Review: Maya Hawke Gets a Second Chance at Love—and Blows It—in Eurydice

In the classical telling of Orpheus and Eurydice, Orpheus travels to the underworld to rescue his lover, Eurydice, but loses her when he panics and looks back. In Eurydice, Sarah Ruhl’s version of the myth, Orpheus looks back at Eurydice when she panics and shouts out to him. If only these two could calm down.

Stranger Things’ Maya Hawke stars in the title role of a new revival now running at the Pershing Square Signature Center. She plays Eurydice with a nervous energy that director Les Waters has infused into the entire piece, which comes off as half serious and half satirical—but it’s hard to tell which is which in this dreamy drama.

Married couple Orpheus (Caleb Eberhardt) and Eurydice are desperately in love, not just with each other but he with music and she with “interesting” books. The death of her father (Brian d’Arcy James) casts a pall over her happiness, but he’s alive in the Underworld writing her letters, one of which is found by a creepy man (T. Ryder Smith) with rapey intentions. After luring Eurydice to his apartment to give her the letter, she suffers a fall and dies.

Suddenly she finds herself in a rain-drenched elevator descending to the Underworld. There she’s berated by three annoying Stones (Maria Elena Ramirez, Jon Norman Schneider, and David Ryan Smith), wooed by an infantile Hades (also T. Ryder Smith), and coddled by the father she hardly remembers. Orpheus comes down to rescue her—but we know how that ends.

Ruhl’s play is not quite absurdist and not quite surreal, though it has elements of both. It has been produced many times since it first appeared in 2003 and has met with audience reactions ranging from the enthusiastic to the bemused. I fall squarely in the latter camp.

For me, Eurydice is a play that one wants to like more than one does. It has the trappings of a feminist take on the myth and appears to subvert traditional ideas about men determining the fates of women, who, the play implies, are perfectly capable of screwing up their own lives by themselves. But where Ruhl seems to make a point, the meaning snaps like a violin string.

Some of that has to do with a messy plot, which has an Alice in Wonderland vibe that never rises to the laughable absurdity of Lewis Carroll. The dialogue is arch, and the jokes are forced. Hawke and James are sturdy in their portrayals, but their chemistry as father and daughter never materializes. Of the Greek-chorus-like Stones (Oana Botez has dressed them like clowns), Ramirez as the loud one comes closest to achieving comedic consistency. And T. Ryder Smith, looking a like a demented Michael Bloomberg as he rides in on a tricycle, gets some half-laughs before the story turns dour.

At times the production shines. Eberhardt has a graceful poetry about him as Orpheus, gliding across the stage like a sad arpeggio, and Waters occasionally conjures arresting tableaus (Reza Behjat’s haunting lighting and Bray Poor’s crystal-clear sound design help create the otherworldly moments). When the elevator doors open in Scott Bradley’s aquatic-themed set and reveal Hawke standing beneath an umbrella in the pouring rain, it’s a portrait of curious beauty.

By the end, Ruhl’s atmosphere of painful loss and frustrating forgetfulness feels like an accurate imitation of the confusion that follows when a loved one leaves. But that’s not enough to fill the play’s unfocused 90 minutes. Eurydice may continue to be sought after by some, but I, for one, will not be calling out for it.