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
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