Virginia Tech Professors Combine Talents in World Premiere
August, 2005

A playwright, composer, and actor from Virginia Tech collaborated for a world premiere event in Edinburgh, Scotland. Patricia Raun, head of the Department of Theatre Arts, was the lone performer in Eurydice, a one-woman play by internationally-acclaimed Virginia Tech English professor Thomas Gardner. Alan Weinstein, also a VT professor and noted cellist, composed the original score and performed in the production at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe August 8-10 in the Greyfriars Kirk House.

Raun received praise for her performance in a review in The Scotsman newspaper. "Three Weeks" called the production a "beautifully vivid script...well acted...worth a look."

Eurydice is a one-woman play chronicling the character's emotional journey of coming to terms with her husband's death. She retraces their life together through memories, finally finding liberation and strength within herself.

In Eurydice, Gardner shows how poetry can "bring a person from death to life" by using the metaphor of the mythic tale of Orpheus and Eurydice, where the poet Orpheus ventures into the underworld to save his beloved Eurydice from death, only to fail at the last moment.

Other Virginia Tech faculty contributing to the production of Eurydice, include David Johnson and Randy Ward, both faculty in the Department of Theatre Arts.   Johnson worked with Raun as an acting coach, while Ward served as a lighting consultant for the production.

Raun first discovered the similarities between poetry and theatre when auditing one of Gardner's classes in 2002.   What Raun learned was "how to enter a poem - an experience I had had as an actress when playing characters onstage, but certainly had never felt while sitting in a classroom full of students reading poetry."   The collaboration of Raun and Gardner during the 2004 Theatre Arts Department production of ear, and I and silence ultimately led to the production of Eurydice. 

Eurydice performance dates at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe coincided with Raun's presentation, developed from ear, and I and silence, for the Voice and Speech Trainer's Association (VASTA) in Glasgow, Scotland, Aug. 13 on the similarities between the process of writing and interpreting poetry and the techniques she teaches in acting and voice classes. The paper was entitled "Poetry Play: The Transfrmation of the Performer's Voice."

An American debut of Eurydice will be a part of the VT Department of Theatre Arts's New Play Festival in February 2006. Working with the Minneapolis Playwright's Center's New Plays for Campus Stages Program, the festival will feature a play by a new voice in the American theatre as well as readings by other young and emergent playwrights working in the field.

For more information on the world premiere performance of Eurydice at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, please visit: http://www.paradise-green.co.uk.