Busy Saturday: Daytripped to New Haven for the matinee of Eurydice at Yale Repertory Theatre, spurred on by the rapturous reviews and to better acquaint myself with Sarah Ruhl in anticipation of her Lincoln Center Theater debut with The Clean House. How lovely is New Haven, and how relaxing is the train ride up there? And Chapel Street, how perfectly collegiate and quaddy is that? Before curtain, I couldn't resist burdening myself with three book purchases, including a used hardcover of Donna Tartt's The Secret History. Is anyone turning that into a movie?
Where was I? Eurydice. I will admit that I've never been to Yale Rep before--things have kept me busy in NYC and New Haven is out of TONY's jurisdiction. But now, count me charmed by this perfectly proportioned amphitheater-style space, housed in a quaint old church. Yale Rep's next show is Elizabeth Meriwether's The Mistakes Madeline Made, a shrewd, smart comedy I hearted here. So they're doing something right. Besides the good taste and the good space, the productions seem to have top-notch set, light and costume design and solid actors. Which all means that Yale Rep should be the envy of NYC's nonprofit theaters and you should treat yourself to a Metro North ticket to see a show there.
Alright, am I stalling before getting to Eurydice? A bit, since I'm still sorting through my responses to this quirky, modern-but-unspecific update of the Orpheus & Eurydice myth. In tone and approach to mythology, it reminded me a lot of Mary Zimmerman's Metamorphoses (which came to NYC in 2001), modernizing the myths and humorously underscoring their historicity and weirdness, but mining them for their emotional wallop and archetypal beauty. Both Eurydice and Metamorphoses infused the "timeless" generality of the myth with the particularity of contemporary psychology and identity. Ruhl's very refined, deceptively simple language reminded me a bit of Anne Washburn's dialog. You know: the astringent, almost sour detachment of Stein, but with winks to let you in on the joke. User-friendly meta. I know I'm drowning in comparisons here.
Drowning! Another Metamorphoses trope also found in Eurydice is water. The multifarious uses of water: To drink, to wash, to play, to drown, to transport, to soak and, in Hades, to make you forget. The very aqueous production is superbly staged by Les Waters (more, rather) whose work I admired in Apparition and years ago at BAM in Big Love. Here, he creates a world in a set that looks like a drained public pool, a high curving wall covered in what looks like, at first, aquamarine tiling. There are a lot of water effects on display: an elevator door opens in Hades to reveal Eurydice, recently deceased wife of singer Orpheus, standing forlornly in a torrential downpour. An onstage pump disgorges water. The set (Scott Bradley), lights (Russell H. Champa) and sound (Bray Poor) were all excellent and Waters made ample use of them to create a gorgeous, hypnotic theatrical space.
Ruhl's writing is exceedingly refined and concise, witty and full of meaning, yet relaxed and almost guileless at times. Her interpretation of the love of Orpheus and Eurydice is both wryly cynical and unguardedly hopeful. She's incredibly inventive with stage pictures: the aforementioned elevator to Hades full of pouring water; a scene in a skyscraper penthouse interrupted by the near passage of a plane; an apartment "constructed" entirely out of string. Her depiction of Eurydice, recently arrived in Hades with her memory washed away is both a source of humor and deeply touching sorrow. With her astonishingly light touch, Ruhl examines issues of grief, death, romantic love, father-daughter love, language's inability to represent and, finally, the beautiful, horrible mutability of memory, like, well, the shifting sands erased by tidewater.
So what the heck's my ambivalence about what sounds like a brilliant young writer (one who has been awarded the MacArthur "genius" grant recently)? I mentioned Metamorphoses and Anne Washburn's Apparition before. At the former, I cried. At the latter, I shivered in nameless dread. At Eurydice, I merely stroked my chin, chuckled at the jokes, nodded at the writer's deft, ingenious touch, but left more unsatisfied than transformed. This sustained tone of winsome whimsy, this mix of archness and childlike wonder, this grad-school feminist coyness, turns me off ever so slightly. Not sure I can get on the wavelength of the play, much as I can admire it.
Perhaps right now she's more interested in ideas than in people.
Postshow it was back to the city to catch the Clarinatrix in a concert by the new, excellent American Modern Ensemble. The program, Midtown Sound, was a survey of music by composers who can be identified as neither "uptown" nor "downtown." To explain: The downtown sound is bohemian, iconoclastic and emerges from an anti-establishment cultural continuum that includes Surrealism, Fluxus and 60s countercultural Happenings. The uptown sound (on which I'm shakier) is more rigorous, academic, the sonically severe progeny of Schoenberg. Mathematical complexity, fidelity to atonality and a lack of concern for the enjoyment of the audience are some qualities of the uptown sound. To illustrate, the concert kicked off with a "downtown" piece, John Cage's Composed Improvisation for Snare Drum Alone (1985) in which Tom Kolor played on a snare drum using dried pasta and screws; and an "uptown" piece Milton Babbitt's Overtime (also 1985), an atonal piece for piano.
Incidentally, for us theater types, this taxonomy has similarities and dissimilarities. There is (or perhaps more accurately, used to be) a definite distinction between "downtown" and "midtown". Not sure anyone ever referred to "uptown" theater. Basically, downtown is freaky avant-garde and pop-culture-referencing work, and midtown is wanna-be commercial showcases and of course, Broadway. So, art versus commerce. Unlike music, which has an avant-garde bifurcated between the renegade bohemian strain and the academic one, both equally out of the mainstream. Today, there's not really a concentrated geo-aesthetic "downtown scene" anymore. Well, Soho Rep, P.S. 122, HERE, St. Mark's Church, sure. But the avant-garde has kinda moved out to Williamsburg.
Anyway the concert was great, with special thrills from Rob Paterson's achingly strange and beautiful The Thin Ice of Your Fragile Mind, which was, to use a rather technical musicological term, tinkly and outer-spacey (lots of metallic percussion and upper register woodwind/piano). Also noteworthy: James Matheson's ass-kicking piano solo Pound, in which Eric Huebner punished the ivories with no mercy.
UPDATE: Jaime over at Surplus weighs in on Ruhl, who happened to be her playwriting teacher.
Yale Rep seems to enjoy splashing around: It staged The Frogs in a pool 30 years ago. As a sucker for site-specific productions, I would have loved to see it.
Posted by: Elisabeth Vincentelli | October 16, 2006 at 02:36 PM
I agree, Yale is beautiful.
I was starting to feel that I was the only one with a few reservations.
http://mirroruptolife.blogspot.com/2006/10/eurydice-by-sarah-ruhl-yale-repertory.html
Posted by: mirroruptonature | October 17, 2006 at 03:33 PM