her father. Heilpern was probably asleep at this point in the play (judging from his review), and so he missed this development entirely.
"When at last Orpheus rescues the love of his life from Hades, you wonder why he bothered. As they leave, he looks fatally back as always—but Ms. Ruhl has added a stunning twist, a brave new interpretation. In a syncopated tiff, Orpheus now blames her lack of rhythm for the tragedy..."
Noooo. Good try, Mr Heilpern, but you missed the point by a mile.
As one who has both read the play Eurydice and seen it staged, I can say that it's not my favourite play in the world. But John Heilpern, ever the dissenter, swam against the tide and invented a plethora of shoddy half-reasons why the play was no good, and because of that, made himself look like even more of a fool than, according to him, Maria Dizzia.