Sarah Ruhl

“I try to interpret how people subjectively experience life,” Sarah Ruhl said in 2008. “Everyone has a great, horrible opera inside him.” While studying at Brown University, Ruhl began a play that she would adapt into an opera libretto, Eurydice, a modern retelling of the story of Orpheus’ wife, dedicated to Ruhl’s father, who had died of cancer. Working on the play, she said in a 2021 interview, before the opera was staged at New York’s Lincoln Center, felt like “taking significant fragments of your life and placing them within, or pushing them through, a giant myth that is much bigger than yourself.”