Production History

In the Next Room, or the Vibrator Play premiered on February 5, 2009 at Berkeley Repertory Theatre in Berkeley, CA. It was the theatre's 50th world premiere. The show was directed by British theatre director and Berkeley Rep Associate Artistic Director Les Waters, a known pioneer of new work and of new playwrights like Sarah Ruhl, Will Eno, and Anne Washburn. The production team featured sets by Annie Smart, costumes by David Zinn, lighting by Russell H. Champ, sound by Bray Poor, music by Jonathan Bell, and production stage management by Michael Suenkel. The cast comprised Hannah Cabell (Catherine Givings), Joaquín Torres (Leo Irving), Maria Dizzia (Sabrina Daldry), Paul Niebanck (Dr. Givings), Melle Powers (Elizabeth), Stacy Ross (Annie), and John Leonard Thompson (Mr. Daldry).

Here are a few visual snippets from the Berkeley Rep production: promotional photos here and video below:

The play then moved to Broadway, where it opened November 19, 2009 at the Lyceum Theatre at the Lincoln Theater Center, and closed January 10, 2010. It was both Ruhl's and Les Waters's Broadway debut. Despite its brief run, it was well reviewed. The production team was the same as the Berkeley production, but the cast was altered. The Broadway cast was as follows: Laura Benanti (Mrs. Givings), Quincy Tyler Bernstine (Elizabeth), Michael Cerveris (Dr. Givings), Maria Dizzia (Mrs. Daldry), Thomas Jay Ryan (Mr. Daldry), Wendy Rich Stetson (Annie), and Chandler Williams (Leo Irving).

There has been an explosion of regional productions of In the Next Room since its run on Broadway. It has been produced all across the country as well as internationally. In the U.S., some highlights include productions at The Actor’s Theatre in Phoenix, A Contemporary Theatre in Seattle, Theatre Workshop of Nantucket, Playmaker's Repertory Company in Chapel Hill, Woolly Mammoth in Washington, D.C., South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, Wilma Theater in Philadelphia, San Diego Repertory Theatre, SpeakEasy Stage Company in Boston, Kitchen Dog Theater in Dallas, and Victory Gardens Theater in Chicago. There have been international productions at the Sydney Theatre Company in Sydney, Australia and at the Tarragon Theatre Company in Toronto, Canada. There also has been a university production, at the Brooklyn College Department of Theatre.

Sarah Ruhl on "Vibrator Play"

Early vibrators + breastfeeding + the dawn of electricity = .....
Ruhl first came up with the idea for In the Next Room, or the Vibrator Play when a friend, Luke Walden, gave her the book The Technology of Orgasm by Rachel P. Maines. She found the idea fascinating of late 19th-century male doctors inducing orgasm or "paroxysm" in their female patients to relieve symptoms of hysteria--a phenomenon seen as medical, not sexual.

At the same time, she had just given birth to twins and became interested in the history of breastfeeding. "The more I learned about wet-nurses," she said, "the more I wanted to spend time with them."

The last puzzle piece in the making of In the Next Room was Ruhl's first image of the play, which was of a mother turning on and off the lights to entertain her infant.

The combination of these three influences sparked a uniquely powerful and personal play. As Chris Jones said in the Chicago Tribune:

"Most writers penning a play about the early days of the vibrator, wherein this instrument of pleasure was considered to be a purely medical device ideal for the curing of 'hysterical' women, would stick with that theme. After all, it's not difficult to spin an evening around the absurdity of Victorian women going to their doctors for an orgasm, without either party knowing what was taking place. Nor is it hard to imagine a scenario where the wife of one of those doctors would start wondering what her husband was doing, and why he was not doing it to her.

Had Ruhl...just done that, In the Next Room would still have been a success. Maybe more so, commercially speaking. But Ruhl wrote this play shortly after having twins, and a good chunk of her play is not concerned with electronic pleasures but with the anxieties induced in a vibrant new mother by a patriarchal approach to women's health and well-being. The vibrator whirs on naked skin in the next room, and that's a lot of fun for everyone, but Ruhl clearly lives with her leading character right in the front parlor, where the game is life itself."

Why the title?
Ruhl notes that while the play’s working title was The Vibrator Play, she ultimately decided to use In the Next Room, or the Vibrator Play, partially as a nod to the nineteenth-century tradition of "or" subtitles, but also to prevent a reductive, prurient view of the play as merely a sex comedy, when she sees it more as a play about intimacy, marriage, motherhood, and the body.

Why this play now?
More than just a commentary on "look how silly we were in the olden days," Ruhl sees the play as a reflection of how we still separate sex and intimacy. Here what she says:

"Ultimately the play is about intimacy. And I think in the age we live in, raw emotional intimacy is far more radical than physical intimacy or selling sex, which we see on every block. We see radical emotional intimacy far less frequently."

"In a way, I feel like sexuality’s been flipped: In the past, they compartmentalized and were so repressed, but today pornography has taken over the language of our sex lives and made it so public that it actually splits our bodies off from our emotions. We have no privacy. Selling jeans is pornography, Sarah Palin’s pornography, everything’s pornographic, so what does that do to our intimate private lives?"

Sources: "An Interview with Sarah Ruhl" from the Playbill from the Victory Gardens production of In the Next Room, Downstage Center interview with Sarah Ruhl, Chris Jones article about the fall Chicago theatre season, Interview from the Lincoln Center production’s blog, Interview from the Wilma Theater’s dramaturg, Interview from Time Out New York

Sarah Ruhl's Style

She says...
"I like to see people speaking ordinary words in strange places, or people speaking extraordinary words in ordinary places."
--Sarah Ruhl

Other people say...
"Ruhl wants to project the delights of pretense, 'the interplay between the actual and the magical."
--The New Yorker

"But if Ruhl’s demeanor is unassuming, her plays are bold. Her nonlinear form of realism--full of astonishments, surprises, and mysteries--is low on exposition and psychology. 'I try to interpret how people subjectively experience life,' she has said. 'Everyone has a great, horrible opera inside him. I feel that my plays, in a way, are very old-fashioned. They’re pre-Freudian in the sense that the Greeks and Shakespeare worked with similar assumptions. Catharsis isn’t a wound being excavated from childhood.'"
--The New Yorker

"She is known for charting complex currents of desire and broaching weighty topics such as bereavement with a light, whimsical touch...Ruhl is an optimist; her heroes and heroines resolve their difficulties and attain happiness."
--James Al-Shamma

We say...
Ruhl is drawn to the quirks and intricacies of relationships, especially in crazy circumstances. But amidst all of the mythology and absurdity, she looks for that humanity, that big story, that "bad opera" inside of everyone.

Some of her common structural elements include:

• mythology
• dreams
• play within a play
• heightened language

Some of her common themes are:

• intimacy
• marriage
• optimism
• whimsy
• theatre affecting real life
• earnestness
• heroism

What else she's written

• Melancholy Play
• Tilly’s melancholy is of an exquisite quality. She turns her melancholy into a sexy thing, and every stranger she meets falls in love with her. One day, inexplicably, Tilly becomes happy, and wreaks havoc on the lives of her paramours. Frances, Tilly’s hairdresser, becomes so melancholy that she turns into an almond. It is up to Tilly to get her back.
• Virtual Meditations #1
• An experiment in interactive drama. Two volunteers become the actors in the play by providing their faces and names to virtual actors, and their measurable biological signals are used as input to influence the performance of the play. Their desires and fears of touching each other, of holding hands with a stranger, become integral parts of the play itself, changing our perception of what is traditionally thought of as a theatrical experience.
• Passion Play
• A three-part play that explores the lives and obsessions of people presenting the Passion Play in Queen Elizabeth I’s England, Hitler’s Germany, and Reagan’s America
• Eurydice
• A modern retelling of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, focusing on the point of view of Eurydice and her reunion with her father in the underworld
• Late: A Cowboy Song
• Mary, always late and always married, meets a lady cowboy outside the city limits of Pittsburgh who teaches her how to ride a horse. Mary’s husband, Crick, buys a painting with the last of their savings. Mary and Crick have a baby, but they can’t decide on the baby’s name, or the baby’s gender. A story of one woman’s education and her search to find true love outside the box
• Orlando
• Meet Virginia Woolf's Orlando, your typical Elizabethan Man: a favorite of the Queen, madly in love with a Russian Princess, fleeing an Archduchess, and waking up one fine day in Constantinople to find he has become, of all things, a woman. She survives three centuries grappling with what it means to live fully in the present, in our own skin, in our own gender, and in our own time.
• The Clean House
• A young Brazilian woman, Matilde, who hates cleaning, is hired by a couple who are both doctors. The husband brings home a patient, his lover, who is dying of cancer, while the wife’s sister does all the cleaning for Matilde, whose life ambition is to come up with the perfect joke.
• Demeter in the City
• A retelling of the Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone, set in modern day Los Angeles. Demeter is a heroin addicted mother in Compton whose daughter is kept from her first by Child Services and later, by a College Republican.
• Dead Man’s Cell Phone
• A woman becomes completely consumed by a dead man’s life when she answers his cell phone. An exploration of what love and relationships mean in our crazy, digital, over-convenient age.
• Stage Kiss
• When ex-lovers He and She are thrown together as romantic leads in a long-forgotten 1930s melodrama, they quickly lose touch with reality as the story onstage begins to follow them offstage. Stage Kiss is a hilarious, off-beat fairy tale about what happens when lovers share a stage kiss…or when actors share a real one.

Sarah Ruhl: A Biography

Sarah Ruhl was born in Wilmette, IL in 1974. Theatre was a part of her life from a young age--her mother worked as an actress at the Piven Theatre Workshop--but she finally went to Brown University with the intention of studying poetry. However, in her sophomore year she took Paula Vogel's playwriting class:

"[Ruhl was a] sophomore, but I thought at first she was a senior: she was quiet and serious, but so obviously possessed a mind that came at aesthetics from a unique angle. I assigned an exercise: to write a short play with a dog as protagonist. Sarah Ruhl wrote of her father’s death from that unique angle: a dog is waiting by the door, waiting for the family to come home, unaware that the family is at his master’s funeral, unaware of the concept of death.

And, oh yes, the play was written with Kabuki stage techniques, in gorgeous, emotionally vivid language. I sat with this short play in my lap in my study, and sobbed. I interrupted my then partner, now wife, Anne Sterling, at her computer in her study, and read it to her, and the two of us shared that playworld, and the recognition of who this young woman could become: Sarah Ruhl." (via BOMB)

After getting her MFA in 2001, her play Late: A Cowboy Song premiered at the Clubbed Thumb in New York City two years later, but it wasn't until 2004 and her play The Clean House premiered at the Yale Repertory Theatre in 2005 that Ruhl gained widespread recognition. It also garnered her a Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and a nomination for the Pulitzer Prize. 

The next year she was awarded the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship "Genius Grant," which awarded her $500,000 dollars over the next 5 years to work on her plays. 

Ruhl's other awards include:

Pen Award 

NAACP Image Award nomination
Fourth Freedom Forum Award
Helen Merrill Award
Whiting Writers' Award

Sarah Ruhl is also a member of The New Dramatists.

Hello!

Hello there! Welcome to the production dramaturgy blog for Sarah Ruhl's In the Next Room, or the Vibrator Play! Read on for everything you would want to know...


Charlotte, Shannon, and Jessica