Sarah Ruhl’s play Eurydice is a play that set designers love: it gives them a chance to depict an underworld that can be as whimsical, as abstract, or as menacing as they want. It’s also a lovely play, written with genuine poetry, about a father’s love for his daughter, and Curio cast the play with Paul Kuhn as the dad and his daughter Tessa as Eurydice. I shot a full costume-and-lighting runthrough. There’s a short monologue where Paul reads a letter he’s sent to his daughter from the Underworld that spells out a lot of the play’s situation, and a piece of music that was lovely, sad, and was recorded without any voice-overs or stray sounds. I used a combination of those as the spine to present some highly visual moments from the play. This is one of the trailers I’ve made that I can watch with genuine pleasure.
I also shot some of the rehearsals and set-building moments, and when Kyle Cassidy came by to shoot promotional photos of the play, I was there too. So we got another promo out of the project:
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I have to confess that these were not my first ideas for the Eurydice promo. I fixated on the play’s use of swing-era music, and the splendid Alan Ladd-ish appearance of C.J. Keller in a fedora. So my first thought was 1940s Movie Trailer, which sparked off a lot of enthusiasm because I love imitating design styles. So I put together a quick draft, using the music from The Maltese Falcon, mainly to see if I could approximate the era’s optical effects in the title cards.
I know, it looks cool, and it’s a funny piece of video… but it just didn’t covey what Eurydice was like at all. I was showing off my own technique, that’s all. So I decided to keep the idea in mind for a more appropriate play… which turned out to be their next production, Dario Fo’s An Accidental Death of an Anarchist.