The New Yorker:
"...exhilarating...we enter a surreal world, as lush and limpid as a dream, where both author and audience swim in the magical and thrilling flow of the unconscious."

Marissa Greenberg, review, Albuquerque Journal:
"In Greek mythology, the story of Eurydice is really not her story at all. It is the story of Orpheus, her husband, whose powerful love and even more powerful music moves the gods to release Eurydice from death. Sarah Ruhl's "Eurydice" retells this myth from the perspective of its title character. Though the worlds of the play remain dominated by men, Eurydice asserts her intellect and affections to become an active participant in her own story.

The Southwest premiere of "Eurydice" by the FUSION Theatre Company is a sumptuous production. Eurydice is in between girl and woman, daughter and wife, aspiring protagonist with individual desires and supporting player to her husband's artistic genius. In the title role Therese Olson imparts Eurydice's neither/both status with grace and vivacity. Her performance of elation and grief, especially in the play's final moments, pays tribute to the force of Ruhl's modern myth.

Ross Kelly, in the roles of Nasty Interesting Man and Lord of the Underworld, is both magnetic and intimidating. Wearing an array of fantastical costumes designed by Aura Sperling-Pierce, Kelly brings to the production exuberant humor, if also a palpable apprehension. Paul Blott plays Eurydice's father, a character created by Ruhl. In a suit and bowler hat, Blott communicates the comforts of normalcy amid the disorientation of the underworld. Blott and Demet Vialpando, who plays Orpheus, are at their finest when they lose Eurydice a second time.

For over half of the play, which is performed in one act without an intermission, a chorus of stones referees the action. Director Laurie Thomas gathers a complementary trio of performers: Kate Costello (Little Stone), David Lang (Loud Stone), and Zane Barker (Big Stone) give a well-coordinated performance. By turns amusing, angry, aggrieved and stoic, the chorus is emotionally as well as physically synchronized.

The design team of Richard K. Hogle (set and lighting design) and Mark Cleveland (multimedia design) create a psychedelic experience of color and music. The actors perform amid diaphanous curtains, sliding sets and kaleidoscopic light. Here again Thomas is to be commended for striking a successful balance. The effect is, like Eurydice herself, one of between ancient myth and modern reality."

Wally Gordon, review, The Independent (East Mountain):
Eurydice’—bringing modern magic to a classic myth

"The myth of the tragic love of the musician Orpheus, son of the god Apollo, and the beautiful young Eurydice has been told for thousands of years by— among others—Apollonius,Ovid and Virgil. When Eurydice is bitten by a snake and descends to Hades, Orpheus makes a long and painful journey to bring her back. The ruler of Hades allows Eurydice to follow Orpheus on condition that he not look back. At the last moment, however, Orpheus lacks faith that his lover is behind him and looks back. She disappears forever back into the depths of Hades.

The FUSION Theater in Albuquerque is retelling a significantly altered version of this ancient myth in a performance that is a kind of staged version of magical realism. Symbolism and reality, myth and actuality, emotion and philosophy, music and mime, prose and poetry combine in ways that are unexpected and sometimes puzzling. The sound of water dripping, sweet harmonies, low comedy and high drama create a sometimesbewildering fresco of sounds and scenes.

The play, by the young writer Sarah Ruhl, who won a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant, created somewhat of a sensation when it was premiered at the Yale Repertory Theater in 2006 and later in NewYork City. The FUSION performance, directed by Laurie Thomas, suffers somewhat from lacking the sophisticated staging of earlier performances, complete with real water running over the stage, but it is brought to life by the graceful interpretation of Therese Olson in the title role as a beguiling combination of innocence and seductiveness. Ruhl’s version of the myth makes two major changes in the ancient love story. First, she tells the tale from the point of view of Eurydice, not Orpheus, giving it a bit of a feminist cast. Second, she invents the character of Eurydice’s father and creates a complex emotional tension around him. In this version, Eurydice is torn between passion for Orpheus and affectionate dependence on her father, between wanting to stay in Hades with her father and returning to Earth with
Orpheus.

The tension is foreshadowed in the first moments of the play when Eurydice is preparing to marry Orpheus and says a wedding is when a woman stops being her father’s child.Of course, in this play, Eurydice never ceases to be her father’s child. Despite the complexities of Ruhl’s magical allusions and the sometimes-confusing images, the play succeeds in showing that the ancient stories of our civilization contain a richness that remains relevant to the passions of our own day."

Charles Isherwood, review, New York Times:
"Ms. Ruhl’s quirky contemporary meditation on a much-meditated-upon story has some of the subliminal potency of music, the head-scratching surprise of a modernist poem and the cockeyed allure of a surrealist painting. It’s pretty funny, too. Oh, yeah, and it may just be the most moving exploration of the theme of loss that the American theater has produced since the events of Sept. 11, 2001....[eurydice's] powerful emotional core draws you into its strange currents; you may find yourself taken to heights of emotion...that theater too rarely achieves."

Manning Harris, review, Atlanta INTown:
"eurydice....is a work of great delicacy and has a shimmering, unearthly beauty about it. If you allow yourself to go with the flow (or accept the syntax, as Edward Albee would say), you'll find yourself in a subterranean never-never land where words are used to conceal as well as reveal."