Eurydice Off-Broadway Reviews

CRITIC'S PICK - Les Waters’s marvelously burnished revival... stars an instantly likable Maya Hawke as a self-possessed Eurydice, cerebral but with a romantic streak, and a beautifully understated Brian d’Arcy James as her mild father, funny here in a dadly way and immensely moving, too... This Off Broadway revival is similar to that earlier Waters production, yet even more eloquent in execution — the work of a director who by now knows the play’s every ripple and depth.

Maya Hawke is just as game to star in a surreal Off-Broadway melodrama as she is a hit movie franchise. Hawke is at home in the frustrated, determined, and slightly mysterious title role... The question is less, ‘Why revive this story right now?’ than ‘Why not?’”

Ruhl's riff leans into surrealism, symbolism, dark humor and poetry as the title character is torn between husband and father, romance and grief, the living and the dead. The production includes moving moments and breathtaking visuals... Her Eurydice is a reimagined remembrance of a story we feel compelled to revisit over and over, even once we’ve learned the dangers of looking back.

The familiarity of it all is crucial to the thing. Given the myth, or the number of times you might’ve seen it brought to life, you know the final turn is coming, though that never makes it any less painful. And it’s bracing when Ruhl tightens her lens and has the play become suddenly specific — those instructions Eurydice’s father recites, for instance, direct you to her own grandparents’ former home. For all its whimsy, the play centers on something hard and insoluble: that we’ll lose each other, from one generation to the next, and that we’ll always come back to thinking of the dead, and wishing we listened more.