EURYDICE (LEGEND OF LOVERS)
StageCraft Productions
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In the original tale Apollo’s son Orpheus, a musician, falls in love with Eurydice. Soon after their marriage, Aristaeus the beekeeper becomes enamored of Eurydice; fleeing him she is killed by a snake. Orpheus journeys to the land of the dead and, through his beautiful music, persuades the gods to release his beloved. They set one condition–that he not look upon her until the two have reached the world of the living. Orpheus agrees, but succumbs to temptation at the last moment and looks back. Eurydice disappears again into the land of death; after seven days of mourning, Orpheus is murdered and his soul joins Eurydice’s in the underworld.
We never see the process by which Orpheus trades a song for his lover’s freedom–that happens between the acts. The story jumps to Orpheus valiantly turning his face from Eurydice despite her incessant bids for his attention. (Earlier in the play Eurydice announced that she’s stupid and that she talks all the time–and unfortunately she’s right on both counts.) Orpheus forgets that this is her way of discouraging questions she cannot answer, and demands to know the truth about his wife’s past. Turning, he finds it, seeing her as she really is and the life of petty compromise and boring mediocrity they would have shared. With both his ideal and his actual sweetheart gone forever, there is nothing left for Orpheus but to die–and be reunited with his ever-young and faithful Eurydice.
The character is Sarah Ann Landis, who vies with her older sister Olive for the affections of their widowed father; the relationships among the three grow more and more insular. The patriarch eventually so dominates the thinking of his younger daughter that when Olive breaks with her incestuous family to elope with a man held unworthy by the draconian Dr. Landis, Sarah Ann heartily concurs with her father that Olive has “betrayed” them–though she also feels a certain exhilaration at the prospect of becoming his sole helpmeet, and vows to care for him precisely as he cared for her.
