Acker's final text, her posthumous play Eurydice in the Underworld (1997), combines autobiographical material with the collective voice of responsible artists. The play conveys Acker's awareness of her own impending death. Eurydice suffers from cancer, and relates her time spent in hospital, her relationship with Orpheus and, following her death, her exploration of the underworld. Acker's underworld is a composite construct – one that intersperses imagery of an afterlife with underground dissident culture. Underground, Eurydice is ‘free to begin travelling with three or four other girls’. She meets the ghosts of artists, political activists and martyrs, including the Arab writer Assia Djebar and Russian writers who risked their lives opposing Stalin's rule. By suffusing her autobiographical revelations with the experiences of female artists, Acker places herself in their lineage and continues a responsible art. In contrast to the rational, detached, ‘optic’ spaces which prevail in the overworld, where, as in the hospital, ‘Above, glaring lights dominate reality’, Eurydice's exploration of the underworld is connected, experiential, nonlinear and haptic: ‘There's no more difference between what I'm seeing and who I think I am’; ‘I perceived solely by feeling’.

As in Acker's earlier works, the female characters summoned in the play are allotted a special role in challenging the Saturnian cliché. Women in Eurydice not only evoke the feminine as an abstract subversive force that liquifies hierarchical social relations, preventing the revolutionaries from hardening into the dictators they overthrew, but also refer us back to real historical agents. Thus, for Acker, women's association with revolution and fidelity to egalitarian ideals is not simply metaphorical. In the play, Eurydice identifies herself as the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva, and tells us about her life during the Stalinist regime; Acker draws on Nadezhda Mandelstam's memoirs, Hope against Hope (1971) and Hope Abandoned (1973). Mandelstam regarded Tsvetaeva's fate to be most ‘tragic’. Poverty forced her to leave her daughter in an orphanage, only to find out later that she died of malnutrition. Her poetry was unpublishable in Soviet Russia, and due to persecution and poverty she went into exile. She returned to Russia to be reunited with her husband, who was then executed by the Soviet police.