HIGHLIGHTS

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Eurydiceby Sarah Ruhl

A companion guide to

Next on our stage:

Lisa Mallette

supported by producers Scott Ellis and Rich & Sally Braugh

March 14-April 14, 2019

directed by

A bilingual English/American Sign Language production

Synopsis

The myth has been told and retold for centuries. Grief-stricken Orpheus travels to the underworld, where he learns he can rescue his wife, Eurydice—if he doesn’t look back on the way up. Now, we see the story from the female perspective, following Eurydice into the underworld, where she finds her lost father and tries to remember all she’s left behind.

City Lights’ innovative new production combines Sarah Ruhl’s strikingly fresh script with the beauty of American Sign Language, reflecting the characters’ efforts to communicate across worlds. A lush and moving tale about life, love and the enduring strength of memory.

Eurydice premiered at Madison Repertory Theatre in Wisconsin in 2003, and next took the stage in 2004 at Berkeley Repertory Theatre. It opened Off-Broadway in 2007 at Second Stage Theatre, where it was nominated for the Drama League Award for Distinguished Production of a Play.

Characters

Eurydice (Lauren Rhodes speaking English, Leah Cohen signing in American Sign Language): Playwright Sarah Ruhl has a delightful description of Eurydice and Orpheus: “a little too young and a little too in love.” Eurydice also has a love of books and a sweet innocence.

Her Father (Brian Herndon*, English; Spencer Stevenson, ASL): Eurydice’s father has passed away, and she encounters him in the underworld. Though she doesn’t remember him at first, he patiently helps rebuild their relationship.

Orpheus (Robert Sean Campbell, English; Stephanie Foisy, ASL): Young and in love, Orpheus is also a soulful, talented musician capable of communicating in notes and melodies.

A Nasty Interesting Man / Lord of the Underworld (Erik Gandolfi, English; Dane K. Lentz, ASL): He’s got charm you should watch your step around.

A Chorus of Stones:Big Stone (Dane K. Lentz, ASL; April Bennett, English); Little Stone (Spencer Stevenson, ASL; Jennifer Bradford, English); Loud Stone (Stephanie Foisy, ASL; Keenan Flagg, English): The production’s Greek chorus, presenting wisdom and often their own opinions.

Above: Lauren Rhodes as Eurydice. Previous page: Orpheus (Robert Sean Campbell) tries to rescue Eurydice (Rhodes) from the underworld. Photos by Steve DiBartolomeo, taken at La Rinconada Country Club.

“When you were alive, I was your tree.”

-Father

Our director’s ‘Eurydice’ dream: two languages, all audiences

About four years ago, City Lights executive artistic director Lisa Mallette began having a vision. She imagined taking the beauty of American Sign Language and weaving it into a play or musical: not by simply adding an interpreter off to the side, but by creating a truly bilingual production.

Lisa doesn’t speak ASL, and she doesn’t have any speakers of the language in her family. But she’s always been drawn to it. “Sign language is inherently theatrical,” she said. “There’s a beautiful connection between ASL and acting. Acting is more about human behavior than speaking. There are a hundred different ways you can say one sentence. And there are so many different ways you can sign one line.”

Her City Lights team was enthusiastic about the idea, so Lisa needed to choose the perfect play. That in itself took about two years of reading scripts, seeing shows and letting her imagination run free. She didn’t want a play that is usually done with ASL; she wanted to open up a script to this language for the first time.

“I had to pick a play we would do anyway…the kind of story we like to tell,” Lisa said. Eurydice, with its gorgeous writing, female perspective and fresh take on a classic, fit right in. Lisa met with playwright Sarah Ruhl in New York and got her blessing for the bilingual production. The project was on.

Lisa is also directing the show, and she says the process has been fascinating. Right away she knew she needed to cast more actors than the script called for, so that each role would be played by one actor speaking and one signing. (Ruhl also granted permission for this change.)

That casting has led to an unusual web of relationships among the characters. While the speaking Eurydice and Orpheus certainly have their close moments, the speaking Eurydice and signing Orpheus might also interact. Or one Orpheus might look to another for support during a tough moment. These theatrical discoveries have been, as Lisa puts it, “joyous.”

A creative challenge arose when the production team looked at the Eurydice stage directions. Many of them are audio. How do you create the mood of the underworld through the sounds of rain dripping and rusty water flowing, when some of your audience members are Deaf? In some cases, the language itself was the solution, with an actor coming on to sign the beautiful ASL words for “drip, drip” and others. This accentuates the evocative work already being done by sound designer George Psarras, who has other tools such as subwoofers that create vibrations everyone can feel.

In the end, perhaps Lisa’s main goal is to make sure that Deaf, hearing-impaired, and hearing audiences all experience the same show and that no one feels ushered to the side.

“At its core,” she said, “the project is about equality of access.”

Lisa Mallette adjusting Lauren Rhodes’ veil during a “Eurydice” photo shoot.

Lauren Rhodes and Robert Sean Campbell are the English-speaking Eurydice and Orpheus. At left is Leah Cohen, who signs as Eurydice, with Stephanie Foisy, signing as Orpheus, at right. Photo by Taylor Sanders, taken at the San Jose Museum of Art.

About playwright Sarah Ruhl

Caught up in the gorgeous, challenging, magical world of Sarah Ruhl’s plays, you would not be surprised to know that this playwright was first a poet. She has described her plays as “three-dimensional poems.” They have language you could hang on the wall and admire for days.

And yet they are always strikingly true. “What happiness it would be to cry,” Eurydice says at one point, and who among us has not felt like that?

We can thank fellow playwright Paula Vogel for ushering Ruhl toward the theater. While working toward her M.F.A. from Brown University in the ‘90s, Ruhl studied with Vogel. Ruhl’s ten-minute “Dog Play,” about her father’s death, made her professor cry, and the teacher convinced the student that her future was as a playwright.

Today, Ruhl, who lives in Brooklyn with her family, has many lauded plays under her name. Titles include The Clean House and In the Next Room, or The Vibrator Play (both Pulitzer Prize finalists), Stage Kiss, Passion Play, Dead Man’s Cell Phone, For Peter Pan on her 70th Birthday and How to Transcend a Happy Marriage. Her works also include 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write, a book of essays about the theater and motherhood; and Letters From Max: A book of friendship, co-authored with Max Ritvo.

Ruhl’s plays celebrate the imagination, and the pure kind of emotion that can spark up without warning, as a child’s does. “I like plays that have revelations in the moment, where emotions transform almost inexplicably,” she told the New Yorker.

Her stage directions can also be surprising, rich with imagery if not with detailed instruction. Directors and designers may find that liberating or vexing.

“I remember a producer once paging through Eurydice and saying: ’This is impossible to do. There’s a raining elevator, and in the stage direction it says that he throws her up into the sky.’ And I said, ‘Oh well, this is all just literary suggestion and it’s all just trafficking in metaphor,’” Ruhl told The Interval.

“He throws her up into the sky as a gesture. A raining elevator could be a sound cue and a light cue. It could be a child with a bucket pouring water.

“I’m always intrigued by how you put up the same play in a black box or in a site-specific way or with students, and then see it fully produced someplace like Lincoln Center or Second Stage where you get the raining elevator and you get the whole scenic idea in a more expensive way.”

When the Interval writer later asked Ruhl how much she thinks about visuals such as scenic design when she’s writing, her answer was characteristically poetic: “I don’t know how it will be imagined on stage, but I do see it all.”

Sarah Ruhl in her element: a theater.

The “Eurydice” elevator at City Lights.

The Orpheus & Eurydice myth elsewhere in arts & culture

From the ancient writings of Virgil, Ovid and Plato to 20th-century works by Tennessee Williams and Salman Rushdie, from a Balanchine ballet to a Zooey Deschanel pop song, the myth of Orpheus & Eurydice continues to fascinate us. Here’s a small sampling of the many places this star-crossed love story has been told.

Metamorphoses (8 AD): Within the 11,995 lines of this behemoth narrative poem by the ancient Roman poet Ovid is the tale of Orpheus & Eurydice (in Book X, if you’re counting). Here, Eurydice suffers a fatal snake bite on her wedding day. Orpheus travels to the underworld to rescue his bride, but in this telling — as in so many others — that plan doesn’t end well.

Sir Orfeo (c. 1300s): Penned by an anonymous author in Middle English, this poem makes Orfeo a harpist-king whose wife Heurodis is spirited away by a fairy king. Spoiler: In this version, no one looks back, and the lovers manage to return to each other.

Orpheus and Euridice (1864): English painter/sculptor/knight Frederic Leighton painted this oil on canvas, which now resides at the Leighton House Museum in London. The work is replete with tragedy and drama. Swoon, baby, swoon.

Orpheus (1948): The dream team of choreographer George Balanchine and composer Igor Stravinsky was behind this neoclassical ballet. It calls for 30 dancers and lots of stage time for the harp: an instrument traditionally linked to Orpheus.

Orpheus Descending (1957): Orpheus strums a guitar and wanders Southern highways in this Tennessee Williams play. He’s also named Val this time around. Though the play ran for only 68 performances on Broadway, it inspired two screen adaptations, a film starring Marlon Brando in 1959 and a made-for-TV movie featuring Vanessa Redgrave in 1990.

The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999): In Salman Rushdie’s dizzying novel, our hero and heroine are rockstar Ormus and singer Vina, whose love story begins in Bombay in the 1950s. By book’s end, they’ve reenacted the myth not once but twice.

Cocktails With Orpheus (2008): Manhattan poet Terrance Hayes, a MacArthur Fellow and NYU professor, tells the tale in moody poetry, where the narrator hangs out in a darkened bar. Watch the poet reading his work.

Don’t Look Back (2009): Myth as video game? Yes ma’am, and you can play it for free on designer Terry Cavanagh’s website. This platform game, playable through Adobe Flash, looks like a classic Atari offering and begins with the sound of falling rain.

Don’t Look Back (2010): Penned and sung by the spritely actress-vocalist Zooey Deschanel, this bouncy song was recorded by She & Him, the musical pairing of Deschanel and M. Ward. Enjoy. A screenshot from the video game “Don’t Look Back.”

“Orpheus and Euridice” by Frederic Leighton.

Poet Terrance Hayes reading “Cocktails With Orpheus.”.

American Sign Language in the theater

When you put American Sign Language center stage, magic happens. The flow, the beauty, the energy of the language: all translate perfectly to the theater. And City Lights’ Eurydice is part of a grand tradition, following in the footsteps of many landmark productions that have incorporated ASL.

In 1959, ASL made its Broadway debut with The Miracle Worker, the play drawn from Helen Keller’s autobiography. Actress Anne Bancroft, who played Helen’s teacher Annie Sullivan, was not the only person to recognize that ASL deserved a larger role on the world stage. Broadway scenic designer David Hays began seeking funding for a new theater company, and found it from the Department of Education. In 1967, Hays, who was hearing, founded the National Theatre of the Deaf in Connecticut with Deaf actor Bernard Bragg. Another founding member was Deaf actress Phyllis Frelich.

Today, the National Theatre of the Deaf has been touring theatrical productions in the U.S. and around the world for decades, blending ASL and the spoken word. But in the early days, tours were tough to book. “Frankly, bookers couldn’t imagine what a performance with Deaf actors would be, or if they could sell it to their audiences,” NTD states on its website. “They thought it might be a pantomime show and patrons would only come out of guilt. … Once audiences saw the performances, things rapidly changed.”

NTD founding member Phyllis Frelich went on to star in another landmark production: Mark Medoff’s play Children of a Lesser God. This play about a love story between a Deaf woman and a hearing teacher won the 1980 Tony Award for Best Play, with Frelich taking the award for Best Actress and her co-star John Rubinstein winning for Best Actor. Frelich’s other credits included a 2003 Broadway revival of the musical Big River, performed with ASL. She died in 2014.

On the opposite coast, ASL was also taking the spotlight. Deaf West Theatre was founded in Los Angeles in 1991 to bring artists and audiences “unparalleled theater experiences inspired by Deaf culture and the expressive power of sign language.” It now has its own theater in North Hollywood. The 2003 Big River revival was a Deaf West production, one of several that Phyllis Frelich performed in.

NTD co-founder Bernard Bragg was also active with Deaf West. A tremendously influential actor, he performed around the world. “Every actor who is Deaf and who steps on a stage today or in front of a camera owes a debt of gratitude for the path he forged over 50 years ago,” acclaimed Deaf actress Marlee Matlin, who won the Best Actress Oscar for starring in the film version of Children of a Lesser God, told the Washington Post after his death last year.

On Instagram recently, Deaf West wrote that Bragg had “a profound understanding that the impact of (Deaf West’s) small theater was immense; the actors who appear on our stages often become global ambassadors of our community.”

In recent years, Deaf West has become best known for its dynamic 2015 Broadway revival of the musical Spring Awakening, which blended ASL and English and cast both Deaf and hearing actors. It ran for 135 performances and received Tony Awards nominations for Best Revival of a Musical, as well as Best Direction and Best Lighting Design of a Musical. The cast included Marlee Matlin as Adult Woman.

Critics, including those at the New York Times, loved the show. “You will be surprised at how readily you can … find yourself pleasurably immersed not in a worthy, let’s-pat-ourselves-on-the-back experience, but simply in a first-rate production of a transporting musical,” the Times reported.

Bernard Bragg’s 2018 obituary in the Washington Post.

Special thanks to our ASL master, JAC Cook

Working on this production has been linguistically fascinating for all involved. For our signing actors, it’s been an opportunity to combine their loves of ASL and the theater. Though none are Deaf, all are immersed in the ASL and Deaf cultures: for example, Stephanie Foisy, Dane K. Lentz and Spencer Stevenson are all professional translators, and Dane is the hearing son of Deaf parents.

As for our speaking actors, they have all gotten to learn some ASL and use it in select moments on stage.

To ensure that our use of ASL is always correct, we hired the wonderful JAC Cook as a member of the Eurydice production team. She serves as ASL Master and dramaturg, consulting with ASL actors on sign choices and supporting the director’s vision of how to create theater that is more visual- and ASL-centric.

Eurydice is a play filled with audio stage directions and a rich soundscape, and JAC’s work is especially valuable in conveying all that audio to Deaf audiences. With her guidance, our actors convey the audio through visual gestures, “where Deaf patrons could grasp the meaning and feel the true emotions when the sound vibrates,” JAC said.

This work is a labor of love for JAC, a performer who has had a profound love for theater since the moment she got on stage when she was young. An ASL consultant for more than 20 years, she is also a veteran dramaturg, having worked on shows including The Tribes, Kid Simple: A Radio in the Flesh and SOUND.

JAC is the founder and owner of Velvet Hands, an ASL theatrical interpreting company for Broadway productions.

Did you know? Many hearing children who are nonverbal use ASL

While American Sign Language is known mainly for its widespread use in the Deaf community, it is also a means of communication for many hearing children who are nonverbal. Children whose speech develops later may start out using ASL at first. Or ASL may remain their primary mode of communication.

Either way, the language is incredibly valuable for many children who have been diagnosed with autism, cerebral palsy, Down Syndrome, or brain and speech disorders. It is also used by people of all ages whose verbal abilities have been limited by stroke, brain injury or other trauma.

Learning American Sign Language does not necessarily mean that a child will never speak English. In fact, research has shown that ASL “can help generate verbal language,” according to The Center for Autism Research at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

Lauren Rhodes and Robert Sean Campbell share the American Sign Language sign for “I love you.” Photo by Taylor Sanders, taken at the San Jose Museum of Art.

JAC Cook.

City Lights Theater Company presents Eurydice from March 14-April 14, 2019. Shows are Thurs.-Sat. at 8 p.m., Sundays at 2 p.m. (no show March 17).

The theater is at 529 S. Second St. in San Jose. Details: cltc.org, 408-295-4200.

Director: Lisa Mallette

Assistant Director & Choreographer: Noëlle GM Gibbs

Stage Manager: Joseph Hidde

Assistant Stage Manager: William Gunn

Production Manager/Technical Director/Scenic Designer: Ron Gasparinetti

Lighting Designer: John Bernard

Costume Designer: Pat Tyler

Properties Designer: Christina Sturken

Sound Designer: George Psarras

Master Electrician: Joseph Hidde

Scenic Artist: Paulino Deleal

ASL Master: JAC Cook

Featuring: Lauren Rhodes, Leah Cohen, Brian Herndon*, Spencer Stevenson, Robert Sean Campbell, Stephanie Foisy, Erik Gandolfi, Dane K. Lentz, April Bennett,

Jennifer Bradford, Keenan Flagg. *Member, Actors’ Equity Association

With original music by George Psarras, and cello performed by Robin Snyder.

This issue of Highlights was researched & written by City Lights dramaturg Rebecca Wallace. Read past issues, and a digital version of this issue, at cltc.org/highlights.

Eurydice by Sarah Ruhl

directed by Lisa Mallette supported by producers Scott Ellis and Rich & Sally Braugh

A bilingual English/American Sign Language production