The Lord of Death Wears Knee Socks by Amy Lighthill

Since sooner or later, and likely it’ll seem sooner, you’ll be permanently vacationing in the Underworld, you ought to wander down into the bowels of the Alliance and enjoy Sarah Ruhl’s vision of what it’s going to be like down there. According to her, it’s a grey, lonely place where you can neither sleep nor remember, a kind of eternal Alzheimer’s.

But some lovers can continue to communicate between the worlds of the living and the dead, via worm or invisible mailbox, and, if the love is strong enough and the River Styx goes undrunk, even two dead folks can enjoy each other’s company forever. This funny and poignant version of the Greek myth is true to the original in one respect, however. Tragedy is its middle name, and a honeymoon in the Magic Kingdom it’s not.

 

What most of us recall about the original story is the literally supernatural power of lyre-player Orpheus’s love for his bride-for-a-day, Eurydice. When she dies on their wedding day, he follows her, grief-stricken, below the earth to beg for her return. His musicianship (which, strangely, goes largely unrevealed here) enchants the Underworlders, and he is granted his wish, as long as he does not turn to look at his bride on their trek aboveboard. Naturally, he fails, since we’re in the land of Chronos, who ate all his own kids rather than be felled by one as predicted by the soothsayers. When Orpheus steals a glance at his beloved, she vanishes forever, and everybody cries.

 

In Ruhl’s version, Eurydice is a Junior Miss, adored by all men. As the play began, her fey mannerisms and self-conscious baby-girl demands seemed cloying. As the play went on, though, she grew on me-- she became more genuine after death. Her ambivalence toward her spouse, and her relationship with her dead father, seemed more Oedipal than Orpheal. “Weddings are for daughters and fathers. That’s when they stop being married to each other,” she tells the audience, almost cheerfully. This added element layered a significant level of creepiness over the more obvious mourning for her husband. Not for nothing do three swords impale the tattoo heart on the program cover. 

The engulfing love this father felt for his child was heartbreakingly rendered by our own venerable stage veteran, Chris Keyser. He had me in tears ten minutes in, when he described how he wanted to be at Eurydice’s wedding, did a solemn, tearful, joyous little wedding march down the aisle alone, then dropped the missive into the ‘letter box’ with palpably rueful love. When Eurydice arrives in the drippy basement of an underworld (magnificently rendered by stage designer Kat Conley),  forgetting most of everything, he agrees he’s the valet, and ever so tenderly, he builds her a room to rest in, out of a ball of string. Would that every child rested in such devotion.

Ruhl’s play is both childlike and profoundly adult. She has concocted a sweet/sour tale of love, loss and memory’s fragile power to bind us together. Pack your (empty) bag for the next world and check in—for 90 minutes, at least.