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COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
At the theatre these days, we are rarely asked to play. Producers, who live or die on the accuracy of their reading of the public mood, have registered the current climate of fear and exploited our need for succor. The glut of movies-into-musicals and refurbished revivals is a kind of "Pimp My Mind" of theatre. Audiences are happy to pay top dollar to see what they already know; it's the unknown that petrifies them. Sarah Ruhl's "Eurydice" (at the Second Stage, under the direction of Les Waters), a luminous retelling of the Orpheus myth from his beloved wife's point of view, is exhilarating because it frees the stage from the habitual. Watching it, we enter a singular, surreal world, as lush and limpid as a dream--an anxiety dream of love and loss--where both author and audience swim in the magical, sometimes menacing, and always thrilling flow of the unconscious.
Scott Bradley's set powerfully conjures up Hades: a cavernous shower room, where the echo of dripping water and shimmers of glinting light bounce off hand-lettered aquamarine tiles that cover the walls. Over time, the tiles take on meaning: they are the petitions of the dead to the living--undelivered letters to the bright, silent world above. This deceptively simple and gorgeous stylization mirrors Ruhl's literary attack:...
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