Here’s what Ruhl said about the Grandmother character[ii]:
The idea of memory as something that can be washed away and painfully retrieved is a compelling idea in Eurydice. Would you address the final moments of the play when we see Eurydice’s grandmother, another occupant of the underworld who has experienced erasure of memory?
I was looking for metaphysical layering, so that we would see someone who has completely lost her memory. The grandmother takes walks across the stage that are like little silent plays unto themselves and can be really specific. Some actors would balk at not having her encoded in language, not having a certain amount of lines. But having the grandmother make that last cross gives the play emotional balance. It’s not as tidy or as Greek as the tragedy would be if we just saw Orpheus coming down and the triangle between Orpheus, Eurydice, and the father. It’s larger, it’s continual—life does go on. The grandmother becomes an emblem of memory loss as sort of a happy thing. I’ve seen some people lose their memory who have been quite happy in the void they’re moving into, but for other people who are aware of it, it’s so horrible and tragic and painful. For Eurydice and her father the pain comes out of their consciousness of memories, but the grandmother is less conscious of what’s slipping away. She’s more peaceful, which for me makes her less ambivalently hopeful.
The Grandmother character is now gone, but she seems to be the forerunner to the old crone stone as conceived by director Lisa Hall-Hagan. She is someone who has been around the underworld the longest and who most represents the idea of peace and forgetting.
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