A season of grief

It is a calm October evening in New Haven, and a thunderously rainy night in Hell. The Yale Rep is staging "Eurydice," Sarah Ruhl's extraordinary reimagining of the Orpheus myth.

The production brims with lovely, memorable images: tiled walls that give Hell the feeling of an abandoned swimming pool, an elevator that rains on its occupants, glowing letters mailed between the living and the dead. And, of course, there's the familiar heartbreak of the story itself. Orpheus, distraught over the death of his bride, Eurydice, breaches the gates of Hades to reclaim her. He is permitted to lead her out with his songs, on the condition that he never look back -- then loses her forever because, in fact, he couldn't resist that backward glance.

All this is powerfully created in Ruhl's simple, strong language and Les Waters's sensitive and imaginative staging. Ruhl also makes an interesting power shift; her Eurydice is not a passive rescued damsel, but a conflicted woman who makes a noise to attract Orpheus's gaze because she's not entirely sure she wants to leave.

It's a fascinating night in the theater, and I scribble excited notes for the review I plan to write the next day. There's a lot to think about, a lot to write about, and that fills me with energy and delight.

Then it's over, and I walk to my car. I get in, put the key in the ignition, and break down into heaving, racking sobs. All I can think about is the image of Eurydice's father, who in this version has preceded her to the underworld and is there to ease her early confusion at being suddenly dead.

He has painstakingly reconstructed his own memory from scraps of language, but she at first remembers nothing -- including him. He takes care of her anyway, lovingly constructing a "room" by outlining a block of air with a single long piece of string. And then they sit together, and he tells her stories, and slowly he brings her back to herself.

This is why she doesn't want to leave, and it's also why I can't stop crying. I saw this play Oct. 3; my father had died Sept. 7. Ours was a complicated relationship -- whose isn't? -- and though I had gone through the rituals of mourning I had been troubled by finding myself unable to cry more than about five tears at a time.

But now, picturing this imaginary father spinning a web of love around his imaginary child, I feel all the sorrow and guilt and confusion and anger and loss that I have been refusing to let in. I cry for a long time. And then, feeling just as cleansed and purified and exhausted as we were promised by all those theories of catharsis in freshman English, I drive the two hours back home.

The next day, after begging my editors for an extra 24 hours to process the whole experience, I set about my usual juggling routine: baking a birthday cake for my son, getting ready to go out that night to another play. Late that afternoon, my brother-in-law calls to say that my mother, whose cancer has so far caused few symptoms, has taken a sudden turn. A few frantic decisions later, a colleague is reviewing that night's play, and I'm serving a rushed birthday cake and then driving to New Hampshire.

My mother dies that night.

Obviously, I never wrote my review of "Eurydice." (Unless this counts.) But the play, more than most I have seen this year, continues to haunt me. And what it leads me to think about now, as I look back on my tumultuous entry into the role of full-time critic, is how complicated it can be to sort out the many elements that compose our response to a play: not just the play itself and the particular production of it, but what's going on in our own lives and, more broadly, the life of the culture around us.

For example, I saw "Eurydice" not just in the mournful personal context of the death of my parents, but as one of several plays this year that seemed unusually willing to grapple with death in complex, theatrically vivid, and nuanced ways. "Rabbit Hole," at the Huntington , trod a delicate line between unbearable pain and bleak humor as it explored the aftermath of a child's death. Company One's "After Ashley" tipped more toward the darkly comic side in its tale of a publicity-mad widower and his appalled son, but it also found the grief among the gags. And "Wings of Desire" at the American Repertory Theatre presented an indelible image of time, eternity, and the line between them: a streaming column of sand.

As for "Eurydice," it was only one of three retellings of the Orpheus myth on nearby stages this year. At the ART, Robert Woodruff and Rinde Eckert collaborated on the hypnotic "Orpheus X," which also placed more power in Eurydice's hands -- and made her a poet in her own right and a stranger to Orpheus, a rock star who mourns her only because his cab happened to run her down. Meanwhile, Chen Shi-Zheng's "Orfeo" mixed the myths of many cultures, first at London's English National Opera and then with the Handel & Haydn Society here.

I missed that production because of my father's death. And I vividly remember "Orpheus X" because I interviewed Woodruff about it for a preview story in March -- from the emergency room, where my father had just arrived after the catastrophic fall that began his last downward spiral.

So, for me, these Orpheus stories are inextricably entwined with my own losses. But what is it about this musician's doomed mission to Hades that seems to be speaking so insistently to many others, too?

Well, it's hard not to see the shadow of the Twin Towers. Particularly in "Orpheus X," the resonance of public mourning for the deaths of strangers was impossible to ignore. And the complicated struggle in these retellings between remembrance and forgetting, between turning back and moving on, also seems to connect to a uniquely American ambivalence. We build memorials to everything, even as we declare that today is the first day of the rest of our lives.

It's also significant, I think, that this is a myth about the failure of art. Like Orpheus, the artists who tell his story are expressing our longing to be healed by song; like him, they are discovering that some wounds can't be healed. We sing, we struggle, but we die. And so do those we love.

But here's the thing: Am I making these connections only because of the ways in which they connect to my own life right now? In a different mood, would I be writing about whatever strand of the zeitgeist brought us two productions of "Carmen" last year or a whole flock of Romeos and Juliets?

Maybe. But this was a year in hell for me. So, ultimately, all I can say is that I'm grateful I did not have to go there alone.

Louise Kennedy can be reached at kennedy@globe.com.