Connubial twist: Newlyweds Orpheus (Benjamin Huber)

Stage

Eurydice at the Wilma and Philadelphia Theatre Company’s The Happiness Lecture.

by J. Cooper Robb

The Wilma Theater, which mounted a splendid production of Sarah Ruhl’s The Clean House in 2005, revisits Ruhl’s work with an uneven and somewhat unsatisfying production of Eurydice, the playwright’s meditation on love and loss.

A modern retelling of an ancient myth, the story focuses on Orpheus (Benjamin Huber) and his young bride Eurydice (Merritt Janson). They’re an oddly matched pair. He’s a brilliant musician who has little need for words; she loves language and literature. Despite their obvious differences, the two are madly in love and soon married.

Their happiness is short-lived because Eurydice dies and journeys to the underworld. In a frantic search for his bride, Orpheus manages to bridge the worlds of the living and the dead with a song that renews her memory of him. Sadly, in their zeal to reunite, the devoted couple instead ensure prolonged separation.

The Wilma’s production is visually dazzling and musically rich (Toby Twining’s original score is mesmerizing), but the play only sporadically touches on a human level.

Annoyingly cute and ridiculously enthusiastic in their displays of mutual affection, Orpheus and Eurydice’s puppy-love romance lacks the emotional resonance necessary to move us deeply. The result is that although we root for their reconciliation, we aren’t as emotionally devastated by their separation as we should be, despite director Blanka Zizka’s best efforts.

What does make a considerable impact is Ruhl’s underworld, a joyless place where singing isn’t allowed. Happiness is the ability to cry in the underworld.

It’s in this bleak place that Eurydice encounters her deceased father (Stephen Novelli in a nicely understated performance). Defying both the lord of the underworld (the outrageously entertaining Triney Sandoval) and the frightening trio of stones (wonderfully played by Erin Reilly, Gene D’Alessandro and Cathy Simpson) who encourage the dead to forget all they knew and loved in life, her father refuses to divorce himself entirely from the world of the living. When Eurydice (who’s unable to remember either her father or husband) arrives in the underworld and requests a room, he tenderly constructs his daughter a domicile made of string. Novelli plays the moment beautifully, but the scene is so laboriously paced that it tests the patience of even the most serene theatergoer.

In remembering her once-forgotten love, Eurydice in effect dies twice. Ruhl’s fanciful look at the joy and sorrow associated with longing and memory is not without merit, but the play is too cryptic to move us deeply. Nevertheless for anyone who has ever lost a loved one, the Wilma’s production offers moments of poignant reflection that prove strangely comforting.