If his lovely new production of Sarah Ruhl’s “Eurydice” is a guidepost, artistic director Braden Abraham’s fresh tenure at Writers Theatre in Glencoe will feature elegant, beautifully designed productions of works suffused with passion, longing and regret. Good for him. The loyal Writers Theatre audience will, I think, appreciate that.

I last saw “Eurydice,” based on the Greek myth, at the Victory Gardens Theater in 2008, back when this Evanston-raised playwright was all the rage in the American theater, even if her warm-centered writing style hardly evokes anger. The “Orpheus and Eurydice” myth also appears in “Hadestown,” the Broadway musical, just another example of how this ancient legend has obsessed writers and other artists for centuries.

Why? Well, it’s firstly a tale of undying love in that Orpheus (Kenneth La’Ron Hamilton) so loves his dead bride Eurydice (Sarah Price) that he journeys to Hades to find her. Once he does so, his love so moves the Lord of the Underworld (Larry Yando) that he allows Eurydice to leave with her lover, conditioning his decision on Orpheus not looking back to check that the woman he adores is following.

And there you have the heart of the story, a core suffused with paradox.

Is that act of looking back an expression of a lack of trust, an insecurity easily exploited by the malevolent? Or is being sure a lover’s most sacred caretaking duty?

In “Eurydice,” Ruhl doesn’t just look at the relationship between Eurydice and Orpheus but at that between Eurydice and her dead father (John Gregorio). In the underworld, Eurydice gets to see her father again, even if the two have to put up with the yammerings of the play’s Greek chorus, otherwise known as the Stones (they’re dryly played by John Lister, Elizabeth Ledo and Susaan Jamshidi). If you look from her dad’s point of view, as Gregorio makes beautifully clear, he gets both the unspeakable joy of being with his daughter again and the unspeakable agony of losing her twice. And in Abraham’s production, that is where the emphasis seemed to lie, although that might also be a function of where a critic with a recently empty nest obsesses at the moment.

Such is the appeal of these timeless myths; they bend and morph according to where the watchers and listeners reside in life. That kinetic sense is embodied in Courtney O’Neill’s setting, a gorgeously sculptured design with a steeply raked set leading down, of course, although doing so in a way that implies the possibility of escape. Every visual moment here has been thought through and the pacing is quite exquisite.

Abraham’s production has the benefit of a truly lovely central performance from Price, a guileless and charming piece of acting that infuses the show with both honesty and courage. Caring for Eurydice and believing in the life-affirming nature of her relationship both with her dad and with Orpheus are crucial to the play. You have to believe in what they had if you are to invest in its loss. And so you do.

The moment where Lord decides to let Eurydice go, and the “why” of that choice, wasn’t entirely clear to me at Friday’s opening and I think Price and Hamilton have a much firmer handle on the ecstasy of their character’s relationship than the trauma of its eventual loss. That surely will deepen as this production progresses.

One last thing. I kept thinking Friday about all the high schoolers who live near this suburban theater and likely think that it’s for their parents. But this show is as teen-friendly a piece as exists in contemporary American drama. It’s only 80 minutes, fresher seeming than “Romeo and Juliet” and would, for my money, make for one sweet date, opening up so much of life itself.

Theater Loop

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Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.

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Review: “Eurydice” (3.5 stars)

When: Through Oct. 22

Where: Writers Theatre, 325 Tudor Court, Glencoe

Running time: 1 hour, 20 minutes

Tickets: $35-$90 at 847-242-6000 and www.writerstheatre.org