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ScholarWorks > Arts & Sciences > English > COMPDR > Vol. 58 (2024) > Iss. 4

 

“I want a bath!”: On the Depth and Limits of Universalist Liquefaction in Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice

Michel Büch

Abstract

This essay examines the role of water as metaphor, material, and mindset in Sarah Ruhl’s 2003 Eurydice, reading the play’s text alongside a 2024 staging. Current scholarship either reduces the play to a debate over Eurydice’s agency or produces a rigid reading of both the play’s author and its eponymous character through the Electra complex. In contrast, this essay seeks to expand our perception of the play and its production by focusing on the role and experience of water. Eurydice challenges the modernist idea of individual agency by staging a broad, multifaceted and theatre-specific affective landscape, where affective investment is not linear but liquid. First, the essay takes up the play’s dramaturgy and its ubiquitous water imagery alongside Eurydice’s aqueous desires through a contemporary psychoanalytic lens. It then considers three water elements of the stage design before turning to the downward spiral of Orpheus. Rather than a traditional hero with a dramatic arc, Ruhl’s Orpheus—and all of the play’s characters—are suspended in a temporary, non-individualist, and open-ended underwaterworld. Finally, the essay critiques the risks of a universalist approach to the myth, its metaphors, and its meanings, which erases cultural, historical, and political specificities and contingencies. What a white critic or audience member might recognize in Ruhl’s play as universal could be perceived very differently by those who are excluded or denied humanity. We are left with a dual responsibility: to reckon with the artistry of works like Eurydice while critically interrogating how they might perpetuate racially normative ideas about universality and “the human.”

Comparative Drama is carried by JSTOR and Project MUSE.

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