Title: The Clean House and Other Plays
Author: Sarah Ruhl
Publisher: Theatre Communications Group
Publication Year: 2006
ISBN: 9781559362665
Rating: 5 stars
Sarah Ruhl is my favorite playwright and every once in a while I revisit my copy of The Clean House and Other Plays which features Eurydice, Late: A Cowboy Song, Melancholy Play, and of course The Clean House. Melancholy Play is probably my favorite of these (it’s about people who get so melancholy that they turn into almonds), but I love all of them. Something else I read recently referenced Orpheus, and that put me in the mood to re-read Eurydice.
Eurydice is a re-telling of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. Orpheus, an extremely talented musician, falls in love with a woman named Eurydice. Shortly after they marry, she dies. Unable and unwilling to live without his wife, Orpheus goes to the underworld and performs a song so moving that the god of the underworld agrees to allow Eurydice to follow Orpheus out of the underworld and be restored to life. However, the caveat is that Orpheus cannot look back at Eurydice until she is safely back in the upperworld or else the deal is off. Since this story is quite old and has tons of adaptations in art, I’m hoping it won’t be a spoiler to tell you that Orpheus isn’t able to do it and looks back, thus canceling the deal.
However, in typical Ruhl fashion, her retelling of the story is poetic and has elements of the absurd. The play opens with Orpheus and Eurydice at the beach. In the notes of the play, Ruhl says that both characters should be “played as though they are a little too young and a little too in love” (332). As they play in the ocean and banter back and forth, Orpheus says he is thinking of music. Eurydice struggles to understand how he can be thinking about music because it is either playing or it isn’t. She tries to tell him about a book she read, but similarly, he doesn’t understand why she cares so much about the book. He tries to teach her a song he is composing for her, but she lacks rhythm and struggles to maintain the melody. The scene ends with them getting engaged despite what seems to me like fundamental misunderstandings of things of the utmost importance to the other.
The next scene switches to Eurydice’s father in the underworld. He has somehow managed to maintain his memory and the ability to read and write, all of which are supposed to be lost in crossing the river to the underworld. He is composing a letter of advice for Eurydice on her wedding day. In typical Ruhl fashion some of the things on his list like, “Court the companionship and respect of dogs,” and “Grilling a fish or toasting bread without burning requires singleness of purpose, vigilance and steadfast watching,” (343) don’t really seem to have much to do with marriage, but can be made to have metaphorical meaning if you stop to think about them.
The play progresses to the wedding. While stepping away from the party to get some water, Eurydice meets “A Nasty Interesting Man,” who later is featured as the god of the underworld. He tries to strike up a conversation with her, but she rebuffs him to return to the wedding. On a later water break, he tells her that he has a letter for her from her father, but he has left it in his high-rise apartment building around the corner. She leaves the wedding to get the letter, and he makes a move on her when they get to his apartment. She gets the letter and tries to flee, but ends up falling down the stairs and dying (there is no elevator to his apartment, but there is an elevator to the underworld interestingly). In the original story, Eurydice dies when she is bitten by a viper (there are some interesting parallels between Orpheus and Eurydice and Adam and Eve), and the Nasty Interesting Man’s actions can be snakelike.
Then Eurydice enters the underworld via the elevator. In the underworld, there are three stones that form a typical Greek drama chorus and Ruhl compares them to mean children. They try to enforce the rules of the underworld. When Eurydice arrives, her father is there waiting for her, but she doesn’t remember him after crossing the river. He is patient with her and takes care of her and teaches her to read and write again. The god of the underworld finds Eurydice and tries to seduce her, but she remains loyal to Orpheus.
When Orpheus finally comes to take her back to the upperworld, Eurydice wants to go back to him, but she is torn because leaving would be like losing her father again and she worries about him alone in the underworld. Her father walks her to where Orpheus is waiting just like he’s walking her down the aisle at her wedding (something he was unable to do because he was dead). Eurydice has second thoughts about going with Orpheus, but the stones tell her she has no choice. When she says she wants to go home to her father, the stones tell her, “You’re all grown-up now. You have a husband” (395) and she feels compelled to go on.
Eurydice catches up to Orpheus and says his name, causing him to turn and look at her. Because he has looked at her, the deal is now off and Eurydice has to return to the underworld. Before she goes, she and Orpheus re-hash some of the issues of their relationship at times speaking over each other or talking about two different things. Then she is gone.
In the meantime, saddened over losing Eurydice again, Eurydice’s father allows the stones to convince him to dip himself into the river so he will forget what he has lost. Eurydice arrives back to him just as he emerges from the river. The god of the underworld returns to let Eurydice know that they are to be married. Knowing she has no choice in the matter, Eurydice writes Orpheus a final letter and then dips herself into the river to forget everything from her life before. As she emerges from the water, Orpheus enters the scene in the elevator to the underworld. He has forgotten everything and cannot read the letter from Eurydice. The play ends with him standing on the letter from her while the sound of water engulfs him.
Water obviously is a big symbol in this play. Orpheus and Eurydice get engaged in the water at the beach, during the wedding Eurydice is upset Orpheus isn’t greeting their guests because he’s in the shower, Eurydice meets the Nasty Interesting Man while stepping away from the wedding to get water, and then there is rain in the elevator to the underworld, and the river that causes forgetting. It serves as a marker of major transitions and a catalyst to change the relationships, so every time you see water, you know some big changes are coming.
The word “interesting” is also often repeated in the first movement of the play (the play has movements instead of acts). Eurydice likes reading because, “It can be interesting to see if other people…agree or disagree with what you think” and her books have “interesting arguments” (336), whereas Orpheus says music isn’t “interesting or not interesting. It just—is” (337). When Eurydice meets the Nasty Interesting Man, he’s on his way “to a party where there are really very interesting people,” but when Eurydice responds she just left her own party to get water, he states that she “must be a very interesting person” to leave her own party (345). He tells her, “You mustn’t care at all what other people think of you. I always say that’s a mark of a really interesting person, don’t you?” (346). He calls her dress “interesting,” architecture “interesting,” and his apartment building “interesting” but says that Orpheus is not a very “interesting” name (351-352). Eurydice tells him that “all the interesting people [she knows] are dead or speak French” (353). He says he doesn’t speak French and isn’t interesting (despite it being in his name), but she is interesting and could teach him to be too, whereas Orpheus’s head is always too full of music to learn anything else (354). Once Eurydice dies, the repetition stops.
I haven’t really decided why I think Ruhl repeats the word that way. One idea I have is that it perhaps highlights the youth and naiveté of Orpheus and Eurydice’s relationship and also points toward the problems between them. “Interest” is often a word used in conjunction with romantic attraction. One is usually “interested” in a partner before you actually get to know them. Mutual interest is pretty much the starting step, and Orpheus and Eurydice are interested in one another perhaps to the point of infatuation. While I know sometimes opposites attract, Orpheus and Eurydice don’t really seem to share a common interest or even really understand or respect each other’s interests. Eurydice struggles to comprehend music and doesn’t really understand how it can be so consuming to Orpheus. Meanwhile, Orpheus can’t even pretend to be interested enough in Eurydice’s reading to ask her what she is reading or thinking about. When they are unable to make it together back to the upperworld, in their last exchange, they are at odds. He wants to talk about music and she tries to talk about their life together. He tells her he wants to reminisce, but it all ends up being about his music. In her final letter to him, Eurydice writes, “Don’t try to find me again. You would be lonely for music. I want you to be happy” (410). I think she finally realizes that the romantic “interest” alone isn’t enough to hold them together.
While this play is seemingly about Orpheus and Eurydice and their perhaps failed love, it is also about the familial love between a father and daughter. The reader/audience first meets Eurydice’s father as he writes the letter of advice for her wedding. He signs the letter “Your Father” and that is the only name he gets in the play (344). When Eurydice takes her first break from her wedding, she laments to herself “A wedding is for daughters and fathers. The mothers all dress up, trying to look like young women. But a wedding is for a father and a daughter” (345). It is the letter from her father that entices Eurydice to follow the Nasty Interesting Man back to his apartment even though she gets bad vibes from him. Eurydice’s father is the one to meet her at the entrance to the underworld (after she’s taunted by the stones) and like in her childhood, he protects her and teaches her language again. He tells her that he is the one who named her when her mother named all of their other children. He breaks the rules of the underworld to make her feel comfortable there and even pretends to be a porter until she can remember who he is. When Orpheus comes to take Eurydice back, her father takes her to the edge of the underworld (an echo of walking her down the aisle at the wedding he missed). And it is thinking that they have lost one another again that eventually leads them both to dip themselves in the river of forgetting again. There are definitely a lot of Freudian implications in the way this relationship is portrayed, but unlike Orpheus, Eurydice’s father is able to meet her where she is and cares for her as she is, not an idealized version of her.
When Eurydice first arrives in the underworld she tells the stones about her death,
"I was not lonely only alone with myself begging myself not to leave my own body but I was leaving. ... How do you say good-bye to yourself?" (361)
That, to me, is one of the most haunting passages of this play. Sometimes going through big changes in our lives can feel like a death of a past form of ourselves. Sometimes we are glad to be losing those parts of ourselves and sometimes it’s incredibly painful (and often both). How do you say good-bye to those past versions, especially when it’s against your will and out of your control, like it was for Eurydice? In the above passage, Eurydice is talking about the feeling of going away from herself. In a later scene trying to tell her father about Orpheus (and the most famous monologue from this play) she says,
"This is what it is to love an artist: The moon is always rising above your house. The houses of your neighbors look dull and lacking in moonlight. But he is always going away from you. Inside his head there is always something more beautiful" (385).
Some of the themes that most interest me in this play and in general are transformation, growth, and the way we think about and remember past versions of ourselves and other people who have been left behind. Orpheus is a talented (and some might say interesting) individual, but for Eurydice, it always feels like he’s never fully there. Much like she must figure out how to say good-bye to herself when she leaves her physical body, I think she begins to question how you can be in a relationship with someone who is never truly with you because his interior life is more enticing to him.
I haven’t seen a stage production of Eurydice, but I’d really like to. I’d like to see the way these elements that I’ve talked about here are portrayed in reality. I’m a big fan of all of the plays in this collection and highly recommend it if you’re looking for some very well-written and poetic scripts.