Play on Words

A Eurydice production that’s lush with language.

- THEATER / JACKSON MCHENRY

IN THESE DAYS, when summer’ struggling to break out of its cloudy shell, the dead seem awfully close to us. Maybe it’s wise to pause and listen closely to what they have to say. Such is happening at Signature Theatre, where Les Waters is carefully and straightforwardly reviving Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice, a play about journeying to the underworld—though reviving is a somewhat odd word here, considering Ruhl’s gently witty drama hasn't been dead for a moment since its premiere in 2003. It has traveled the world over, and Ruhl worked on the libretto of the operatic adaptation, which premiered at the L.A. Opera in 2020. But with Waters’s hand guiding you, it’s worth pressing your ear to the poetry of Ruhl’s work all over again. The dead, as she puts it in one of Eurydice’s most memorable lines, speak so softly “it's like the pores in your face opened up and talked.”

A phrase like that needs to be delivered with a certain frankness lest it bend toward something too cute. Waters’s long collaboration with Ruhl includes directing Eurydice at the Berkeley Rep in 2004 and its Off Broadway debut in 2007, and he knows the ins and outs of her language, when to get the actors to emphasize and where to let her words speak for themselves. Here, Waters works with Maya Hawke, the latest