NEWPORT, R.I. – Salve Regina University’s department of performing arts will present Sarah Ruhl’s play, Eurydice, from April 14-18 on campus in the Megley Theatre, located in Antone Academic Center, corner of Lawrence and Leroy avenues.
Performances, open to the public, will be given Wednesday through Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m. Wednesday’s performance, a dress rehearsal, is pay-what-you-can with proceeds being donated to Salve Hearts for Haiti, a campus organization dedicated to raising money for Haitian earthquake victims.
Tickets are $10 for adults, $7 for seniors and Salve Regina faculty and staff, and $5 for students. On-line ticketing information can be found at the department of performing arts website under the Theatre Season link or by calling 401-341-2250.
Just 32 years old, playwright Sarah Ruhl has already written 10 original plays, including Passion Play, Dead Man’s Cell Phone and the Pulitzer Prize finalist, The Clean House. She has an MFA from Brown University and was a recent recipient of the MacArthur “genius grant.”
In Eurydice, she reimagines the classic myth of Orpheus through the eyes of its heroine. After dying on her wedding day, Eurydice must journey to the underworld, where she reunites with her father and struggles to remember her lost love. Ruhl wrote the play after losing her own father to cancer and the New York Times wrote that it is “an inexpressibly moving theatrical fable about love, loss and the pleasures and pains of memory.”
Suzanne Delle, Salve Regina’s new assistant professor of theatre, directs the show. Delle came to Salve Regina in January after running her own theatre company in southern New Hampshire for seven years that specialized in contemporary thought-provoking theatre.
During that time she was nominated three times for Best Director of a Professional Theatre production. She teaches acting classes at the university and Eurydice will be her first production at Salve Regina.
The cast of student actors is led by Anna McConville, a senior music major from Massachusetts, as Eurydice. She is joined by Matthew Dinda, a senior theatre minor from Connecticut, as her father, and Judson Hobbs, a sophomore theatre major from Maine, as her husband Orpheus. In the underworld she meets a cast of characters including the Lord of the Underworld played by Nicole Dionne, a sophomore theatre minor from Connecticut, and a Greek-style chorus portrayed by Mary Wright, a senior theatre minor from Massachusetts, Liana Wendy Sarapas, a sophomore theatre major from Massachusetts and Alexandra Clayton, a freshman theatre major from Massachusetts.