The New Reportory Theater's exciting "Eurydice": unforgettable scenes of eternal love and eternal loss

Sarah Ruhl's play is an exciting re-creation of the story of Eurydice, who dies on her wedding day, and Orpheus, her husband who descends into the underworld to save her. It's a wonderful play, and Rick Lombardo, the director, does a great deal with the actors, a small stage space, and a very few spare props.

I felt as if we watched an inspired group of actors, as if they were very young, and struggling to make names for themselves. Zillah Glory is very good as Eurydice, spontaneous and sexy. Ken Baltin, her father, is terrific.

There are two powerful scenes that will stay with me:

• Eurydice's father in the underworld, aware of her upcoming wedding to Orpheus, happily and silently miming his role in her wedding (holding out his arm, feeling her arm in his, stepping with her towards the imaginary altar);

• and Eurydice at the end, drinking water from the river Lethe in order to save herself from a hideous fate as eternal concubine to the clownlike and vile Lord of the Underworld, knowing of course that Lethe will erase her memory and everything that makes her Eurydice -- she truly surrenders to death as the only escape possible. Her last motion is to take her father's dead hand into hers and pull his arm around her.

Ruhl employs a number of artificial theatrical devices that seem evocative and natural: the father building a "room" for Eurydice in the underworld out of string, written messages accurately sent between the lovers from the world to the underworld and back -- carried "hopefully" by a worm, an elevator delivers characters to the underworld. It all works magically well.

Eurydice might have been a bit too ditzy in the beginning of the play, the three stones being played by young girls got tiresome, the music has a New Age cliched air, and the getup of the lord of the underworld was a bit like something from Alice in Wonderland. But these were small flaws that only made me love the production and its cast more.