Interview: Sarah Ruhl and Les Waters Reunite for Signature Theatre’s Revival of Eurydice

As far as the beloved American plays of the 21st Century go, Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice is at the very top of the list. Acclaimed upon its first New York production at Second Stage Theatre in 2007, the heartrending reimagining of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth helped put Ruhl on the map, and it led to a longtime partnership with one of her most trusted artistic collaborators, director Les Waters.

Ruhl’s current residency at Signature Theatre is coming to an end with a revival of her seminal play, featuring Waters once again at the helm. Their’s is a close-knit relationship forged over decades now, grounded in emotional precision, playfulness, and the poetry of theater. Here, they look back on the creation of Eurydice, and how a play about grief hits different 20 years later.

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Tell me about how you met.
Sarah Ruhl: Les, do you want to start?

Les Waters: Sure. I was rehearsing Big Love at the Long Wharf, and [playwright] Chuck Mee said, “There’s this play by Sarah Ruhl called Eurydice.” So, I read the script and I liked it. And then I wrote Sarah a fan letter saying “I’m not a nutcase stalking you. This is me; this is what I’ve done, and I like your play.”

Sarah was living in LA, I was living in Solana Beach, just outside of San Diego, and we met at a local café and we talked. Shortly after that, I moved to Berkeley and took the play with me, and said to Tony Taccone, the then-artistic director of Berkeley Rep, that I would like to do it, and being one of the best artistic directors, he said “Do it.”

Sarah: When Les called me out of the blue and told me his name, I was like, “Holy shit.” I couldn’t believe it. I knew Chuck Mee’s work because he’d given a talk about Brown, but I hadn’t seen Big Love. I loved it on the page, and I had seen photographs of Les’s production, so I thought of Les as this legend. We had this wonderful meeting of the minds, and now it’s 14 productions later.

Did Signature want Eurydice to be part of your residency or was revisiting it your idea?
Sarah: Signature has been open about what I’d been wanting to do. It was important for me to do something with Les because he’s been such a huge part of my life in the theater. I don’t know if I can say honestly that I thought “There’s one thing I’ve been wanting to explore that I haven’t.” In a funny way, in the modern age, you’re supposed to have a good reason. I just wanted to do it again.

I do feel like there’s an emotionality in it for the audience, and for the actors, to have access to grief. Post-pandemic, it was helpful. We hadn’t gathered in many communities to feel things deeply for a good chunk of time.

How does it feel to come back to it with the benefit of 20 years of exploration?
Les: It feels totally familiar, in the sense that the play and the original production seem to live in my DNA, and then, very different. I would think I know this play, and then we would be working on it, and I would have no memory of this bit of the play at all. Both things are happening simultaneously.

Sarah: The bones of it are the same. Working with Les feels like there’s an aesthetic that’s deep and profound and that I know. But a cast makes something completely new. Maya Hawke was heaven to work with. She has brilliant instincts and had all kinds of questions about the father-daughter relationship, about the relationship with Orpheus, about what it is to be human. I think she digs deep into her own childhood and her own life as an artist, in terms of drawing out the play.

There are artists, like set designer Scott Bradley, who worked on this play with you originally and are back now. What were some of the staging challenges you faced in realizing Sarah’s vision for the underworld?
Les: It’s hard to talk about. I think everybody who worked on the play then and now knows that it throws impossibilities at you. Like, it’s an elevator and it rains. It’s set in the underworld, but what is the underworld? We may think daily life is hellish, but none of us have any knowledge of what the underworld is. Or, the father makes a room out of string.  It’s like, can one do that? The time it takes to make a room out of string is just a really juicy challenge.

Or the Stones in the underworld. They were grayscale Victorians in the original, and now they’re commedia clowns. How do you get from point a to point b?
Sarah: The Stones are always an open question. I’ll defer to Les.

Les: Oh, it was conversations with both costume designers [Meg Neville in the original production; Oana Botez presently]. I think I associate death with the Victorians because they made a cult out of it. We try to avoid it, and the Victorians celebrated it. Oana Botez, who did the wonderful costumes for this production, found all these images of Victorian clowns, so that’s how that developed.

Sarah: I love our particular actors for this group of Stones. They’ve all worked with Les before, so they have a great choral sensibility together. I’ve seen little kids do it, I’ve seen elderly people do it, teenagers. It completely delights me.

This play is rooted in the relationship between fathers and daughters. Sarah, you first wrote it after losing your own father, and now you’re a mother to two daughters. Les, your daughters are grown. Have your experiences as parents reshaped your connection with certain moments in the play, like when Eurydice’s Father, in the underworld, imagines walking her down the aisle?
Sarah: For sure.

Les: And it resonates in different ways than it did before. I was in my early 50s, and now I’m in my early 70s. I’m a different person.

Sarah: It’s an amazing generational leap. Maya Hawke is the age I was when I wrote it. I’m the age that Les was when he first directed it. There’s this kind of sweep to it all.

Les: There is a gloomy thing to say: at some point in the future, I hope quite a long way in the future, I’m going to be somebody’s dead dad. That is a very uncomfortable feeling. I think about my own father all the time. It’s my feelings about my father, and how I feel that my father felt about my daughters, that stirs up a lot of emotions.

Sarah: I’ll also say that there’s a part of you, when you lose a parent, that I think gets a little bit arrested, speaking from my own personal experience. There is still a daughter in me that wishes my father could have walked me down the aisle and, quote-unquote, given me away at my wedding, which is such kind of revolting terminology.

But there’s something about that ritual that feels important. Brian d’Arcy James is such an incredible actor, and of course, Charles Shaw Robinson [in the original production] is, as well. There’s something about the way Brian does that scene where I feel like “Oh, thank you. I’ve had that ritual now. I’m done. My father was at my wedding. Great.”