‘Eurydice’ Review: Maya Hawke in the Underworld

The young couple on the beach are coltishly enamored — snuggled up close, their long limbs entangled. When he ties a string around her left ring finger, to remind her of his love, she squeak-squeals with pleasure and agrees to marry him.

She is Eurydice and he is Orpheus, legendary musician nonpareil, and the handed-down myth about them says their union will be short. She will die abruptly, he will be bereft, and it will not go well when he descends into the underworld and tries to lead her back to the land of the living.

Their relationship does figure in “Eurydice,” Sarah Ruhl’s tear-dappled masterwork, yet the play’s primary grief is Eurydice’s own — for her dead father, a gaping, missing presence on the day she and Orpheus wed. In this poetic, heightened comedy of mourning and oblivion, the surest, most steadying love is between parent and grown child.

Les Waters’s marvelously burnished revival, which opened on Monday night at Signature Theater, stars an instantly likable Maya Hawke as a self-possessed Eurydice, cerebral but with a romantic streak, and a beautifully understated Brian d’Arcy James as her mild father, funny here in a dadly way and immensely moving, too. Caleb Eberhardt plays Orpheus, gentle and determined, pouring his misery into music and writing to his dead wife.

“I’ll give this letter to a worm,” he tells her, signing off. “I hope he finds you.”

Waters’s breathtaking 2006 staging of “Eurydice” was my introduction to Ruhl’s slender play, which she and the composer Matthew Aucoin have more recently adapted into an opera. This Off Broadway revival is similar to that earlier Waters production, yet even more eloquent in execution — the work of a director who by now knows the play’s every ripple and depth.

Crucially, he has brought along two members of the crack creative team from that production: Scott Bradley, whose glamorous, slant-walled set is all watery blues and greens, part painted tiles, part forlorn grid of handwritten letters; and Bray Poor, whose often delicately musical sound design evokes the near-omnipresence of water in this very liquid play.