1. Eurydice: PURE Theatre, 10 Storehouse Row, North Charleston
2. Lobby Hero: Stelle Di Domani, Chapel Theatre
3. I Live Next to Horses, Piccolo Fringe, Theatre 99

It occurred to me today that there are a couple of things going on between the big festival’s Amistad and the small festival’s Eurydice. Both are concerned with memory and forgetting, and both make creative use of non-traditional performance spaces. Upon further reflection, I suspect that the latter — staging — divides our tastes more deeply than any other factor.

P&C overview critic Tim Page knocked Amistad’s opera-in-the-round staging Sunday morning, noting that the singers can’t project their voices to everyone in the audience simultaneously. This was part of an overall lukewarm review that declared the opera disappointing. But here’s the thing: The people who decided to stage the opera that way knew going in that 360-degree opera would present these acoustic challenges. They said as much. You could have criticized Amistad for its acoustics without even attending.

The more interesting question to me: What did the audience get in the tradeoff? Because in the ever-shifting tension between form and content, in the ever-morphing context of a media-saturated culture, the design of a production has perhaps never been more important. I found Amistad’s set design fascinating, and the use of space in dress rehearsal got me excited about the story’s mythic aspects.

Fast-forward to Sunday’s Eurydice matinée.

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Local writer/blogger/critic/filmmaker and SpoletoToday SpoJo Nick Smith alerted us yesterday to this series of videos he made about PURE Theatre’s Eurydice, a 21st-century re-imagining of the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. And then, oddly enough, I ran into PURE co-founder Rodney Lee Rogers (Eurydice’s father) during my Thursday rounds.

PURE built an enviable reputation for creative, challenging theater during its years at what is now The Cigar Factory, but it’s been homeless ever since losing that lease. This production is staged at 10 Storehouse Row on the former Navy base in North Charleston, where one drawback is the simple fact that so many locals have never been there and don’t know what to expect if they go.

We’ll let Nick introduce you to the piece, and maybe we’ll come up with a SpoletoToday “Follow Us to Eurydice” trip here soon…

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