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Of course, Eurydice is generally thought of as a supporting character in that story: the woman who triggers the most famous adventure undertaken by Orpheus, the poet-musician whose songs could charm stones. In the traditional version, a snake kills her on their wedding day, and Orpheus follows her down to the land of the dead, hoping to bring her back up with him. He nearly succeeds, too. The netherworld’s presiding couple, Hades and Persephone, are so taken with him that they make a rare exception to the rules of mortality and permit Eurydice a second chance. The only condition: that Orpheus not look back at his bride until they’ve both reached the surface. Orpheus makes it across the finish line, but Eurydice’s not quite there yet when he turns toward her. She’s doomed again, this time for good, thanks to Orpheus’s impulsiveness.
As unfortunate as that may seem, there’s a major upside for Eurydice in this telling: she’s reunited with her beloved dad. In Endgame, Clov, who can’t sit down, looks after blind Hamm, who can’t stand up, in a subterranean room that’s certainly the end of the line if not hell itself. Eurydice and her father share a similar, though much less cranky, mutual dependence. He’s managed to cross the Lethe, Hades’s river of forgetting, without losing his memory, so when Eurydice arrives—Lethe-washed and believing she’s checking in at a very badly run hotel—he recognizes his daughter and coaxes her, tenderly and with the aid of still more balloons, back to full consciousness. The two of them share an idyll.
The icons on the set include veteran Chicago actors. It’s a pleasure to see William J. Norris, Caitlin Hart, and Cheryl Lynn Bruce play a chorus of talking stones whose old-coot repartee recalls Nell and Nagg, the parents in the garbage cans from Endgame. Joe D. Lauck? Also a pleasure, returning from years at a marketing firm to play Eurydice’s father. Tall, white-haired, and generous of spirit, he does a dance with Lee Stark’s Eurydice that’s archetypal in its spring-prom resonances. And Beau O’Reilly, with his grizzled satyr looks, was born to play both the Nasty Interesting Man and Hades, child king of the underworld. The only cast members who come across as somewhat bland are the principals—Stark and the production’s Orpheus, James Abelson. That’s entirely appropriate, though: they’re playing innocents.v
