By Sarah Ruhl. Directed by Missy Cross. Presented by Secretly Women Productions. At Studio 16 on Wednesday, May 25. Continues until June 3

American playwright Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice is a witty and sometimes moving theatrical poem—but not always a successful play.

Ruhl presents the story that’s usually told as the myth of Orpheus from the perspective of his wife, Eurydice. As in most versions of the story, Eurydice dies shortly after marrying Orpheus, and he uses his music to charm his way into the underworld, where he hopes to retrieve her. The gods allow Eurydice to follow Orpheus back to the land of the living, but warn him that if he looks back, she will disappear and return to the underworld forever.

Ruhl, who lost her dad to bone cancer when she was 20, uses the story to meditate on straight female love and sexuality; in her take, the main conflict in that arena is between a woman’s love for her father and her love for her husband.

In Ruhl’s version, Eurydice meets her dead dad in the underworld and their reunion inspires some of the script’s most beautiful text. Having been bathed in the river Lethe, Eurydice has lost her memory, but her father restores it by reteaching her the language of love, resorting to metaphor when he has to; she forgets the meaning of father, for instance, so he uses tree instead. And Ruhl’s Orpheus looks back not because of his own impulsiveness, but because Eurydice calls him—perhaps because she’d really rather stay with papa.

Ruhl’s meditation is often funny: the Lord of the Underworld is presented as a ghoulish kinkster who demands submission; when Eurydice cries out, “Please don’t!”, he gets her to repeat it several times, as he gets increasingly aroused.

And the playwright thinks in terms of concrete poetry: in the elevator that carries people to the underworld, it’s constantly raining.

But there are longueurs, big chunks of time when remembering is the only action. Yes, the play posits the notion that love and meaning are based in recollection, but, in the real time and space of theatre, one longs for events.

Still, the play is ambitious and, under Missy Cross’s direction, this mounting from Secretly Women Productions does a solid job of sustaining the script’s giddy surrealism. Newcomer Joey Bothwell charms as Eurydice. Blond and curvaceous, she is, frankly, gorgeous. Her smoky voice, which always carries the hint of a chortle or tears, belongs to a movie star, and she’s got great comic chops. Greg Bishop brings gentle melancholy to Father. Patrick Spencer makes a swashbuckling, though not terrifically musical Orpheus. And Michael Barry Anderson delivers a wildly eccentric performance as the Lord of the Underworld. In the Chorus of Stones, voices of emotional deadening, Anna C. Robin creates a creepy kewpie buffoon character for Little Stone. Costumer Veronika Rudez makes the Stones look like fabulously animated garbage and rock.

In this journey across the river of death, the tops of the waves are exhilarating. The troughs are troughs.