Eurydice, Sarah Ruhl’s reimagining of the Orpheus myth from a female point-of-view, is being presented by MacTheatre this spring. Eurydice is a play that contrasts the archetypal themes of life, love, and death with the fondly familiar aspects of everyday life. Influenced by the playwright’s loss of her own father, Eurydice is a reminder to take pleasure in mundane moments, and to explore the extraordinary nature of life with childlike boldness and curiosity.

Ruhl’s version of the play uses the basic myth as inspiration, but differs in many ways. As classicist M. Owen Lee said in his book entitled Virgil as Orpheus, “A great artist never touches a myth without developing, expanding, and sometimes radically changing it.” Eurydice’s father doesn’t play a role in the original myth, but he plays a pivotal role in Ruhl’s play. In the classical versions of the story, Eurydice is a passive victim. In Ovid’s version of the story, she doesn’t speak at all and in Virgil’s poem she says only a few words after Orpheus has already looked back at her. In Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice, she is given both a voice and a choice.