Eurydice Reviews
Chicago Reader- Highly Recommended
"...Charles Riffenburg's intimate production for BoHo Theatre capitalizes on superb and subtly affecting sound design by Joshua Wentz to create an atmosphere that heightens Ruhl's imaginative and rich poetry. It's a moving ensemble effort throughout, and as Eurydice, Amanda Jane Long delivers a nuanced, childlike, grief-stricken performance that perfectly conveys the play's complicated and contradictory ideas about death and longing."
Theatre By Numbers- Recommended
"...Director Charles Riffenburg aligns this production to embrace strange angles and human body formations. Those of us in the audience are so close to the action that it can feel uncomfortably inclusive. If we are not complicit in every characters' mistakes and hardships, then we are at least confined, right alongside them in a grey, industrial underworld. "Eurydice" succeeds in inviting us in for love and loss that strikes very close, not just in proximity, but in familiarity; characters speak our language and feel heartbreaks just like ours."
ChicagoCritic- Not Recommended
"...Long and Dzielak, as Eurydice and Orpheus, indicate all the common, symptomatic signs of love — from doe eyes, to hand clasping — but never submit themselves to those emotions long enough for us to believe them. On the other hand, Robel, as Eurydice’s father, fully embraces his character’s role, but does so as an ambling cliché of 1990s fatherhood (a la Full House); so, apart from his artistically redemptive closing monologue, he too is unbelievable. Contrarily, Kander, who plays both the Man and the Lord, captures perfectly the seething perversity and neuroticism of his characters; on that account, though the nefarious villains, his characters are by far the most likeable because of their lived-in truthfulness."
Chicago Stage and Screen- Somewhat Recommended
"...I don't want to go through and ridicule because I think I've made my point. In a story that is based on a myth that echoes a sort of artistic version of an epic journey, this production lacked the journey. Orpheus (Chloe Dzielak) is the same man (or woman, in this case) before he loses his wife as he is after. Whether Eurydice (Amanda Jane Long) is celebrating the love of her life in marriage or dealing with the complicated reality of an afterlife and a reunion with her father, she shows no dynamic change. I can't imagine that Riffenburg's message with this production is to say "no matter what, we are all emotionally the exact same no matter what befalls us," but that is the basic message given here. No peaks, no valleys. Just one long, inevitable march toward a predetermined and depressing end."