Eurydice by Sarah Ruhl
I had the wonderful opportunity to play Orpheus in Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice at the Mitchell Hall Theatre on campus at the University of Central Oklahoma directed by Kato Buss. This was a retelling of the story of Orpheus but from Eurydice’s perspective. Orpheus and Eurydice are about to get married at the start of the show. Eurydice meets a man who tells her that he has a letter from her late father and she follows him up to his high rise apartment to receive it. In this scene, she falls down a flight of stairs to her untimely death and so forth enters the underworld. Orpheus is searching for Eurydice the entire time and devises an elaborate plan to receive her wife. A twist from the original story, Orpheus gives into her temptation to look at Eurydice and causes her to be stuck in the underworld forever after all the hard work she has put in to leave. Unable to carry the burden on her shoulders, Orpheus commits suicide to be with her wife in the underworld. However, when Orpheus has finally arrived, she realizes everybody has dipped themselves in the river of forgetfulness and Orpheus, then too is rained on with the water, forgetting everything herself.
Eurydice was played by Miranda Summar.
As a cast, we received a total of three Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival Nominations for the roles of Eurydice, Orpheus, and Nasty Interesting Man.
