Wednesday night with Eurydice...

It’s the night before tech rehearsal and the cast has the night off to relax, ponder and regroup before we start into the process of getting Eurydice ready to open in a little over one week. What do we do? Talk about Eurydice!! We’re engrossed, we’re ingrained, we’re down to crunch time. I had the pleasure of chatting tonight with Stephanie Ogden who plays the role of Eurydice, an ingenue unlike any other. Trust when I say that she’s every bit as compelling offstage as she is in the show.

A 2009 psychology graduate of the University of Utah, Stephanie began her journey into theatre in her last year of college. A singer and dancer growing up, she took an acting class because it was something she always wanted to do. After that, she developed more than just an acting bug, she came down with a full-blown acting fever that gets stronger with each rehearsal. She definitively says, “I ended up falling in love with it,” and as such performed in A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Beehive Theatre in Ogden and in the Egyptian Theatre’s A Christmas Carol.

Which brings us to our performance of Eurydice at The Grand. Stephanie got the script prior to auditions and felt compelled to be part of the story because it was unlike anything she had read before. It seems most people are at least a little familiar with the classic Greek tale, but Stephanie was interested in this particular adaptation. “This show is very much a love story, and the play presents love as a force that is strong enough to last beyond the grave.” She continues, “but love is also very fragile and can be lost with one misstep.” Ultimately the story is a tragedy, but it’s not without hope.

We talked further about how love is presented in Eurydice, and going into rehearsals Stephanie first focused on the relationship between Orpheus and Eurydice. She then realized the play examines many different kinds of love. Stephanie says, “When I found that Eurydice meets her father in the afterlife I saw the love in the show as both romantic and paternal, and that love breaks the barrier between living and the underworld.” This play examines what it means to love, live in the moment, then potentially lose someone you love. “How do you go on living without someone you love? How do you remember your loved ones and keep them alive after they’re gone?” Stephanie muses. “These questions have all become more apparent as we’ve gone through the rehearsal process.” She hopes audiences will relate to love in their own ways and look to their own experiences to enrich what they will see on the stage.

To people who are still wondering what this play is all about, Stephanie thinks that the performances will be not only entertaining but also refreshingly thought-provoking. This show is sure to take audiences to remarkable places that may not resonate until they’re already there. She puts it most eloquently, “This play is surprising in its simplicity and its power.” We could talk about the script for hours and still wonder what it all means, for the nuances in the show are as simple or as complex as you would like to delve. Stephanie sums this up in one of her favorite lines in the show (as spoken by Little Stone) Love is a big, funny word by “hoping people take home with them the idea that love is strange and wild thing, but it’s wonderful. It's what we live for and the script shows us that love will endure when we're gone.”

Audiences are going to be blown away by not only the show itself, but also the beautiful hearts of the people in the show. The wonderful spirit of the group of people cast in Eurydice resonates through more than just the words being spoken, and each is touched in their own way. We agree that you're going to be astonished by this experience.