It’s our nature to process stimuli through our heads. “Eurydice” is a play best filtered through the heart.
Let the love and melancholy of the timeless Orpheus myth course through you in the visually and aurally intoxicating setting of the Curious Theatre. And worry about what all those esoteric words mean later.
Orpheus is the musician who goes to hell and back for the wife who died on their wedding night. In Sarah Ruhl’s imaginative (and liberal) retelling from Eurydice’s point of view, we first see young love in full but forebodingly discordant bloom (a central metaphor). Eurydice dies but, in this world, there is no death. She emerges in the Underworld, is reunited with her beloved father and eventually found by her grieving husband.
There, a capricious young lord grants Eurydice her freedom on the impossible condition that Orpheus not look upon his love for their long journey to the surface. Following behind, she naturally calls to him. And, naturally, he looks.
For this offense, here squarely laid at Eurydice’s feet, she is forever exiled to the land below. There, heartbroken, she chooses to bathe herself in a river that expunges all memory of her husband.
The truisms are wrenchingly timeless: Gazing upon one you love but can’t touch? That feels a lot like death. And memory of a love lost is its own curse, the only relief from which might be to forget.
Though this myth has cut a pop- culture swath from Ovid to Shakespeare to Jean Anouilh to Tennessee Williams to Nick Cave, Ruhl’s take is a uniquely feminine look at a woman’s two great loves: her husband and father.
Ruhl leaves the physical interpretation of her enigmatic poem up to the imaginations of those who stage it. Curious Theatre adopts a stylized, Jazz Age motif while creating a world where an elevator (inside which it rains) is your portal to hell; where earthworms deliver mail between worlds; where umbrellas dot the sky like clouds; where you read with your feet. And where period love songs like “Beyond the Sea” cede to cleverly apropos rock lyrics like the Doors’ “Learn to forget.”
This underworld isn’t so much a fiery hell but a cool blue purgatory populated by a chorus of human stones condemned to the pointless, terminal task of overturning buckets of river water.
Director Chip Walton’s cast, led by Karen Slack and Tyee Tilghman as the lovers, and Jim Hunt as her dead father, delivers one aching moment after another — such as Hunt imagining giving his daughter away at her wedding. Mark Pergola paints a macabre underlord who ages from young brat to fully grown menace.
But the real stars here are the concert creators of this surreal world: Michael R. Duran (set), Shannon McKinney (light), Brian Freeland (sound) and Janice Lacke (costumes). And Walton’s most daring innovation was choosing to choreograph nearly the entire tale. Ballet Nouveau artistic director Garrett Ammon brings a physical rhythm to the storytelling that matches the cadence of the words and the flowing of the onstage water.
Strange, fanciful and visually exquisite, “Eurydice” survives a sleepy midplay lull to sear audiences with a memory no shower might soon wash away.
John Moore: 303-954-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com
“Eurydice” ***1/2 (out of four stars)
Musical Myth. Curious Theatre, 1080 Acoma St. Starring Karen Slack, Tyee Tilghman, Jim Hunt, Mark Pergola, Dee Covington, John Jurcheck and Courtney Hayes-Jurcheck. Through April 18. 1 hour, 40 minutes, no intermission. 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays. $24-$37 (2-for-1 Thursdays). 303-623-0524 or
