We were really looking forward to seeing Sarah Ruhl's Eurydice (at ACT through October 5, tickets $10-$55). Ruhl's a Pulitzer prize finalist and a MacArthur "genius" grant winner, and we've long been fascinated by the Greek tale of not counting your dead chicks before they're hatched. Maybe we'd love it; maybe we'd hate it. We didn't expect boredom. But that's what we got.

We first meet Orpheus (Trick Danneker) and Eurydice (Renata Friedman), two kids madly in love, chasing each other around the theater. It's an update: they're at the beach, looking a little Gidget-y. Orpheus is all about his music; Eurydice tries to talk about an interesting book. There's a quick spat, they get engaged.

We see Eurydice's father, writing letters of advice to her from the underworld, which is done in blue bathroom tile and has a sewer grate in the floor. We see her getting married, we see a man pursuing her (Paul Morgan Stetler, also Hades). She dies. She spends time with her father, reminiscing. Orpheus shows, finally. She dies again.

Behind all of this are resonances--of a marriage gone wrong, infidelity, a wounded retreat to home and father. At one point, Eurydice writes a letter to Orpheus's "next" wife. And less figuratively, there is the loss of a father, the inability of those around to accept the searing grief. The subtitle could be, "An Exploration of the Father/Daughter Bond and the Grieving Process."

Telling the story from Eurydice's point of view might strike you as a great way of rewriting the experience of love's loss; yet Ruhl gives us little in the way of character. All we know is that Eurydice is young, likes books, and misses her father. Similarly, Orpheus is a cipher. Here, he doesn't even sing (the medieval harmonizing that breaks Hell's gate asunder comes over the speakers). Ruhl simply drops situations in front of us--the way a book falls out of the sky in front of a newly dead, amnesiac Eurydice, who shouts at it to tell her what it is--and expects us to care. Even if we do, that's not drama.

To create a waking dream atmosphere, Eurydice is filled with clever visuals (and sight gags): strings stretch from floor to ceiling and when Orpheus plucks them, you hear an electric guitar. Eurydice's father uses string to mark out a room for her in the underworld. Letters drop from the sky. Hades rides a tricycle of varying sizes. But don't ask why. Why is her father able to use Orpheus's strings to anchor Eurydice's string house? Why is Paul Morgan Stetler both her pursuer and Hades (which seems more a conflation of the Persephone myth)?

Friedman and Danneker didn't make much of an impression on us; Friedman especially, as the protagonist, felt one-note and over-loud at that. And director Allison Narver's pacing begins hyperactive and slumps into a languid crawl. The tone veers between ironic detachment, pathos, and (in the case of the chorus of stones) camp. The handling of Orpheus's arrival--a goofy palms-up rockstar pose--and the anti-baptisms in death's riverwater--an "Ah, me!" swoon to the floor--is just inept.

Mark Chamberlin, as Eurydice's father, struggles to find a person beneath a blanket of muted grief and the iconography of the sainted departed: always attentive, always protective. Ironically, only Stetler's loutish Hades has any life to him. Stetler avoids the sin of making him likable, but his anarchic lust lights up the stage, and when he exits, you wish you could go with him. That's where the party seems to be.