In the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, Orpheus tries to retrieve Eurydice from the underworld, but can’t help looking back at his wife, and so loses her forever.

Sarah Ruhl is also looking back at “Eurydice,” in a revival at Signature Theater of a play she wrote two decades ago. In doing so, she largely loses me.

To be fair, the play attempts something intriguing, shifting the perspective from Orpheus to Eurydice and reworking the central relationship to be the one between Eurydice and her father. Ruhl, who wrote the play a decade after her father died of cancer when she was only twenty years old, does find some resonant metaphors for the ways we process grief, a battle between trying to remember and trying to forget. There are  moments that recall the inventiveness and heart of the many plays Ruhl has written since  (How to Transcend a Happy Marriage, The Oldest Boy, Stage Kiss to name a few), helped by a cast of fine actors — most notably Brian d’Arcy James as the father, with admirable work by Maya Hawke as Eurydice, yet another Stranger Things veteran making a New York stage debut.

But it’s because of those later, better plays that I wondered why Ruhl found this the right moment to bring back this less cohesive, more indulgent work, without any obvious effort to reimagine it; indeed, half the creative team — director Les Waters, scenic designer Scott Bradley and sound designer Bray Poor – were also involved in the 2007 production Off-Broadway at Second Stage Theater.

The play begins with Eurydice (Maya Hawke) and Orpheus (Caleb Eberhardt) sitting on the stage, in a set resembling a swimming pool in Miami, making lovey-dovey in a way that makes them sound as if they’re about nine years old. Orpheus tells her: “I’m going to make each strand of your hair into an instrument. Your hair will stand on end as it plays my music and becomes a hair orchestra. It will fly you up into the sky.”

He puts a string on her finger to remind her of his love, but he chooses the wedding finger, and so this brings up marriage, to which they both eagerly agree.

The next scene is Eurydice’s wedding day, and her father (Brian d’Arcy James), is offering advice that’s similarly quirky, but also somehow sensible, such as: “Court the companionship and respect of dogs.”

Her father, it turns out, is dead, and is writing Eurydice a letter from the underworld, without knowing how to send it to her. While she walks the aisle, he accompanies her in spirit, in parallel, but not in reality. As the couple sing and dance to “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree,” the father does a parallel jitterbug in sympathy.

Eurydice takes a break from her wedding to get some water, and meets with a character who is identified in the program as A Nasty Interesting Man (portrayed by T. Ryder Smith), but comes off more creepy than interesting, and seems determined to seduce Eurydice, enticing her into his high rise apartment by telling her he has a letter her father wrote to her. In what is supposed to be a come-on, he tells her he finds her interesting.

“All the interesting people I know,” she replies, “are dead or speak French.”
“Well, I don’t speak French, Eurydice.” 
Does this mean he’s dead?

Suddenly,  he inexplicably starts writhing on the floor in a fit that feels borrowed from “Stranger Things: The First Shadow.”

It’s at this point that Eurydice falls down a long flight of stairs to her death; it was unclear to me whether she fell by accident or the nasty man pushed her. But he appears later (on a red tricycle) as the Lord of the Underworld, so it’s what he wanted, whether or not he made it happen.

Once in the Underworld, a trio of “Stones,” a Greek chorus dressed like Renaissance court jesters, who go over the story, and explain Eurydice has forgotten everything including language. So when her father greets her eagerly, the Underworld, and yell at the father. her father is there to greet her. But she doesn’t remember him, nor understand him, since she’s also forgotten language.

After several efforts to remind her of who he is, he eventually changes tack and tells her “When you were alive, I was your–tree.”

It worked. “Yes, the tall one in the back yard! I used to sit all day in its shade!”

Much of the rest of the play is Eurydice getting reacquainted with her father and with the world she had forgotten. Sometimes Orpheus helps from the land of the living, at one point dropping in the complete works of Shakespeare. But, while the conventional myth does play out more or less (the visit to the Underworld to retrieve his dead wife, etc.) Orpheus’s presence has become secondary, in effect supplanted by the father, both on stage and in Eurydice’s affections.

There are memorable touches in this production: Eurydice arrives in the Underworld in an elevator full of pouring. There is some singing and dancing.

But “Eurydice” could use a lot more splendor, and a lot more song. And indeed there is a “Eurydice” that’s all song – a 2020 opera composed by Matthew Aucoin, for whom Ruhl wrote the libretto.

Eurydice
Signature Theater through June 27
Running time: 90 minutes no intermission
Tickets: $90 – $172
Written by Sarah Ruhl
Directed by Les WatersSc
enic design by Scott Bradley, sound design by Bray Poor, costume design by Oana Botez, lighting design by  Reza Behjat, hair, wig and makeup design by  Krystal Balleza and Will Vicari of The Wig Associates.
Cast: Maya Hawke as Eurydice, Brian d’Arcy James as Father,  Caleb Eberhardt as Orpheus, Maria Elena Ramirez as Loud Stone, Jon Norman Schneider as Little Stone, David Ryan Smith as Big Stone, and T. Ryder Smith as A Nasty Interesting Man/Lord of the Underworld