Photo Flash: Single Carrot Theatre Set To Open Its 2009/10 Season With EURYDICE

One of America’s top new playwrights, Sarah Ruhl, has enjoyed recent wildfire-like success around the nation. For the first time ever, the 2005 Pulitzer finalist’s evocative work will be produced professionally in Baltimore.

Single Carrot Theatre will open its 2009/2010 season with Ruhl’s Eurydice, a vibrant new take on the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice (pronounced yoo-RID-uh-see). Ruhl’s version tells the familiar love story from the perspective of Eurydice, whose wedding to Orpheus is marred by her sudden death.

Upon her death, Eurydice is taken to the Underworld, a fantastical realm where stones can speak and worms carry messages through the earth.

“The land of the dead,” says director J. Buck Jabaily, “is not Dante's Inferno, but more like Alice in Wonderland.”

As in most variations of the myth, Orpheus descends into the Underworld to retrieve his love, where he is posed with the challenge of retreating back to Earth without looking back at his wife, lest he lose her forever.

However, Single Carrot’s take on Eurydice is decorated with modern flair. Orpheus, a character considered in the play as one of the world’s greatest musicians, will score the play as a DJ on turntables.

Actors in the play are undertaking training in contact-improvisation, a form of movement utilized in dance and theatre focusing on weight sharing, balance, and creative physical storytelling.

To Jabaily, Sarah Ruhl is the perfect playwright to use as a vehicle for such fantastical creativity, “because she gives us real people, real emotions, real struggles, without having to have the real kitchen table between them.”

Audiences can also expect a devious chorus of stones, a river of forgetfulness, a tricycle-riding Lord of the Underworld, and one superb opportunity to see a MacArthur Fellowship-winning playwright who has triumphed in New York, Washington DC, and California.

Photos courtesy of Single Carrot Theatre

Giti Jabaily and Brendan Ragan