jtaylor@kykernel.com

I’ve been to every play UK has performed in the past two years, but each time I’ve been alone. “Eurydice” is the first one that’s ever made me desire a companion. Not to talk to. Not to hold hands with. And not to tell me what happened if I had to get up and pee half way through (there is no intermission) but simply to sit in silent lucidity with.

My loneliness for that hour and change is all Michael Sheehy’s fault. In his final role with UK’s Theater Department, Sheehy plays the title character’s dead father, and is largely responsible for a shift in the original myth’s motifs in this stage adaption.

In the original Greek myth, Orpheus’ wife Eurydice dies on their wedding day. After playing the saddest music in the world and making the gods cry, he enters the underworld to seek his late wife. He convinces Hades with his music to allow Eurydice to return to the upperworld if she can follow Orpheus all the way back, without him turning around and seeing her. It’s uncertain why, but he looks back at the last second and loses her a second and final time.

In this adaption, Eurydice (Rachel Snyder) is the main character, not Orpheus. And her love interest is her father. Not in a Caligula type way, but in an endearing way.

Her, father (Sheehy) is one of the very few to remember who he is in the eternity of hell. Having missed much in the way of being a father and being unable to see or know his daughter, the father faces “a very long time to be sad.”

In his opening appearance, father extends a lonely arm, pretending Eurydice is holding onto it while he walks her down the isle. In the hole between his elbow and waste, you can see the even larger hole that death, separation and memory has left in his heart.

When Eurydice first joins him in hell, she doesn’t remember anything — including him — and believes her father is the valet at a train station. His heart-hole shrinks a little, but it’s still perpetually there like an ulcer.

As the play progresses, she eventually remembers him and the two begin to share the joys of living even if it’s among the dead.

The two’s hearts are mended only briefly though, and father caves in when Orpheus arrives in hell trying to fill a similarly shaped Eurydice hole in his own heart.

Without giving too much away, playwright Sarah Ruhl explores what it was like to lose her own father at a young age and what it’s like for a conflicted, heartbroken girl to choose between two halves of the only thing that can fill the hole in her own heart.

But to concentrate so heavily on the themes of loss that impacts me now even days after seeing the play would be an injustice to it. It made me laugh by portraying the lord of the underworld as an insecure adolescent riding a tricycle. It made me smile when a long separated father and daughter were reunited in memory. It made me tap my foot along to the tune of Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” and it’s modern soundtrack, and it impressed me with it’s use of water works and string to drive home some of the most complex philosophical concepts so concisely.

Most of all the wonderland of UK’s “Eurydice” left me much like its characters, unable to move on and desperately needing to never let go of the experience.