thoughts on the play, Eurydice

This fall, a group of gentlemen meet at church on Monday morning. This term, they are looking at Christianity through the lens of other faiths. This session touches on the power of myth. They will be well-served to see the play at Jacoby Arts, Eurydice.

How do we imagine the world of the dead? The movie Flatliners has been re-made to consider that question as well. How do we regard the dead? How doe the dead regard the living.  In the myth, the dead have no memory. The myth of Orpheus (possibly relating to the dark of night) has him marry a daughter of Apollo.  When she dies, Orpheus descends into the underworld to try to capture his bride from that world back into the world of the living.  As poet and musician, he composes a song to allow him to enter the underworld. Here, we wonder if art can transmute suffering and create a community of memory and feeling for all of us who live in the shadowland of loss. After all, the language of the dead is silence, but his art moves even the stones to tears.

The playwright, Sarah Ruhl, reconstructs the myth of Orpheus by placing the bride, Eurydice (wide justice in Greek) at the center. She encounters her deceased father in the underworld. She will be torn from a new, partially reconstructed love of father and knowing that Orpheus is her husband but not recognizing him and fearing that she will not recognize him back in the world of the living either.

One of the main themes of the play is memory. In the underworld, the dead dip in the waters of forgetting. Early in the play, Eurydice says that a memory of music is imprinted on her memory like it is wax.  (Old recording were made on wax cylinders).  If they remember, they grow sad, and no sadness is permitted in the underworld. It is a version of ignorance as bliss. Instead, we are to resemble the stones who do not weep.  A main part of forgetting there is losing names, one’s own and the names of our friends and loved ones. To mourn in the realm of the dead is considered immoderate. After all, no tears are permitted in the land of the dead. It reminds me of a Star Trek episode. For once Kirk has fallen in love, but she dies, and he is grief-stricken. Spock steals into his quarters and lays his hand on the sleeping captain, and the episode concludes with the word: forget.

In our time, we tell people to move on, to face forward only, just as in the myth. In our new name for funerals, a celebration of life, we try to dry the tears of loss prematurely.

Live like there’s no tomorrow, we are told. The play reminds us that our decisions in life always have consequences, obvious or unforeseen. Death may be timeless in the underworld, but for the living, we constantly are weaving together the strands of past, present, and future.

The Christina faith has memory as a core component.  At the Lord’s Supper, Jesus says: “do this to remember me.” Many of us have committed some rituals and prayers to memory.

We speak far too easily coming to closure with death. No, the communion of saints applies. We continue in communion with those who have gone on before us. Memory connects us to them. In my view the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead may suggest that the dead endure with their loves, their memories intact within the new life of God. Indeed, we live on within the expansive life and memory of the Eternal One.